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Pharmageddon: America’s Top Selling Drug Cause Diabetes

June 21, 2011

IF ALL DOCTORS followed the latest cholesterol treatment guidelines, and all their patients took their prescribed statin medication, there would be 3.5 million more diabetics in America. But wait! There is another pill (injection actually) that has been shown to reduce the risk of diabetes. And it’s only about $50,000 per year per patient. Let’s see 3.5 million times $50,000. What does that bring us to?

Pharmageddon!

We are stuck in an absurd cultural habit of thinking that medication will save us from lifestyle and social diseases.

Two separate studies in today’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) underscore that we have come to the end of an era of being saved by medication. Antibiotics and vaccines were a huge advance in medicine in the 20^th century. But the single pill for the single ill just doesn’t work for 21^st century chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes.

Statins cause Diabetes

The latest cholesterol guidelines (ATP III) increased the number of Americans who should take statin therapy from 13 to 40 million. Those additional 27 million are ones without heart disease, but who have high cholesterol. This type of treatment is called primary prevention. I have extensively reviewed the lifestyle medicine and a social cure which would prevent over 90% of all heart disease.

Immune Suppressing Medication Prevents Diabetes

In another study of nearly 14,000 patients, published in today’s issue of JAMA, researchers from Harvard found that those treated with powerful immune suppressing medications (TNF alpha blockers like Remicade or Enbrel), reduced their risk of getting diabetes.

Sounds great. We have an explosion of diabetes. By 2020 one in two Americans will either have pre-diabetes or diabetes. The authors said “there is evidence suggesting a possible role for … immunosuppression in diabetes prevention”. But the side effects of these drugs are overwhelming infection, increased cancer risk and death. And they cost about $50,000 per year per patient. Were the authors serious about using these drugs for