First - wanted to say those in the flood plains are in our prayers - wish we could do more than that to help!
Second - have missed visiting here but have been traveling and advocating for health care for ALL in the US with a special emphasis on the need for Mental Health coverage. In addition have been "living" at SLU. My husband had surgery which led to infection (End of April) and ended up in ICU - finally coming home yesterday! At $49,000 a day, was thinking about just asking them to keep him until he could "work the bill off" but...:) kids wanted dad home - 7 weeks out of their life was a long time. Can not tell you how thankful we are for the wonderful staff on the 6th floor at SLU - incredible! Missing them the last couple days as we've had to do his IV therapy on our own every 6 hours (want Emily back for that 4 am dose!) Anyway - moving in the right direction so maybe life will return and we can move forward and I can visit and read all your wonderful pieces / information / discussions again....
Am very excited to say that my book: Escape from the Pharma Drug Cartel (amazon.com) caught the attention of a well known medical journalist and a small portion of my story has been on Australian TV and now in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) - a ray of sunshine in our chaos - My best to everyone in the "community" -
Within a Country suffering from a job
security crisis, raising gas prices, and increased foreclosures, the last thing
U.S. Citizens want to worry about is their health insurance.
Unfortunately, over 44 million are uninsured in the US and with increased job
losses, I'm sure those numbers are rising. (and how many illnesses are
aggravated or increased due to stress? Diabetes, heart disease, depression,
migraines, Irritable Bowel, etc) Actually, about 1 in 5 adults younger than 65
are in a precarious situation in case they are faced with a serious illness
according to a new study from the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation in
New York specializing in health research
In this country we provide police protection,
fire assistance and education but what do all of these things mean if we can
not even provide our citizens with the very basics like good, quality,
affordable health care? Remember, our laws only say that you are
entitled to "stabilization" of a life threatening illness - they do
not guarantee any further care or follow up. If you can not pay and are
having a heart attack, all the ER has to do is stabilize you, give you pain
meds and then can LEGALLY release you with no further care.
Many of us take our medical coverage for
granted until we lose it. Then what happens? What if we have pre-existing
conditions and can't find new coverage? Or what about those COBRA or
independent fees that are so high they just aren't affordable when we've just
lost a job and have no income for "extras"? What happens then? How
many more bankruptcies are caused by medical disasters?
Finally, so what if you do have insurance? Do
you put "blind faith" in your medical professional and the drugs you
are taking? Most people do and even when they don't the information that they
"google" from online resources such as WebMD and MedScape are
all sponsored by Phamaceutical Corporations so they will only tell you what the
companies want you to know. As an 18 year veteran of the pharmaceutical
industry, I will tell you that this truly scares me on many levels and the
American Public needs to know how involved the Pharma companies are in the
influence of their health care - and much of it is not to their benefit.
(Drug companies are turning us all into patients. Drug companies are using new
marketing tactics to turn ordinary life experiences and feelings into medical
conditions for expanded and increased sales)
I am not saying drugs are bad things - many
are lifesaving indeed! It is just that many older products are just as good as
the newer more expensive ones, many are better and some drugs on the market
haven't really proven any benefit over that of a placebo sugar pill.
Today, People with health insurance are
having more trouble paying for prescription drugs as higher out-of-pocket costs
for medications and a slowing economy strain family budgets, according to
surveys and health care analysts. 13% of insured Americans report paying
for drugs is a serious problem, says a recent poll by USA TODAY, the Kaiser
Family Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health. That's up from 9% in a
foundation survey in 2000. The latest poll of 1,695 adults had a margin of error
of +/—3 percentage points.
The following is an article that appeared in
TODAY'S British Medical Journal - BMJ a well known and respected magazine about
just a "tip of the ice burg" in the large problem that is known at
the Pharmaceutical Industry - it was based on some of my current autobiography:
ESCAPE
FROM THE PHARMA DRUG CARTEL (available at Amazon,com) I would love to help make a
difference in any way that I can! (I know the pain and frustration and being on
the verge of bankruptcy from one freak auto accident which cost me my job and
my insurance - I can tell the story from both sides of the fence - I am
uninsurable due to my Autoimmune Hepatitis and Lupus and my husband has just
gotten out of the hospital's ICU after a 28 day stay resulting from an
infection following a colon removal from Crone's disease leaving several
hundreds of thousands in bills):
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7658/1402
21 June 2008 (Vol 336, No 7658) 
BMJ 2008;336 (21 June),
doi:10.1136/bmj.a413
Editor's Choice
Key opinion leaders, your time is
up
Fiona Godlee, editor,
BMJ
We’re lucky in medicine to have
an unending supply of mysteries to ponder. Some of these—like why
vitamin A supplementation benefits some children while harming
others—are amenable to scientific research (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39575.486609.80;doi: 10.1136/bmj.39542.509444.AE). But there are
mysteries of a different sort, ones that are in our power as a
profession to resolve. Why, for example, is it considered normal for
medical leaders to accept personal payment for promoting a company’s
drug or device?
This week Ray Moynihan asks
whether paid "key opinion leaders" can be independent or
are just drug representatives in disguise (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39575.675787.651). His
interview with former sales representative Kimberly Elliott suggests
the latter. We know from independent studies that paid opinion
leaders can increase use of a target drug or device. Even if we
didn’t know this, we would have to assume it from industry’s continued
funding of "KOLs." Speakers who don’t make enough impact
on drug sales are dropped, says Elliott.
Perhaps most troubling is the way
industry grooms potential opinion leaders. Quoting from the magazine
Pharmaceutical Marketing, Moynihan says that industry staff
are told to find doctors who will endorse their products "who
may be further down the influence ladder," and then help
"raise their profile, and so develop them into opinion
leaders."
Of course industry is doing
nothing illegal, and it employs many fine people motivated more by
improving health care than making a profit. In this week’s Head to
Head, Charlie Buckwell argues that industry has an ethical
obligation to work with influential health professionals so that
each side understands the other’s thinking (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39541.702870.59). The
fact that these interactions can affect clinical practice is not
necessarily bad, he says, since this can help doctors appreciate the
benefits of some drugs.
But is this the best way to
inform doctors? What of evidence based medicine, which asks us to
use information that has been gathered systematically and evaluated
objectively? Moynihan also spoke to Richard Tiner of the Association
of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, who said that key opinion
leaders are "free to speak about other medicines" and
their presentations are "often quite balanced." Surely
doctors should be setting their sights higher than this?
Buckwell argues for tighter rules
and role definitions, and there are signs that things are improving.
It’s now rare in the best forums that speakers fail to start with a
slide declaring their conflicts of interest. But how often do these declarations tell the full story? Have you ever heard speakers say
that they were paid an honorarium and travel expenses and that the
sponsor prepared their slides?
Such transparency is crucial if
we are to understand the full extent of the influences we are under.
But can we look ahead to something even better, to an era of truly
independent medical leadership? Giovanni Fava thinks we can and
should (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39541.731493.59). He
envisages "a reservoir of truly independent experts" and calls
for an end to "business disguised as science." Medicine sorely
needs leaders, but not if a they’ve been bought.
