In an article in the LA Times, Greg Critser discusses the reasons behind the plummeting profits of the pharmaceutical industry. Drug company officials have offered up reasons such as generic competition, overzealous regulators, trial lawyers, bad public relations and the high cost of research.

Neither Safe Nor Effective

Critser proposes a different reason: the pills they offer are neither safe nor effective. He points out that, according to the industry itself, only about half of the new medicines launched since 1990 are significant improvements over older and cheaper products.

At the same time, problems from side effects are on the rise, especially now that one in six Americans take three or more prescription drugs daily, often in untested combinations

The result? Only about half of patients stay on any given regimen.

"Persistence and Compliance"

The industry's response, however, has been to increase efforts to promote "persistence and compliance" -- in other words, ways to keep a patient taking pills, even if the patient doesn't like it.

Few Programs Look at Side Effects

The rise of P&C programs mean that huge amounts of money are spent getting people to ingest pills, and less and less is being spent to discover new ones.

Meanwhile, patients may be encouraged to continue taking a drug that can be harmful,and few P&C programs even bother to look at the reasons patients might stop taking pills, such as side effects, adverse events and special individual sensitivities.

Los Angeles Times November 20, 2005

Dr. Mercola's Comment:You may be familiar with Greg Critser from his book Fat Land, which I reviewedtwo years ago. Now he's focused his energy on the conventional and fatally flawed health care paradigm once again in his newest book, Generation Rx.

It isn't bad enough that the drug companies spend billions on direct-to-consumer advertisingto influence you to purchase drugs, but they also spend an average of over $10,000 EVERY year on EVERY physician in the United Statesto brainwash them to the same conclusion. That is over $16 billion every year.

Persistence and compliance programs are the new evil tools that the multinational drug companies are now using to deceive you. Superficially they sound like something that is really serving you, but nothing could be further from the truth-- its primary purpose is to increase their bottom line far more than your health.

These persistence and compliance programs started as joint ventures between drug companies and HMOs in the form of phone calls or e-mails from "health counselors" -- better known to the rest of the world as telemarketers -- to remindyou to refill your prescriptions, even whenyou don't need to or shouldn't.

And who's paying for all that marketing slight-of-hand that's overmedicating the world? That's right, folks, you are.

That said, you can take steps to begin optimizing your health and lessen your dependence on expensive and potentially toxic drugs today, with all the free tools available on my Web site. A good place to start: Learn how you can retool your diet to fight and prevent disease by eating foods better suited for your body's unique metabolic type with my free test.

About the author:

This article is reprinted from Mercola.com, the world's #1 most visited and trusted natural/alternative health website. For a limited time only, you can take the FREE "Metabolic Type Test" to help you learn the right foods for your particular body type so you can achieve optimal fitness & health. Just go to http://www.mercola.com/forms/mt_test.htm right now to take this quick test!