If you require medical prescriptions to gain or maintain good health, then you may be very concerned about a major social collapse that prevents you from obtaining those drugs.
As the cost of these drugs continue to rise in the pre-crisis world, you’ll also be concerned about the way big pharma and the insurance companies appear to be holding people financial hostage.
From this perspective, let’s have a look at how big pharma, in particular, may be reaching into your wallet and reducing your chances of enjoying good health through the influence of your doctor.
They Sell Patented Products Only
At first, you may not think much about the fact that major pharmaceutical manufacturers only sell items that they have patents on. After all, the way modern laws go, no company wants to be accused of, or sued for stealing the ideas or research conducted by another company.
The problem is patent law does not cover items that exist in nature. Therefore, even if an herb works better than something manufactured by a pharmaceutical company, they will never sell the herb as a medicinal option because they cannot get the patent.
In the end, this causes harm to consumers and patients in many ways. First, researchers in big pharma are strongly motivated to disregard centuries of documentation from around the world regarding the use of common herbs.
For example, conventional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine have some of the best cures on Earth, yet big pharma does not research them because they cannot get a patent. Instead, they move ahead with the development of dangerous drugs and seek to make a profit on them because that is how the system works.
It stands to reason that part of protecting one’s market revolves around making sure that better, or in this case, safer products, never come to be used by the mainstream.
When combined with the lack of fair and non-biased testing of alternative medical options (including reiki and meditation), it become impossible for doctors to recommend these options to consumers. To make matters worse, consumers that want to pursue these remedies have very few reliable resources to work with.
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Sidelines Selling Herbal Blends and Extractions
If you visit any pharmacy, supermarket, or department store, you are likely to find shelves filled with “nutritional support” herbal blends and extractions. No matter whether you are looking for cinnamon pills for diabetes or garlic pills to get rid of a cold, there are many brands and strengths to choose from.
In the end, these are still pharmaceutical companies that manufacture these products. Perhaps this is why the “nutritional support” products bear more resemblance to cradle-to-grave pill popping than to the way herbs have been used for centuries.
Did you know that Chinese, Ayurvedic, and even Native American folk medicines are little more than dried herbs taken as teas several times a day? It is my contention that the herbs you see in pill form today are formulated based on “scientific experiments” that lead to the exact same kind of dangerous side effects as you see in conventional drugs.
On the other hand, using dried herbs and teas gives the body more time to absorb the necessary therapeutic agents without doing as much damage. In the end, all we come away with is the idea that there is no real difference between herbs and modern drugs; so patients might just as well go with what the doctor wants; which in the end, is what big pharma wants them to push.
Once you decide that you no longer what to subscribe to big pharma’s cradle-to-grave view of their products, herbs are usually the next place to go.
Remember, at this point, your doctor has already led you to believe that you have a medical condition that requires relying on pills for life. This is reinforced by the fact that you may have failed in lifestyle change efforts caused by lack of awareness about what is actually in foods and the environment that may be preventing you from succeeding.
For example, if you have asthma and know that you need to exercise more, walking outdoors can make the situation worse because you don’t know how to protect yourself from smog and air pollution caused by body care products.
When you go to a doctor, very rarely do you come out of the visit without a prescription for something or other. In many cases, these prescriptions are meant to be taken for a few weeks, which stretches to months and then years.
For example, high blood pressure, diabetes, and many other “chronic diseases” caused by lifestyle and diet choices are treated with pills that must be taken for life. Even though the doctor may start off with good intentions and a diet sheet, that quickly falls by the wayside.
Once you become tired of the pill routine and its side effects, it is still very easy to transfer that pill popping behavior to the herb aisle. At that point you are right back to relying on big pharma instead of learning how to grow and make herbal teas the way they were meant to be used.
Video first seen on The Truth About Cancer.
Pumping Doctors Full of Fake and Sub-par Statistics
If you visit medical offices on a regular basis, you are bound to see pharmaceutical representatives stopping by from time to time. When these people stop by, they also bring along all kinds of charts and statistics (based on research conducted by the manufacturer) that show how their product works better than anything else on the market. These results may have been fudged, or completely false.
To understand how this works, you must understand how doctors are educated in the United States. Essentially, unless you have an undergraduate degree in a “legitimate” science such as biology, chemistry, or biochemistry, you will not have the “coursework” required to enter medical school.
If you have ever attended undergraduate “legitimate science” classes, then you will quickly see that the textbooks and teaching methods look like a form of brainwashing that discourages students from thinking outside of scientific method and theories that have come to be accepted by dogmatics that shape this field.
