Pharma Call it "Preventative Medicine"

I call it stupid.

The problem with pharmaceutical medicine is that you only get to treat people when they’re sick. Well, unless you identify a bunch of indicators that they might get sick one day, and treat those.

All you have to do is scare the crap out of them to scare the money out of them. You just point out that someone has high cholesterol, blood pressure, BMI, is overweight, has gone through the menopause and has different hormonal readings, and they’ll be lining up for your incredible miracle cure that has the power to reach into the future and stop them from getting a heart attack, stroke or cancer.

Pharmaceutical companies can treat risk factors for years – decades even – if they’re lucky, in people who aren’t even sick yet! It works on doctors too, because they see unhealthy patients with high risk factors get diabetes, heart diseases, cancer and stroke all the time. So, it would seem to make sense to them that if you help people lower them then you might save their lives.

The problem with that is changing a risk factor using a drug is not the same as changing it by lifestyle. People who lower their cholesterol or BMI themselves by adopting a better diet and taking more exercise, will enjoy lower risks of disease. But, so what if some diet pills cause someone to lose weight? That’s no proof that you’ve made them any healthier. In most cases, all you’re doing by treating the risk factor is changing the reading on a meter which is correlated with later illness. Now supposing your car is running on empty, and you change the gas meter. Now it looks like the tank is half-full, but it’s still near empty. Are you safer or less safe? So, you’ve changed someone’s cholesterol or hormones, but you haven’t actually improved the underlying condition of the body. You haven’t made the patient more healthy, And you’ve now introduced some toxic chemicals with side effects into the body that will put an additional strain on their kidneys and liver. The patient is still dehydrated, they’re still malnourished, they’re still not taking enough exercise, they’re still smoking too much and drinking and taking too many drugs and stuffing their face with processed foods. And that’s what passes for medical science today. What’s scientific about that?

In most cases, we don’t find improvements in all-cause mortality associated with treating risk factors. Or, as one doctor put it, “cholesterol lowering drugs may change what is written on your death certificate, but they won’t change the date.”

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