Of course if people were paying for the drugs out of their pocket and you told them to add a drug that costs almost $500 a month because the first one isn't working, they would say the only thing "treatment resistant" is your s ales pitch -- go find another sucker. But if third party payers get stuck with the bill, no one seems to mind pharma's double-(and triple)-its-money plan -- or even notice it.
In fact psychiatric drug cocktails of eight, ten and twelve drugs are now common medical practice for "treatment resistant" depression and PTSD (often paid by government entitlement health plans) even though the drugs have never been tested when taken together. Unless you count the patients taking them now!
Pharma also adds an urgency pitch to the sell in case you think you can wait to take you or your child's treatment resistant drug cocktail until symptoms worsen. Depression is now a "progressive" disease say pharma-paid doctors after being known for decades as a self-limiting disease. (The one good thing you could say about depression; it would go away.)
And don't think kids will outgrow mood problems either, says pharma. That erratic behavior is no doubt early mental illness that will become Worse if you'd don't treat it in the bud. Even mothers of one-year-olds with the sniffles are told serious asthma is just around the corner if they don't treat their toddler now.
Pharma is also having a field day with sleep because everyone is in the demographic. In fact comedian Chris Rock riffs about hearing a DTC ad that asks, "Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning?" and recognizing himself. "Yeah, I got THAT," he says."
Not falling asleep soon enough of course is the disease of insomnia which can have "strains" like "middle-of-the-night" and "terminal" insomnia. But it also sets you up for -- what's the pharma euphemism -- wakefulness problems the next day. And once you're using a wakefulness aid like Adderall or Nuvigil, what do you bet you'll have sleep problems?
Because of pharma-paid doctors, PR firms and industry subsidized medical journals and Web sites like WebMD, pharma is able to create new diseases (osteopenia, the "risk" of osteoporosis), perimenopause and Low T), "humanize" others by giving them nicknames (ED, RA, RLS, Hep C) and elevate others to public health problems like HPV/venereal warts. (It doesn't hurt that Julie Gerberding, MD, former CDC head resurfaced as head of Merck vaccines after she left the government.)
But a more insidious sell are pharma subsidized "patient groups" that lobby FDA and state agencies about expensive drugs, often psychiatric. While these "patients" -- often flown by pharma to testify at FDA hearings -- pretend they can't get needed drugs like terminal cancer patients, the issue is seldom availability but money : either they want a new use covered by insurers or don't want an older, cheaper drug substituted.
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