Are we sick from too much medication?
We suffer from an obsession with health that does not benefit it. According to the OECD, Spaniards are among those who go to the doctor the most – six visits per year per inhabitant – without need.
Are the analytics getting stricter every day?
A case in point is that of cholesterol: the cholesterol threshold that is considered to be medicated is getting lower and lower.
The famous statins so dispensed?
Statins are prescribed here as if they were candy, but their side effects are not negligible: from muscle pain to diabetes… And right now a million Catalans are taking them: do they need them?
Does this hypermedication also cost us a fortune in taxes?
More medicine does not necessarily mean more health, but it does necessarily mean more healthcare spending…
How much do we spend on medication?
Too. Doctors in our public health system can prescribe up to 16,000 pharmaceutical specialties: who keeps that much information in their heads?
Maybe they are redundant?
Well, let’s look only at the active principles and not at the brands on sale: there are 3,000 of them marketed in Spain, and I have been working in pharmacology for 40 years and I only know about 30 of them well.
Shouldn’t this medicated exuberance be due to unhealthy interests?
A healthcare system in which a doctor can prescribe 16,000 drugs is programmed to not be prescribed well.
How many would actually be needed?
The Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine, to give you an idea, publishes a therapeutic guide which barely includes four hundred and a few medicines. And it is a guide that addresses absolutely all our health problems.
Only here we medicate too much?
In Sweden, of all health expenditure, barely 10% is on medicines, the rest is for medical attention and supervision; in Great Britain, only 14% of this healthcare expenditure is spent on medicines. Here we reach 26%.
Are we already winning the farm eurocup?
We are the first in Europe in pharmacological consumption.
What is the secret of our failure?
Almost all medical visits end with a prescription for a medicine and too many are from healthy people who come to the doctor for tests with too strict cholesterol criteria; or osteoporosis in women after menopause; or children diagnosed with ADHD…
Isn’t prevention better than cure?
The fact is that most of these problems are not health problems: we provide medical and pharmaceutical solutions to social problems.
Where do you detect this error?
The poorest quintile of Catalans takes seven times more antidepressants than the richest; women, more than twice as many as men; those over 65, seven times more than those under 65; the unemployed, four times more than the employed; and those without housing take six times more than the rest.
Would this spending on housing cure more citizens than on pills?
It would be healthier for everyone, but the healthcare system patches up a social malaise and the medicalized state turns it into a diagnosable and treatable disease…
Which pharma benefits?
Look at the new classification of psychiatric diseases in 2015: it says that sadness, within 15 days of the death of a loved one, is pathological and that you should prescribe antidepressants, when in the previous classification of 2008 that period was three months.
Isn’t the doctor there to help, after all?
Doctors should know more about biochemistry and not believe that every ailment can be cured with a prescription. We learn to converse with people and, from there, get something more than a diagnostic label. There are many depressed women who are actually abused.
Who benefits from hypermedication?
The research that is done is what interests those who pay for it. And the main promoters of medical research in the world are pharmaceuticals and medical publications.
And the injections to lose weight?
Semaglutide? The European Medicines Agency, which has approved it, considers overweight a body mass index (weight divided by height in meters squared) of 30…
You think that 30 is not obesity?
The systematic meta-analysis of clinical studies says that those with a BMI between 25 and 30 live longer; those of us between 20 and 25 live 9% less, and those between 30 and 35 live the same as those between 20 and 25. It is from 35 when you do suffer from obesity. So why is the obesity BMI being lowered while new overweight drugs are being approved?
