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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-05
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnf0jfSobHQ
welcome to the United States of addiction where we make up less than five percent of the world's population and yet consumer seventy five percent of the world's medication we are drug and over medicated our culture is drawn to addictive behavior and drugs have become our favorite past time now this isn't about illegal drugs this is about the drugs we get from our doctors drugs we got
from our pharmacies drugs we trust are safe to consume if they're on the market legal medicinal drugs prescription drug abuse is a %HESITATION is an epidemic that has been greatly overshadowed by society stigma of drugs as well as concealed my farm local industry we started a war on drugs in a multitude of other countries and yet somehow forgot to touch on the war on people coming
from our own industry in attacking our own people here in the United States of addiction we've all been lied to and we are all at risk my name is Samira as you may have heard some people yell out as I walked out I am a going in the pharmacy school in the fall I working clinical in retail pharmacy and I've been a lifelong consumer of medication
as we've all been we've all taken the Tylenol or Advil or cough syrup for stronger prescription pills let's find medication is supposed to improve our quality of life we should use it yet too often were misinformed about the drugs we think we know the drugs we call safe too often our health isn't as valuable as the most profitable medication that can be prescribed off of us
now don't get me wrong the goal here today is not to smear the name of any healthcare industry we've achieved historic feats in this name of medicine and science of save millions across the world but the greatest healthcare feet we have yet to achieve as a society of informed people I love this profession I wouldn't be up here if I didn't I'd probably be in bed
watching Netflix right about now but I love it because it pushes me to be better than I am and I watch and rich lives everyday the from three hundred dollar diabetic supplies to dangerously addictive pills I also watch this industry take advantage of us everyday if we want take back control of our system have to understand what gave our power away now our industry encourages our
culture of drug dependence all you have to do is turn on the TV to see if we all love those commercials do you feel exhausted and worn down all the time do you find trouble motivating self do even the simplest of tasks your trouble sleeping any more trouble with to get cold when it's chilly hungry if you don't eat if I were to ask everyone in
here the same set of questions everyone would answer yes once I call these the symptoms of life and these commercials are deceptive because they compete something that's normal and natural as part of an illness that you need this magic pill to fix Vera mantra there's always something to fix about yourself impels lapels exists to fix you now you said take about two painkillers a day I
was never in any physical pain but I feel stressed and pressured by silly things I choose the pill because it was a quick fix as my tolerance grew two became three then four then six pills a day does like my caffeine there's always a temporary fix never dealt with the root of the problem and it was never quite enough when you take a step back from
the thousands of manipulated commercials were bombarded with you see a different side of the strokes prescription drugs are more people in the United States than illicit drugs to a corner D. a this is the number of people that die each year from cocaine heroin and marijuana abuse combined by contrast prescription drugs killed almost consistently twice the number of people each year the CDC reports that someone
in this country dies prescription drug abuse every nineteen minutes that's a little over five hundred people a week the size of this audience that doesn't exactly make sense because our legal drugs are supposed to be our safe drugs if you take a look at our FDA approval process from left to right they undergo a strenuous application process and multiple clinical trials before they are approved by
the FDA now this process can take over ten years and over two point six billion dollars per drug and I have all the drugs that started only about a handful make it out so that's a lot of bad drugs that get weeded out that's our system working yet the FDA's drug recall rate is at an all time high we have more drugs than ever being approved
to be on the market only to be deemed unsafe and removed shortly after so my question is what are the loopholes to our system how did they slip past the radar now keep in mind there's a lot at stake for the drug companies in this process that's a lot of invested time and money I can go to waste for these for profit so even if they
realize their drug is in a safe or effective as they wanted it to feel they have to push it through the system somehow to turn a profit they do this by using what I like to call the three golden rules of form these are the loopholes the sky companies have found across our system that allow them to misinform us and turn a profit golden rule number
one regulate the regulation now the FDA controls the fee of all proposed drugs %HESITATION as a drug company one very good relationship with the FDA this means giving money to review board members and congressman struck legislation as well as paying above and beyond the required drug fees in order to speed up the approval process for your drug the FDA's budget exponentially grows each year and former
contributions account for over eighty percent of that growth each year it's easy to control regulation against you when you basically Alan the agency's take antidepressants for example now for millions these drugs are a miracle for others not so much after concerns about anti depressants inducing suicidality and violence in patients the US FDA held a hearing in nineteen ninety one discussed the safety of anti to process
what troubles me is that the majority of the forty one FDA review board members in that hearing had some financial ties to the companies that created these drugs there was such a conflict of interest that they released a statement titled conflict of interest that the hearing will deal with the no specific issue dealing with a specific product or sponsor meaning that the drugs are going to
be looked at in very general terms no one drug or company is going to be targeted and possibly regulated rule number one regulate the regulation rule number two publish only the positive now before approval the FDA to secede to large scale positive studies supporting that a drug is an effective versus a placebo for particular ailment naturally they don't want a to approve a drug that feels
that way it's supposed to do so too is the magic number and since drug companies fund and conduct their own clinical trials they control which studies they publish and which studies they bury this can be particularly dangerous say we conducted one hundred studies and ninety eight of them showed our drug had seriously disturbing side effects we can legally only disclose the two studies we favor that
is being reckless with our health that's not exactly how the political if you look at the drug Prozac in two thousand five in two thousand five internal documents about side effect information and clinical trial data about the pill Prozac were leaked to the media these documents were dated a year after Prozac was approved to be on the market in the show that patients on Prozac are
twelve times more likely to commit suicide with patients other major antidepressants and eight times more likely to commit intentional injuries Prozac had been on the market for almost two decades at that point without any warning labels for the side effects that the company knew about but chose to conceal this is a drug that was also marketed for children now today the FDA does require suicide risk
