The Medical Monopoly


There is one central state of being in which everyone strives towards: healthiness. America has placed their well-being into the hands of pharmaceutical companies such as the Hartley Medical Center Pharmacy, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, even Rite Aid, and CVS. They are comfortable blindly entrusting strangers, even those who may have a different frame of reference, with their health. Should we continue to trust the validity of what doctors say is needed to be healthy? Are their opinions biased by the prospect of money? The medical field is influenced by numerous business giants, namely the pharmaceutical industry, whose main objective is to keep the public consuming their products, achieved by weaving sickness and epidemics, instead of health and prosperity, into a world raged by the pursuit of health.

There is a link between over-the-counter medicine pharmacies provide and the eagerness and hastiness doctors display towards diagnosing a patient. The number of OTC (over-the-counter) drugs, antibiotics, and vitamins continues to grow as people succumb to the "fix-it with this new pill" attitude that many doctors install in their patients. Americans aren't interested in exploring what their medications do exactly, in finding a medication that would work better than the one they are given, or even in researching a cheaper, more natural alternative. Similarly, doctors are very quick in diagnosing and then dishing out a medication for illnesses. People should seek out other opinions and views on their condition, without being so fast to accept one doctor's diagnosis. Many chronic dietary based illnesses such as: diabetes type II, hypertension, high blood pressure, hyperlipidemia, and high cholesterol are treated with pills and vitamins that can all be avoided with a simple alteration in diet, which is a fact many doctors fail to mention or don't know about, since they aren't required to take a course in nutrition to get their degree. Kelly Dorfman, MS, LND, explains in her book, What's Eating Your Child?, that doctors are sorely lacking in the physical exam skills. In other words, they have trouble identifying and assessing the "ten common conditions associated with any ailment". Which means that many people are taking unnecessary medications because their doctor may not be able to correctly assess their condition and come up with a working solution to their problem. In Every Patient Tells A Story by Dr. Lisa Sanders, it is noted that graduating medical students correctly answered only about half of the questions on a test evaluating cardiac examination skills, and teacher-physicians and doctors answered about 60% correctly. This means that about half of the diagnosises a doctor makes are either incorrect or is their best guess based on their education. Another important survey to note: doctors and patients frequently disagreed about the reason for the patient's visit, which means that your doctor only knows your main reason for going to see him/her 25-50% of the time, so the other half the time you visit them, they have no idea why you are there or what you need help with.All this information suggests that doctors are only human and can't store all the information available on each illness, which is why it is so important for people to research their condition on their own and find different sources that would assess their problem with more expertise in a certain area, mainly a nutritionist or even a chiropractor. Kelly Dorfman, MS, LND, concludes "in general, doctors tend to diagnose the most common conditions they were trained to find with clear, agreed-upon diagnostic criteria."

As soon as flu season swings around again, pharmaceutical typhoons, doctors, physicians, et cetera, all know they'll have some spare change in their pockets. Why is this? Vaccines are the biggest money generators for the pharmaceutical industry, and they are injected most frequently and liberally during those months where common colds and flues are most prevalent. Unfortunately, vaccines aren't only administered during the annual flu season- they are available to people year-round. (The recommended immunization schedule for a lifetime, according to the CDC, is attached.) Why is the administration of those vaccines so bad? Aren't pharmaceutical companies and the doctors that prescribe the vaccination just trying to keep America in a healthy state? That isn't entirely true. The main objective of the medical field is to cure sick people, while in turn, making a profit. Vaccinations insinuate seeds of trust of modern medicine in people, because when administered, 56% of the population, according to CDC, becomes immune to the infection, which is a large enough percentage that people weigh the outcome of getting a vaccine and conclude that it is worth a trip to their local pharmacy. While this is a true, positive percentage, it doesn't fully articulate the aftermath of vaccines. Common side effects that effect 80% of people immunized include: fatigue, fever, headaches, loss of appetite, dizziness, vomiting, and joint pain. More severe, yet not uncommon, reactions to vaccines are: seizures, dementia, skin lesions, chronic fatigue, chronic anemia, osteoporosis, epilepsy, neurological issues, severe joint pain, and cancer. In conclusion, vaccines are an important tool the pharmaceutical industry and medical field uses to generate money and insure a disposition of trust in the people towards modern medicine.

The main objective pharmaceutical industry makes a profit by inventing, developing, and marketing drugs that are designed to mask the symptoms of diseases. Pharmaceutical industries have no interest in finding cures for diseases because there would no longer be an ongoing need for their product. Americans need to pursue information on their condition by seeking out other opinions and views, exploring exactly what their current medications are doing, and by possibly finding natural alternatives that would work better for them. Vaccines, OTC drugs, vitamins, and antibiotics are largely unnecessary, or can be mainly avoided by alterations in diet, a subject doctors are not trained in. It is important for Americans to take control of their health and treat it like the important matter that it is. We can all benefit from learning how to listen to our body.