Are we over medicated? Do we use pills instead of living healthy?

• What we'll do
Some of our members in the medical profession want to talk about what they see happening in healthcare (not health insurance).

From The Huffington Post, October 2012:
Americans are taking too much medicine, often casually and unnecessarily prescribed by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and causing lots of needless harm.

The really bad news is that the bulk of psychiatry is no longer done by psychiatrists. Psychiatric medicines are most often prescribed by primary care doctors who are always busy and usually under trained in psychiatry. And their diagnostic and treatment decisions are heavily influenced by drug company advertising aimed directly at patients combined with aggressive marketing campaigns aimed at doctors.

The result is massive overprescription of medicine for off label, untested, and inappropriate indications. Drug companies have more unregulated freedom in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world to push their product where it does not belong. Their success is measured in returns to shareholders, not benefits to patients.

It simply makes no sense that the antipsychotics are now the largest revenue producers among all classes of medicines — bringing in $15 billion per year — much of it coming from excessive use in vulnerable populations of children and the elderly. Antipsychotics often cause large weight gains increasing the risks of diabetes, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy. Almost equally concerning is that eleven percent of U.S. adults are taking an antidepressant medicine, making these the fourth most lucrative class for drug companies. Perversely, only a third of severely depressed people get the medicine they so desperately need, while many taking antidepressants do not need them at all and receive no more than placebo effect.

From Consumer Reports, 2017:
Almost 1.3 million people went to U.S. emergency rooms due to adverse drug effects in 2014, and about 124,000 died from those events. That’s according to estimates based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Other research suggests that up to half of those events were preventable.

All of that bad medicine is costly, too. An estimated $200 billion per year is spent in the U.S. on the unnecessary and improper use of medication, for the drugs themselves and related medical costs. Many Americans—and their physicians—have come to think that every symptom, every hint of disease requires a drug, says Vinay Prasad, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. “The question is, where did people get that idea? They didn’t invent it,” he says. “They were spoon-fed that notion by the culture that we’re steeped in.”

• What to bring
Ideas for better health without medication.

• Important to know
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/288721.php
https://www.quora.com/Have-we-become-too-dependent-on-pharmaceutical-drugs
https://www.oftwominds.com/journal08/Prescription-Drugs.htm