Prescription for Disaster

Although the pharmaceutical industry says that prescription medicines are as safe as they can possibly be, prescribed drugs kill more people each year than automobile and plane crashes combined, and send approximately one million people to the hospital. The system that puts drugs in our medicine cabinet is flawed.
 
Nearly every one of the most popular prescription drugs has potential serious side effects, yet doctors seldom discuss them for fear that patients will be too frightened to take their medicine. For example, Motrin, Advil, and Aleve may cause life threatening perforated ulcers. Prozac is linked to 242 different adverse effects, Xanax can be highly addictive. Tranquilizers, sleep aids, painkillers, drugs at lower cholesterol, combat depression, reduce blood pressure all have documented risk. And while many drugs are valuable, none are entirely safe. Most of us trust our doctor to pick the right drugs for us, but doctors often make mistakes, prescribing drugs that are inappropriate or dangerous or ignoring FDA warnings.
 
Many drug dangers emerge only after FDA approval. Americans took the diet drug combination fen-phen for years before heart specialists discovered that fen-phen can damaged heart valves. But the FDA office that monitors the safety of thousands of approved drugs is pitifully small and its powers limited.
 
Moore does not suggest that we stop taking prescription drugs, but he does explain how to be an informed consumer.  There are steps each of us can take to minimize our chances of being hospitalized or injured by medication.  Moore explains which questions to ask your doctor and pharmacist to avoid unnecessary risk. Documented with hundreds of specific studies from mainstream medicine, prescription for disaster makes a compelling case for action to reduce the toll of needless industry injuries and deaths from prescription drugs.