Taking Drugs for Your Disease Can Cause...Another Disease

Public Citizen's excellent Website WorstPills.org features an article this week on the various "side effects" caused by today's most popular pharmaceutical drugs. As if that's not enough, they also have written anecdotal stories of people harmed by drugs, including people who developed additional diseases caused by the drugs.

Larry, an otherwise healthy 58-year-old man with diarrhea believed to be due to “irritable bowel syndrome,” was given Stelazine, a powerful antipsychotic tranquilizer to “calm down” his intestinal tract. Stelazine is not even approved for treating such medical problems. Six months after starting Stelazine, Larry developed severe parkinsonism and was started on L-dopa, a drug for treating Parkinson’s disease. Presumably, the doctor did not realize the parkinsonism was drug-induced, and the Stelazine was continued. For seven years, Larry took both drugs. Then a neurologist specializing in Parkinson’s disease saw Larry, recognized the real cause of his problem, stopped the Stelazine, and slowly withdrew the L-dopa over a six-month period. Larry’s severe, disabling parkinsonism cleared completely.

Read WorstPills.org entire article here.

Review of Side Effects Movie

I finally bought the DVD for the movie "Side Effects." I have been wanting to see this movie for a long time. Dr. Pam Popper at the Wellness Forum introduced me to it, but I haven't had a chance to see it until now.

Side Effects is a movie about the drug industry. It is based on a true story, the budding career of a pharmaceutical sales rep named Kathleen Slattery, who also happens to be the director of this movie.

The story begins with Karly Hert's (Kathleen's character) start in the pharma business. The initial pay and perqs get her excited, but she isn't really good at the job for a while. Finally, she decides to tell the doctors the unvarnished truth about the drugs she's selling, being upfront about all the side effects. It works, and Karly becomes the top sales rep, earning top dollars selling their marque drug, named Vivexx (named suspiciously like Vioxx, the arthritis drug that killed tens of thousands).

Karly finds out that the drug company withheld important side effect information, and does some digging to find out the real facts. She does some great detective work and at the end, makes a difference in a big way (trying to avoid spoilers here).

The movie itself is quite entertaining. That is for one reason and one reason only. Karly is played by Katherine Heigl, who is from Grey's Anatomy on TV and recently starred in Knocked Up. Katherine is an amazing actress. She holds the entire film together. I can sympathize that Kathleen Slattery is a first-time director, and as such, she does an okay job. But the movie has many problems, which can all be traced back to the director. Awkward ten-second scenes that mean nothing, strange interviews with doctors interspersed throughout, and awful performances by almost everyone except Katherine Heigl. The actors who play Karly's boyfriend and her two bosses are especially painful to watch. Again, it's understandable that, with a budget of less than $200,000, you're not going to get great actors to surround a star, but it doesn't make it any easier to watch.

I have one more bone to pick. As a red-blooded guy, it pains me to complain about this, but why does Katherine Heigl have to get undressed on-screen a half-dozen times or more with no connection whatsoever to the plot? It seems like a very cheap way to get our attention. Yes, Katherine has a beautiful body, but even a sex-crazed guy like myself can tell when he's being manipulated.

Having said all that, my wife and I still watched the whole thing and we still liked it. We both thought it was a tribute to one of the best new actresses of the twenty-first century, Katherine Heigl.

And, setting my inner movie critic aside, the story is good and the message is incredibly important. I suggest that, if you want to buy the DVD, you consider getting a combo-pack with Kathleen's companion movie called "Money Talks," which is a documentary on the same issue of pharmaceutical companies' undue influence on doctors.

Both movies are worth watching. We all need to learn more about this issue and find out what we can do to mitigate the risks.

Former Head of the Chinese FDA Sentenced to Death

In a surprisingly harsh decision, the former head of China's food and drug agency was given a death sentence for the corruption of his department.

Zheng Xiaoyu was convicted on charges of taking bribes and dereliction of duty.

The severity of the sentence probably had something to do with China's embarassments over the pet food poisoning scandal as well as others involving toothpaste manufactured in China, but Xiaoyu's corruption apparently predated these events by years.

Xiaoyu was convicted with taking bribes from pharmaceutical companies amounting to more than 6.5 million yuan ($850,000 US). There is a long list of Chinese patients who died from drugs that were approved by his department and later found to be unsafe.

This is quite a story. It speaks to a lot of issues in China as well as issues we deal with in the U.S.