Students are practically forbidden from having anything to do with things that “cannot be scientifically tested” at this time – or rather, anything that they don’t want to test unless the flaws in the test design create the desired conclusion. This means that meditation, reiki, and many other techniques that may work to heal or cure disease are already drummed out of existence in the prospective doctor’s mind.
By the time these people get out of medical college and into the field, most of them are prime picking for any pharmaceutical representative that waves a few numbers and charts under their nose. To add insult to injury, if a patient does mention alternative methods, the doctor either knows nothing on the subject or cannot absorb the information because of prior “educational” experience. Perhaps we can say this one is simple psychology.
Wooing Doctors With Gifts and CME Credits
There is no question that running a medical office or practice is very expensive. Malpractice premiums can cost several thousand dollars per year alone, while staff, supplies, and book keeping, and billing can cost even more on a monthly basis. Doctors emerging from medical college may be saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debts plus a plethora of expensive social and community obligations.
All of these financial situations can make doctors of all ages highly susceptible to lavish gifts from pharmaceutical companies.
Pharmaceutical companies may give “free” CME courses (Continuing Medical Education credits are required to keep a license to practice medicine) in all kinds of beautiful locations, or make expensive gifts in private. Anything from a lavish dinner to insider stock tips can make it very easy for the receiving doctor to look more favorably on products sold by the pharmaceutical company.
Consider how you feel about someone that gives you a gift versus someone that doesn’t. Even though the non-gift giver may have a better product or more honest intentions, glamour and glitter still sell better. But today you can find out just how much money your doctor is getting from pharmaceutical companies from here.
While these payments may seem small, remember they are still more than the doctor is getting from companies that sell dried herbs, herbal teas, or meditation products. No matter how small the gift may seem, remember that it may have a subtle impact on decision making by your doctor.
While doctors may immediately claim they cannot be bought, the fact of the matter is there is no such thing as a business that doesn’t need money or help with financial matters.
A medical office is still a business and even if the doctor doesn’t want to follow the money, there are others in the practice that will force them to kowtow or see that their license or ability to practice is severely curtailed.
The Licensing and Mandatory Insurance Scams
Today, we take it for granted that doctors know what they are doing because they must get a license from the government to practice. This license, in turn, is based on how well a doctor performs on a variety of tests designed to determine the person’s level of scientific and medical knowledge.
As you saw earlier, this “knowledge” they are being tested on may not be reliable or accurate because the scientists doing the research may have fudged the results. From that perspective, the entire licensing system isn’t a “better than nothing” scenario. Rather, it becomes a sham and an excuse to push big pharma’s expensive and dangerous “cradle-to-grave” drugs down everyone’s throat.
If you happen to be a political conservative, then you may be waiting as patiently as possible for the complete dismantling of Obamacare‘s mandate that everyone must carry health insurance. As you wait for this change, stop and take a look at how drug prices have changed since Obamacare came into effect. From Epi-pen to common antibiotics that used to cost less than 10.00, the costs are skyrocketing and going higher every day.
When it comes right down to it, the rising costs suggest some very unsettling things about the effects of the mandatory coverage mandate (along with it’s adjusted federal standards of care guidelines that may one day include outright death panels).
This mandate has become nothing more than another tool big pharma uses in its quest to shove dangerous and expensive drugs down your throat via your doctor’s prescription pad. Now that everyone “covered” with insurance and, in reality pays for very little, big pharma can raise the cost of drugs with relative impunity.
Since the insurance company gets money from the government to cover “additional” costs associated with Obamacare, there is little, if any incentive for them to try and reign in the cost. As long as big pharma can keep doctors writing prescriptions, this entire mess of mandatory insurance coverage will ensure they get richer while patients get sicker.
Stock and Financial Incentives
Medical providers are like everyone else in the sense that they would like to retire some day, pay off their homes, and enjoy all the best that life has to offer. As with most other people that work for a living, they aren’t about to reach that goal without having some kind of investment portfolio.
If you do some research on stock and industry trends, you will see that big pharma has been growing steadily for some time. This, in turn, means that pharmaceutical representatives will turn to doctors and larger sized practices for stock investments.
If you have ever invested in a business, then you already know that you are going to think more favorably of its products. By the same token, if you want to make some money, then you will also encourage others to buy from that company.
Once big pharma is able to encourage doctors to invest in their businesses, it stands to reason the doctor will become a de facto salesman. The person being led by the doctor to buy these drugs happens to be a patient that may be emotionally and physically vulnerable to suggestions that may or may not be good.
