User:JoshBrumfield

The pharmaceutical industry has been put on notice. People are getting sick or injured and rely on the drug companies to provide them with medications that will make them better. The drug companies are giving them drugs that have more side effects than the actual disease or injury they had. Even worse, are the designer drugs that are literally killing people. Drugs for everything from birth control to weight loss are being pushed by these companies that have minimal testing.

The FDA has set up regulations and guidelines for the creation and testing of drugs. They regulate what can be tested and on whom. They also regulate the amount of side effects that are allowed by the drug. On paper this seems like a decent way of handling the checks and balances of the industry. However something has been broken. Drug companies have been able to throw money at the FDA to get their drug on the market sooner. There has been a crack down on that but it doesn’t mean that the problem has been taken care of. There are still drugs that reach the public that are making them sicker or even killing them. With all the talk of healthcare reform we can only hope that the pharmaceutical industry is lumped in with that reform. If it was not so lucrative or more strictly managed then the maybe the big companies wouldn’t find it so important to get the drugs on the market as soon and develop better testing practices.

In 1995 I shattered my ankle and had to have reconstructive surgery to repair it. At that time the abuse of prescription drugs was not as public as it is now. After my surgery I was given a prescription for a very high dosage of vicodin. After a few days on this dosage I began to have physical and auditory hallucinations. When I went in the next week for my checkup I complained that the pain medication was making me feel and hear things. He gave me a lower dosage and sent me home. The lower dosage didn’t work right away so I took more. By the 3rd week of my recovery I was taking 4 750mg of vicodin every hour. I didn’t even notice the amount that I was taking until I ran out after filling my prescription 3 days earlier. I couldn’t go to school for the entire day because after about lunch time I would have so much vicodin in my system that the hallucinations would be constant. My next doctor’s appointment I complained again and told him that I thought I was getting addicted. He agreed and prescribed me a non-narcotic for the day time and then the vicodin at night. I tried the non-narcotic pain killer the next day but ended up popping vicodin as well because the other pill didn’t work.

With an open prescription for the vicodin I was refilling it constantly. I was addicted to vicodin for a year. I was going all day long with not knowing what was going on. My reality was far from the real world. I should have never been given the drug in the first place. I was 16 years old and under complete control by a pill. My parents did not see a problem with me taking vicodin because they had taken it before without any problems. What I found out later was that the dosage I was given was the same dosages that are prescribed to adult burn victims. My doctor stopped prescribing that dosage of vicodin. When I talked to him about this a few years later he told me that those symptoms were not seen with that dosage and he was also shocked that vicodin was addicting but that I was not his only patient that had those problems.

This whole problem could have been solved with better testing and more forward warnings and dosage recommendations from the drug companies. There are a whole lot of alternative methods of healing these days. Everything from burning plants to daily workout and health regimens have been known to put some chronic pain suffers at ease. There are even magnets and special jewelry that have been promoted by high profile people all over the world. Some of this stuff is definitely placebo effect. My opinion is so what? If the brain is able to make some body feel better, hey good. That is far less dangerous than popping a pill that could make them worse.

Something needs to be done to break this cycle of drug companies paying the government to release their drug sooner. The sooner the drugs get on the market the sooner the drug companies can send their represenitives to hospitals and clinics to pimp the pills. Here is to hoping that the health care reform will look into the regulations and profitability and reduce the amount of money that can be made with drugs. This could force some of the drug companies to look into other ways to make a profit other than pharmaceuticals. I would love to see Merc. Resort to having to make shampoo than release the untested and potentially fatal drugs to make their fortunes.