“Marketing” Illness
Thursday, April 9th, 2009The newsletter from the American Association for Health Freedom on 4/7/09 contained a very insightful statement:
. . . the drug industry is now marketing illnesses, offering pharmaceutical solutions to problems the public didn’t even realize they had.
How true! In 25 years of practice as a “non-medical” health practitioner, I’ve seen this again and again. When I started in practice in 1983, cholesterol wasn’t considered high until it was above 240. Then they lowered it to 200. Three or four years ago they lowered down to, I believe, 175 or 180. By lowering “abnormal” down into what is actually a very normal and healthy range, the drug industry has “marketed” an illness, creating a problem where none existing . . . and of course, adding 20 or 30 million new potential customers for unneeded cholesterol lowering drugs.
The same thing happens with blood pressure pills, borderline high blood sugar drugs, and especially the gastric reflux drugs. Remember the months of advertising about “Do you need the purple pill?” The original ads didn’t even say what the “purple pill” was or what it was supposed to treat. You were just supposed to go beg your doctor to give it to you.
Most of these commonly drugged and overdrugged conditions can be remedied naturally with dietary change and supplements that cost a fraction of the prescription medications. More importantly, the drugs only treat symptoms, while natural health care approaches seek to deal with root causes.
Bottom-line, be very leery of being diagnosed with non-problems that just happen to have an expensive drug available to treat them.
–Monte Kline