Inclusion in Research Studies
In the arena of keeping insurance costs down and maintaining a license, doctors have to obtain a certain number of CME credits each year. Depending on the state and the insurance carrier, doctors may also be required to publish something in a peer reviewed journal.
If you have never conducted a scientific experiment or dealt with peer review standards, then you may not realize just how hard it can be to get published. Flawed system or not, any doctor that wants to take advantage of the credits and prestige of being published will wind up relying on big pharma for assistance.
At first, the whole issue of research and peer review may not seem like it has much impact on patients. After all, the doctor isn’t about to force you to be part of the research project, let alone use drugs or procedures that haven’t been fully tested.
The more doctors and researchers learn about medical conditions, the better chance they have of finding cures and better treatments. As hypothesis goes, those are good ones, however it may not turn out that way in day to day impact on patients.
Among other things, people enrolled in clinical trials may not actually get the medication depending on the research design. While clinical trials can offer access to “cutting edge” drugs, there is also a risk of being exposed to very dangerous chemicals because test results done on animals may have been fudged. Perhaps it can be said that fake or slightly fudged test results may be an even bigger problem than the money basis for big pharma.
The sad reality is that patents on prescription drugs only last for so long. Once that patent expires, other companies can manufacture the drug and undercut the market. As a result, the pharmaceutical company must have another proprietary drug on hand to take its place. This cannot happen without more research and more input from doctors that have access to patients that can be enrolled in clinical trials.
No matter how much or little money a doctor gets from big pharma, he or she is going to write more prescriptions. It does not matter how that money comes in, only that it comes in. Today, it is possible to find out if the doctor you are seeing takes money for big pharma research efforts. Pay as careful attention to these incentives as you would any other.
Faked Data Goes Further Than the Lab
Every now and then, there’s something on the news about how the vast majority of herbal supplements on the market are nothing more than placebos. While there is very little regulation of these supplements, it is impossible to tell the impact of big pharma on these operations.
Here are just a few things that may be happening:
Even though the labs that do the testing are supposed to be non-biased, they may be getting adulterated samples to test. If illegal aliens can work under the table in food production industries with ease, rest assured that people from big pharma can probably get into nutritional supplement companies and adulterate samples. When it comes to money, never underestimate what people will do. In my opinion, as long as people can do it and deny it, there is at least an increased chance they will do so.
Big pharma may own or have hidden ties to any number of supplement companies. They can use this position to generate all kinds of fake test results and data that guide doctors and patients right back to more expensive products manufactured by big pharma.
Big pharma may also have financial or other ties to people working in government sponsored research projects. If big pharma doesn’t want you to know about an herb’s benefits, or the proper amount to use, rest assured the results can be fudged with ease. Not only does this throw off the entire herbal supplement system, it also makes it much easier to “prove” to doctors that only big pharma has the answers to their patient’s problems.
Together with faked data, there is also data that can be used to justify irrational and dangerous conclusions. The data itself may be true, however the conclusions are faulty at best. Today, irrational conclusions arrived at by big pharma can even make the doctor ignore previously learned information about how the body works. For example, if you are a diabetic, you may have been told ad nauseum that it is a bad thing for glucose to be eliminated through the kidneys. In fact, you may even think no doctor in his her right mind would recommend a product that causes glucose to be eliminated through the kidneys! Some newer drugs approved for diabetes do just that, and doctors are prescribing them left and right. As they prescribe these drugs, more people wind up with kidney failure even as the pharmaceutical representatives continue to wave their charts that show fasting blood sugar and Hemo A1C levels are lowered using these drugs.
Big pharma is an integral part of every doctor’s practice and perhaps even their personal lives. While big pharma may be able to produce some good results, recent trends in class action lawsuits for dangerous drugs reveal that they may be more concerned about money than tangibly helping people to get well or remain in good health.
Perhaps the saddest thing in all this is patients rarely, if ever understand the role big pharma is playing in how the doctor chooses to treat any given condition. When you put your trust in someone that is supposed to help you make good health decisions, it is truly disheartening to see that this trust may be misplaced.
At the very least, if you are also a prepper, this should serve as an incentive to investigate your doctor far more carefully as well as any health records and tests he/she may have in your files.
If you are going to thrive in a situation were medicines and medical care may not be available, this will be one step of many that you will need to take in order to succeed.
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References:
https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-who-take-company-cash-tend-to-prescribe-more-brand-name-drugs
http://www.medico-legalsociety.org.uk/articles/dishonesty_in_medical_research.pdf
This article has been written by Carmela Tyrell for Survivopedia.