85% Of Older Patients Are Prescribed At Least 1 Drug After Each Doctor Visit... But You Can Beat This Healthcare Crisis

The next time you go to your doctor — for either a routine checkup or due to a specific symptom — pay close attention to what happens during your visit.

And be very wary if your doctor decides you need a new medication right off the bat...

Because your prescriptions could be poisoning you.

The average adult in America takes four or more prescriptions every day. And 50% of older Americans take five or more.¹

What they haven’t taken into account are all the previous prescriptions their patients are filling.

Today, a third of seniors visit at least five different doctors. Most of them are specialists who each prescribe a pill to treat a specific diagnosis.

Those medications quickly add up. And while patients are always being told to take this or that new drug, they are never told to stop taking the old one.

A team of Harvard researchers summed it up well in a now landmark study. They reviewed the medical records of more than 6,000 people over the age of 65.

The authors of the study found “a disturbingly high level of potentially inappropriate prescribing for older people...” ²

I saw this not long ago in one of my own patients.

When Louise first came to see me, she had one of the worst cases of diabetes I’ve seen at my clinic. She was carrying twice the weight she should have been.

Louise was 57 and as she told me, “I just don’t feel right.”

It was the biggest understatement I’d ever heard. She was experiencing fatigue, loss of energy,

and sleepless nights.

A full body DEXA scan revealed Louise’s inflammation levels were sky-high. She was also taking a long list of medications — including pills for diabetes, high blood pressure, and joint pain.

But none of them were working. In fact, they were making her sicker by the day.

The first thing I did was wean her off these medications and replace them with natural alternatives I’ve successfully used with patients for more than three decades.

I also enrolled her in my PACE program and helped her change her diet.

Within weeks, Louise noticed improvements. In less than two months, her:

Louise was able to stop taking her dangerous diabetes and hypertension drugs, had kicked her opioid habit, and ditched the sleeping and diet pills her former doctor had prescribed.

And a year after I met her, she was 102 pounds lighter and shed 31 pounds lighter and shed 31 inches from her waist.

“It’s amazing,” Louise told me during a recent follow-up visit. “I have the best blood sugar readings ever and I can’t believe what I see when I step on the scale every morning!

“I feel better than I have in decades and I’m sure my better health journey will continue.”

In a moment, I’ll share the natural alternatives that replaced Louise’s dangerous Big Pharma drugs.

But first, let’s take a closer look at how we got into this mess in the first place...

You Can Kick The Big Pharma Drug Habit

As striking as Louise’s story is, she’s hardly alone. I’ve helped many patients kick the Big Pharma drug habit and reclaim their health.

You see, they’ve all discovered what I’ve known for decades: The real drug epidemic in this country doesn’t have anything to do with illegal party drugs. It’s the Big Pharma drugs authorized by the FDA.

They’ve hijacked our health care system and turned it into a for-profit scam that is actually making you sicker and the fat cats wealthier while costing us all a fortune.

It might surprise you to know that more people die each year from prescription medicine

overdoses and lethal side effects from legal drugs than heroin or meth.

As I said earlier, the average American takes four or more prescriptions a day. And 50% of older Americans take five or more.

And in the last two decades, Americans have nearly doubled up on the prescription medicines they take — rising from 2.4 billion to 4.5 billion, according to the health research firm IQVIA.³ That doesn’t account for the billions of over-the- counter drugs Americans buy every year.

In fact, 85% of doctor visits result in a patient walking out of the office with a prescription for one of the more than 20,000 FDA-authorized drugs on the market.

But I’m not blaming your doctor.

The truth is our health care system is driven by Big Pharma companies who fund the vast majority of clinical trials of drugs that lead to FDA approvals of those meds. Your doctor is prescribing medicines based on those studies, because Big Pharma and the FDA are saying they work.

Even though there’s a financial interest driving the whole thing.

It’s bait-and-switch salesmanship at its worst: They make money by convincing your doctors to prescribe a medicine for you, regardless of whether it works or not. And the studies I’ve seen show that they don’t.

What’s more, many of these drugs are actually harmful. According to the FDA’s own research, about 2.2 million Americans are hurt by prescription drugs and more than 100,000 die from them every year.

That’s about 240 Americans daily — the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every single day.

Now, keep in mind: These numbers are just scratching the surface.

As a doctor, that makes my blood boil because it’s proof the government watchdogs who are supposed to protect our health have become slavering lapdogs for the pharmaceutical industry— which is putting financial interests ahead of your well-being.

There is a better way.

Now you know that I have a different way of treating my patients. I only use conventional medications for acute problems, such as infections, but not for chronic, long-term conditions they fail to treat and cure.

Instead of using Big Pharma’s lab-created synthetic drugs, I turn to natural treatments and cures that don’t turn your body into a toxic chemical waste dump... without any health benefit.

Big Pharma Controls Information Doctors Need Most

Each year, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) budget provides less and less money to fund FDA clinical trials that test the safety and effectiveness of drugs, treatments, and therapies.⁴

So, over time, Big Pharma has stepped in to pay for and run the majority of these trials.

As a result, Big Pharma funds a big part of FDA’s operations today and wields enormous control over the information the FDA uses to base its decisions on drug approvals and safety reviews after drugs hits the market.⁵ That biased information, in turn, is what most MDs use when deciding how best to treat their patients.⁶

Big Pharma’s influence over clinical trials allows drug companies to push on the benefits of a drug and downplay the risks, all in the name of profit.

