Plays Well With Others

Off Label Use…

It used to be that you’d walk into your doctor’s office and they’d spend a good amount of time looking you over, checking this and that and really chatting with you about your medical history before prescribing some cough syrup or something. Now, you walk in, tell them what’s wrong with you and without barely even touching you they’ve got their prescription pad out with some medication written on it. You have to wonder if that medication is something you really need or if it’s just an easy way to get rid of you, so he can squeeze in a few more patients. Afterall, if I got paid per person, I’d certainly want to squeeze a few more in.

Wifey™ and I were watching a segment on 20/20 the other night on a new “miracle medication” that’s helping keep people awake—giving them more time in the day to do the things they need to take care of. The medication is called Provigil and was approved by the FDA to treat three sleep disorders: shift-work syndrome, narcolepsy and sleep apnea.

Despite this, doctors are readily prescribing this medication for all sorts of off-label reasons, including using it as a pill to help a person stay awake. Further, the maker of the drug actually pays doctors to prescribe the pill for off-label use. And this pill in particular isn’t just being prescribed to keep you awake, but allergists, internists, pediatricians and even dentists are prescribing it to treat excessive sleepiness in depression, multiple sclerosis, hyperactivity and cancer. Cancer??

But even more interesting was that, when tested against regular caffeine, the medication actually showed that it had no significant benefits. In fact, caffeine was shown to work just as well to help keep you awake.

My concern isn’t so much about the pill maker’s marketing, or even about it’s program that’s paying doctor’s to prescribe the drugs, but about the doctor’s themselves, who in my opinion, are setting aside their ethics in order to fill their pockets with quick cash at the expense of their patients. One good example is the number of “depression” pills that are being prescribed. Twenty years ago, there might have only been a handful of cases, now there are thousands or hundreds of thousands.

It apparent that the medical profession is more about making money and less about the quality of patient care. And it’s scary to think that these people we are trusting our lives and health with are more concerned with filling a quota. Most people put their full trust in their doctors and we all deserve to spend more than a couple of minutes in the doctors office before being shoo’d out with a prescription in hand.

As for the off-label use of Provigil and other drugs, I have a feeling that in a number of years we’re going to see a lot of people seeing their doctors for new illnesses and needing new treatments. Personally, I don’t think our bodies were meant to be pumped with so much medication. Also, I think people are too willing to pump themselves with medications for simple illnesses like colds and flu’s. Sometimes you just need to ride it out and be sick, and your body will take care of making you better all on it’s own. It’s been done for thousands of years and somehow we’re all still here.

So next time you visit your doctor and he or she prescribes something to you, it might be a good idea to ask your pharmacist about it or even to look it up and make sure that what you’re putting in your body is really something that’s been designed for your illness.

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