warning labels on all antidepressants take the birth control the acid Yasmine were found to increase the risk for blood clotting two times regular birth control pills patients on the drug Zyprexa an anti psychotic medication or three and a half times more likely to develop diabetes from patients not on the drug side effect information that was conveniently left out of the original publication in this is particularly
dangerous because adverse affects medication is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease cancer and stroke rule number to publish only the positive rule number three involve everyone with a financial interest now it may take a village to raise a child but it takes an army to push forward a drug approval is only half the battle of the other half is
selling it in such a crowded market of extremely similar drugs you have to make your drug more appealing for for as prescribed you can buy private doctors with the free dinners trips dinners money more dinners in order to prove your drug over others you can pay entrance companies establish your drug is their preferred drug for a diagnosis you can also reward individuals willing to push forward
your drugs with high ranking jobs at the very drug company for example a revolving door phenomena where you have the faith officials and then up with high ranking jobs at the very drug companies they helped approve drugs for if you look at the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders or DSM for short this is basically the diagnostic standards for every psychiatric disorder recognize in the
United basically a mental diagnosis have to be in this book before medication can be approved for its treatment and what interests me about this is when you look at the task force team that put together this book each version over seventy percent of them half financial types the pharmaceutical industry the more diagnoses they create that existing drugs can be marketed for the more money that psychiatric
Sandra companies alike to me rule number three involve everyone with a financial interest we have a system that is harming everyone that is on medication and everyone that knows someone that is on medication were encouraged to depend on drugs for our problems and then misinformed about those very drugs so where do we go from here well for starters so we have to break the golden rules
from a policy perspective this means regulating the companies and their contributions to the FDA publishing all clinical trial data and adverse effects as well as only involving individuals known for health and safety interests not money in trucks are medications should not be tied to someone's financial agenda there should be no conflict of interest when it comes to public health now if you look across the globe
were the only ones facing this problem because of how we approach tell now all our process is considered a gold standard across many nation with our system we've eaten we need to prove that a drug is tremendously harmful before it can ever be regulated in addition Missouri is the only state in the United States without prescription drug monitoring program that is being reckless with our health
on the other hand if you look at the European Union they follow very precautionary principle if a drug has even the slightest potential harm protective and preventive actions taken their fees to be reckless with health that is where we differ and that is the change we need to make now we can crack down on these companies and regulate the system all we want but we need
to take a moment to look at ourselves because from a cultural perspective we allow these loopholes we feed into the drug commercials and the drug dependence culture we don't ask enough questions about her medications and were quick to exchange a pill for a problem for a pill no one is happy about paying absurd for a crisis for medication they can they don't know all the risks
for but not many have the incentive to protest it's only when a drug is harming someone close to a source costing us a fortune that we care about regulating it at all not this being reckless with our health now of all the major players of the game we the citizens stand to lose and gain the mouse how are these drug companies powerful well the creator ducks
pies our we powerful where their customers and like any good business this industry have to cater to its customers in order to survive and we have more power there then we truly realize if you look at the apapun controversy you may have heard about it spanning I'm a couple years back when the price of this life saving epinephrine people increased by over six hundred percent because
that's company Mylan no longer have competition in the market I wonder what you through a visual timeline feed event of the entire scandal now beginning the reaction was very slow the people that were affected spoke out but not nearly enough %HESITATION and warn them more price hikes went up more people can afford the medications even EMT is how to use syringes instead of the medication because
it was too expensive to even use professionally now by July online petitions on websites like change dot org started for Congress investigate the price gouging and then the media picked up the story from there it blew up by August twenty tweets a day increase to five hundred two thousand eventually reaching over ten thousand tweets today from doctors and consumers are like sharing their outrage and calling
for cheap in the aftermath Mylan released a cheaper generic and CVS computed by creating an even cheaper generic in essence we demanded a new supply in the industry rose to meet our demands and the other defense analyst by no means one of a kind if you look across our history of medicine protest you see the %HESITATION protests for affordable healthcare to cancer drugs you see the
protests against the over drugging of veterans against the use of psychiatric drugs on children against affordable access to aids there is not a shortage of bottles we have taken on and have yet to take on no social media it's easier than ever to spread the word and educate the community around us in the words of John F. Kennedy only an educated and informed people will be
a free people we have to understand how our culture impacts this industry and how we can protect ourselves and I suggest we do this by creating our own set of rules just like they have there was we get to have our rules I call them the United States of recovery rules before asking your for taking any medications ask yourself the center question number one do I
need this drug is this proposition drug treating a physiological problem or simply a symptom of life problem rule number two do I know the side effects of this drug researcher medication ask your doctors about the Medicare about the side effects of the medication look under study is published by the FDA under the European medicines agency the daily mothers even application %HESITATION released by the FDA called
orange but the content side effect information off of almost all FDA approved drugs use your resources number three is the struggle the best possible option for me what are my alternatives but with the help of a healthcare professional analyze if the benefits outweigh the harms for you personally we all have to be reckless with our health now the United States of addiction is in their best
interests middle have customers for life that way we shouldn't make it that easy for them nothing then there's not uphill for every problem but for the pills that do need them we are entitled to safe medication we are entitled to drugs that will increase our risk for suicide twelve folder leaves paralyze here also entitled to a drug industry that won't look at our children as an
