Too Many Pills

Author: James Le Fanu
Publisher: Abacus
ISBN: 9781408709788
Category : Drugs
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
The number of prescriptions issued by family doctors has soared threefold in just fifteen years with millions now committed to taking a cocktail of half a dozen (or more) different pills to lower the blood pressure and sugar levels, statins, bone strengthening and cardio protective drugs. In Too Many Pills, doctor and writer James Le Fanu examines how this progressive medicalisation of people's lives now poses a major threat to their health and wellbeing, responsible for a hidden epidemic of drug induced illness (muscular aches and pains, lethargy, insomnia, impaired memory and general decrepitude), a sharp increase in the number of emergency hospital admissions for serious side effects and implicated in the recently noted decline in life expectancy. The paradoxically harmful, if increasingly well recognised, consequences of too much medicine are illustrated by the remarkable personal testimony of the readers of James Le Fanu's weekly medical column, coerced into taking drugs they do not need, debilitated by their adverse effects - and their almost miraculous recovery on discontinuing them. The only solution, he argues, is for the public to take the initiative. His review of the relevant evidence for the efficacy, or otherwise, of commonly prescribed drugs should allow readers of Too Many Pills to ask much more searching questions about the benefits and risks of the medicines they are taking.

Mind Over Meds

Author: Andrew Weil
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316352985
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
Too many Americans are taking too many drugs -- and it's costing us our health, happiness, and lives. Prescription drug use in America has increased tenfold in the past 50 years, and over-the-counter drug use has risen just as dramatically. In addition to the dozens of medications we take to treat serious illnesses, we take drugs to help us sleep, to keep us awake, to keep our noses from running, our backs from aching, and our minds from racing. Name a symptom, there's a pill to suppress it. Modern drugs can be miraculously life-saving, and many illnesses demand their use. But what happens when our reliance on powerful pharmaceuticals blinds us to their risks? Painful side effects and dependency are common, and adverse drug reactions are America's fourth leading cause of death. In Mind over Meds, bestselling author Dr. Andrew Weil alerts readers to the problem of overmedication, and outlines when medicine is necessary, and when it is not. Dr. Weil examines how we came to be so drastically overmedicated, presents science that proves drugs aren't always the best option, and provides reliable integrative medicine approaches to treating common ailments like high blood pressure, allergies, depression, and even the common cold. With case histories, healthy alternative treatments, and input from other leading physicians, Mind over Meds is the go-to resource for anyone who is sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Ten Drugs

Author: Thomas Hager
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683355318
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
“The stories are skillfully told and entirely entertaining . . . An expert, mostly feel-good book about modern medicine” from the award-winning author (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Behind every landmark drug is a story. It could be an oddball researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effect discovered during clinical trials. Piece together these stories, as Thomas Hager does in this remarkable, century-spanning history, and you can trace the evolution of our culture and the practice of medicine. Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book. “[An] absorbing new book.” —The New York Times Book Review “[A] well-written and engaging chronicle.” —The Wall Street Journal “Lucidly informative and compulsively readable.” —Publishers Weekly “Entertaining [and] insightful.” —Booklist “Well-written, well-researched and fascinating to read Ten Drugs provides an insightful look at how drugs have shaped modern medical practices. Towards the end of the book Hager writes that he ‘came away surprised by some of the things he had learned.’ I had the very same reaction.” —Penny Le Couteur, coauthor of Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History

Bitter Pills

Author: Stephen Fried
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307785483
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
We take our medicines on faith. We assume our doctors are well-informed, our drug companies scrupulous, our FDA diligent—and our medications safe. All too often we're wrong. Just how wrong is documented in this critically acclaimed portrait of the international pharmaceutical industry by one of our most highly respected investigative journalists. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in America. Reactions to prescription and over-the-counter medications kill far more people annually than all illegal drug use combined. Stephen Fried's wife took a pill for a minor infection—and ended up in the emergency room. Some drug reactions go away in a few hours or days. Diane's did not. This emotionally wrenching experience launched Fried into a five-year examination of the entire pharmaceutical industry, the most profitable legal business in the world. Rigorously documented, Bitter Pills is a full-scale portrait of pill making and pill taking in America today, presented through the powerful human drama of doctors, patients, drug companies, the FDA, and government regulators as they war for control of our medicine cabinets.

Medicines That Kill

Author: James L. Marcum
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 1414382804
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
The recent deaths of celebrities like Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, and Whitney Houston have shown a spotlight on the overuse and abuse of prescription drugs. Most people believe that prescription drugs are safer than illegal substances. But, when combined with other over-the-counter sedatives, prescription drugs can be every bit as powerful, addictive, and dangerous. In 2006, overdoses on a class of prescription pain relievers called opioid analgesics killed more people than those killed by overdoses on cocaine and heroin combined. Right now, among 35 to 54 year olds, poisoning by prescription drugs is the most common cause of accidental death—even more so than auto-related deaths. In Medicines That Kill, Dr. Marcum shines a light on the addictive power of prescription medication and how you can protect yourself and your family by practicing healthy habits.

Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309459575
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 483

Book Description
Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.

Are Your Prescriptions Killing You?

Author: Armon B. Neel (Jr.)
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145160839X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
A veteran board-certified pharmacist cites the high number of annual deaths associated with prescription drug side effects, calling for changes in prescription practices that account for the needs of aging bodies.

Medications for Opioid Use Disorder Save Lives

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309486483
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
The opioid crisis in the United States has come about because of excessive use of these drugs for both legal and illicit purposes and unprecedented levels of consequent opioid use disorder (OUD). More than 2 million people in the United States are estimated to have OUD, which is caused by prolonged use of prescription opioids, heroin, or other illicit opioids. OUD is a life-threatening condition associated with a 20-fold greater risk of early death due to overdose, infectious diseases, trauma, and suicide. Mortality related to OUD continues to escalate as this public health crisis gathers momentum across the country, with opioid overdoses killing more than 47,000 people in 2017 in the United States. Efforts to date have made no real headway in stemming this crisis, in large part because tools that already existâ€"like evidence-based medicationsâ€"are not being deployed to maximum impact. To support the dissemination of accurate patient-focused information about treatments for addiction, and to help provide scientific solutions to the current opioid crisis, this report studies the evidence base on medication assisted treatment (MAT) for OUD. It examines available evidence on the range of parameters and circumstances in which MAT can be effectively delivered and identifies additional research needed.

A History of the Medicines We Take

Author: Anthony C Cartwright
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526724065
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
A History of the Medicines We Take gives a lively account of the development of medicines from traces of herbs found with the remains of Neanderthal man, to prescriptions written on clay tablets from Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, to pure drugs extracted from plants in the nineteenth century to the latest biotechnology antibody products. The first ten chapters of the book in PART ONE give an account of the development of the active drugs from herbs used in early medicine, many of which are still in use, to the synthetic chemical drugs and modern biotechnology products. The remaining eight chapters in PART TWO tell the story of the developments in the preparations that patients take and their inventors, such as Christopher Wren, who gave the first intravenous injection in 1656, and William Brockedon who invented the tablet in 1843. The book traces the changes in patterns of prescribing from simple dosage forms, such as liquid mixtures, pills, ointments, lotions, poultices, powders for treating wounds, inhalations, eye drops, enemas, pessaries and suppositories mentioned in the Egyptian Ebers papyrus of 1550 BCE to the complex tablets, injections and inhalers in current use. Today nearly three-quarters of medicines dispensed to patients are tablets and capsules. A typical pharmacy now dispenses about as many prescriptions in a working day as a mid-nineteenth- century chemist did in a whole year.

Powerful Medicines

Author: Jerry Avorn, M.D.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307489752
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Book Description
If you believe that the latest blockbuster medication is worth a premium price over your generic brand, or that doctors have access to all the information they need about a drug’s safety and effectiveness each time they write a prescription, Dr. Jerry Avorn has some sobering news. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of patient care, teaching, and research at Harvard Medical School, he shares his firsthand experience of the wide gap in our knowledge of the effectiveness of one medication as compared to another. In Powerful Medicines, he reminds us that every pill we take represents a delicate compromise between the promise of healing, the risk of side effects, and an increasingly daunting price. The stakes on each front grow higher every year as new drugs with impressive power, worrisome side effects, and troubling costs are introduced. This is a comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at issues that affect everyone: our shortage of data comparing the worth of similar drugs for the same condition; alarming lapses in the detection of lethal side effects; the underuse of life-saving medications; lavish marketing campaigns that influence what doctors prescribe; and the resulting upward spiral of costs that places vital drugs beyond the reach of many Americans. In this engagingly written book, Dr. Avorn asks questions that will interest every consumer: How can a product judged safe by the Food and Drug Administration turn out to have unexpectedly lethal side effects? Why has the nation’s drug bill been growing at nearly 20 percent per year? How can physicians and patients pick the best medication in its class? How do doctors actually make their prescribing decisions, and why do those decisions sometimes go wrong? Why do so many Americans suffer preventable illnesses and deaths that proper drug use could have averted? How can the nation gain control over its escalating drug budget without resorting to rationing or draconian governmental controls? Using clinical case histories taken from his own work as a practitioner, researcher, and advocate, Dr. Avorn demonstrates the impressive power of the well-conceived prescription as well as the debacles that can result when medications are misused. He describes an innovative program that employs the pharmaceutical industry’s own marketing techniques to reduce use of some of the most overprescribed and overpriced products. Powerful Medicines offers timely and practical advice on how the nation can improve its drug-approval process, and how patients can work with doctors to make sure their prescriptions are safe, effective, and as affordable as possible. This is a passionate and provocative call for action as well as a compelling work of clear-headed science.