I was driving home and listening to talk radio when an interesting topic came up: medication and pharmaceuticals in America today. Now, personally, the most drastic drug I have ever taken has been acne medicine - which required me to take a blood sample every month to test chemical levels. However, the concern was that the Medicare system is out of whack in so many ways. One example would be the open use of so many, and in so much dosage, mental drugs like Ritalin and anti-depressants like Prozac. I mean, I full-heartedly agree that they are there for a reason, but I am concerned that they are too commonly prescribed in today's generation of preteens and teens. I almost went on antidepressants when I hit a small depression stage in my life, but I found that there can be natural cures to that as well. Some conspiracy nuts and such believe that it's a tactic by pediatricians to get paid money by large pharmaceutical companies as compensation for how much less they make than other medical professionals (e.g. surgeons, pharmacists). It's come to the point where medicine is nothing more than a million-dollar industry waiting to be manipulated. The poor are receiving less less-than-standard health care at small clinics where pill-pushing, under-trained staff are simply making money for large medicinal firms. Meanwhile, expensive medicine and doctors are being bought out by the wealthier side of the American population. An interesting way to look at it can be the way the film The Constant Gardener looks at it. For those who have not seen it, it is based on the conspiracy of pharmaceuticals in Britain are using their underdeveloped AIDS vaccine in Africa - a risky situation consider chemical instability - simply for the cut of costs. After his wife - a journalist - has been assassinated, her husband goes in search of answers and finds a plot for the pharmaceuticals to silence the truth that they are using third-world villagers as lab rats in their sick development of powerful drugs. Some would say that this is a global-scaled version of the US today; wealthy corporations exploiting the lower class with financial power in order to prepare a product for the market. If you wanted to cut down on the read, here are my main questions: 1. How do you feel about the direction that mental drugs have taken in the last few years? 2. Do you think clinical medicine has become a corporate tactic or is it still the honest "First-Doctor-No-Harm" practice? 3. Is there a significant chance that the pharmaceutical market will become an unfair business for exploitation (similar to that in The Constant Gardener)?
