Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Friday, Jun 09, 2006
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Friday, Jun 09, 2006 |
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Life
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Health Industry & Economy - Pharmaceuticals Prescription woes P. T. Jyothi Datta
It is normal to suffer from mood swings or mild anxiety. But drug companies have made a disorder of normal mood swings and use it as a reason to push anti-depressants, says Dr Chandra Gulhati, Editor of `Monthly Index of Medical Specialities' (MIMS-India). The same is the case with obesity. Young patients are prescribed anti-hypertension drugs and one thing leads to another, he says. He cites the example of a 28-year-old man who had high blood pressure. Instead of being asked to change his lifestyle, he was put on anxiety drug alprazolam, and Nebivolol, a cardio-selective beta-blocker prescribed for hypertension. The young patient subsequently found himself impotent, for which more medicines were prescribed. Still later, he would need medication to treat the side-effects of the impotence drug, says Dr Gulhati, illustrating the never-ending need for medicine for a problem that could have been fixed with a change in lifestyle. "The drug companies are not discovering new drugs, but new diseases," he says. And doctors are only too ready to prescribe medicines for the slightest of reasons and so you have fancy combinations such as calcium with vitamins, nutraceuticals and "useless" lifestyle medicines that are regularly prescribed to people.
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