More than 100,000 drug industry sales reps fan out across the country — visiting doctors’ offices, providing gifts and meals, sending physicians on expensive all-expenses-paid trips that let them peddle their latest meds and even providing free samples for MDs to hand out to their patients.

It’s all part of an outrageous racket like nothing else I’ve ever seen. It’s a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse.

There’s no other industry I know of that has such power. What other for-profit enterprise tells regulators what they can and can’t do, in terms of regulating how they can promote, market, study, and sell their products and services?

Just imagine the tobacco industry being in charge of studies on the safety of cigarettes, and telling health officials what they can — and can’t— do, when it comes to warning people about the dangers of smoking?

To me, Big Pharma’s hidden hand in our health care system puts us all at risk of ineffective and even dangerous drugs and therapies.

It wasn’t always this way.

Big Pharma’s takeover of our health care system started in the 1970s, when funding grants for medical research from the NIH shrank from roughly half of all drug applications to one-third.⁷

Then, in the 1980s, federal bureaucrats slashed university-based medical research funding, pushing academic researchers into the waiting arms of pharmaceutical companies who were only too happy to step into the gap and pony up millions of research dollars.

But all that money — blood money, in truth — came with strings attached. Researchers whose findings suggested new drugs or therapies were worthless or dangerous ran the risk of seeing their funding sources dry up.

What’s more, new laws passed in the 1980s allowed nonprofit institutions and their researchers to benefit financially from the discoveries made while conducting federally funded research.

But the biggest transition in our health care was still to come. Over the past three decades, Big Pharma has taken over most of our clinical research. In 1991, academic medical centers — hospitals that train doctors and conduct medical research — received 80% of the money spent to

fund clinical trials. But by 2004, the percentage of clinical trials conducted by such institutions had fallen from 80% to just 26%.

This has allowed Big Pharma companies to own and control virtually all the FDA information doctors use when deciding how to treat their patients. Some companies even ghostwrite clinical trial reports for publication in scientific journals, giving the named authors in those papers the ability to merely “suggest” revisions.

Here’s the point:

The pharmaceutical industry’s control over the FDA — and what doctors believe about drugs, vaccines, and other therapeutics — has turned our once-vaunted health care system into a for-profit sick care system that often does more harm than good.

Shocking 3rd Leading Cause Of Death

In the first episode of the TV series The Resident, a nurse tells a patient that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States after cancer and heart disease.⁸

But she hastens to add: “They don’t want us talking about that.”

This unforgettable line is hardly a fictitious claim designed for dramatic purposes. In fact, clinical studies prove that prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death not only in the U.S., but also in Europe.

The problem is accelerating precisely because more and more Americans are taking an ever- growing number of prescription drugs.

And the number of Americans taking multiple medications has grown rapidly over the last two decades. Between 2000 and 2012, the proportion of adults in the U.S. who were taking five or more medications nearly doubled, from 8.2% to 15%.⁹

Older Americans are particularly vulnerable to medication overload. Today, 42% of adults over the age of 65 take five or more medications, which clearly puts them at greater risk.¹⁰

If nothing is done, medical errors over the next decade are projected to cause 4.6 million hospitalizations of older Americans, 74 million outpatient visits and nearly 150,000 premature deaths.

One reason this is happening: Over the last two decades, prescription drug use has exploded. To keep up, the FDA has been pressured to streamline — I would say shortcut — the approval process to get more drugs to market faster.

To reduce the time needed for drug approvals, the FDA has turned to the drug companies themselves to pay for the research. The agency did so with help from Congress, which passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) in 1992 to allow the FDA to collect fees from drug manufacturers to fund the new drug approval process.

These so-called “user fees” now equal nearly one-third — $920 million — of the FDA’s overall budget. They have also made the FDA the fastest drug-approval agency in the world.

This has made a bad situation worse. Now you have government employees and regulators whose jobs are dependent on the drug companies for funding.

That makes Big Pharma the Big Boss of the FDA.

The FDA’s own scientists even admit to this. David Graham is the current Associate Director of the FDA.   Back when he was a senior drug safety researcher at the agency, he played a key role in getting 12 drugs removed from the market (including Vioxx).

But he admits the FDA is not the watchdog for consumers it should be.

Here’s what he said after the FDA made Merck pull Vioxx from the market because of the risk of heart attacks:¹¹

“As currently configured, the FDA is not able to adequately protect the American public. It's more interested in protecting the interests of industry.

“It views industry as its client, and the client is someone whose interest you represent. Unfortunately, that is the way the FDA is currently structured.”

It should come as no surprise to anyone that nearly three dozen drugs have been pulled from the market since 1992, after follow-up research found they posed grave dangers.¹²

These have included Vioxx, the acne drug Accutane, the cholesterol-lowering statin Baycol, the antidiabetic Rezulin, and painkillers Bextra, Darvon, and Darvocet, just to name some of the more well-known medications.¹³

By comparison, just eight drugs were withdrawn from the market between the 1 950s and 1992.

But withdrawn drugs are just scratching the surface.

Countless dangerous — even deadly – drugs remain on the market today. Drugs like statins and powerful NSAID painkillers. And these studies don’t even include drug recalls due to contamination and other manufacturing problems.

What this tells me is that there are forces out there that aren’t working on your behalf. Despite the smart people doing hard work and all the helpful science, not everyone’s incentive is your health.

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