Earl Harford, a retired professor, recently bought a month’s worth of the pills he needs to keep his leukemia at bay. The cost: $7,676, or three times more than when he first began taking the pills in 2001. Over the years, he has paid more than $140,000 from his retirement savings to cover his share of the drug’s price.
“People with this condition are being taken advantage of by the pharmaceutical industry,” said Harford, 84, of Tucson, Arizona. “They haven’t improved the drug; they haven’t done anything but keep manufacturing it. How do they justify it?”
As the pharmaceutical industry, led by Pfizer Inc.’s proposed $100 billion takeover of AstraZeneca Plc, is in the throes of the greatest period of consolidation in a decade, one reality remains unchanged: Drug prices keep defying the law of gravity. Continue reading
The November 2011 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine reported that most emergency hospital visits for the elderly are caused by side effects and overdosing from taking blood thinners to prevent strokes and blood clots. Conventional doctors wait until you’re at risk of a stroke or have had your first stroke to prescribe blood thinners in hopes of preventing additional strokes. What they don’t warn you about are the serious possible side effects from these drugs including internal bleeding, stomach ulcers, muscle aches and pains, headaches with dizziness, kidney failure and a boat load of other negatives that can destroy your health. However, there are several natural substances that possess powerful anti-inflammatory properties and also help to thin the blood. These herbs can also produce their own side effects and should not be taken in combination with pharmaceutical drugs. Don’t take any unfamiliar medicinal herb unless supervised by a well-trained herbalist or natural health practitioner. 
A U.S. jury imposed $6 billion in punitive damages on Takeda Pharmaceutical in a case involving allegations that the company 
In a nation that seems to thrive on popping pills for a range of different health woes, it really should come as no surprise that deaths due to the overdosing of prescription drugs are on the rise in the United States, and will likely to continue to be so. Though there is a definite need for a number of these prescription drugs, and they provide relief from pain, infections and a host of other uncomfortable ailments, history is starting to tell the story of how these medically prescribed medications can be abused by patients. Many physicians, too, simply write a prescription as a cure-all for their patients rather than spend the time and make the effort to get to the root cause of the issue. 
The Washington Post had a major piece that discussed the ethics of efforts to use public pressure to force drug companies to make expensive drugs available to patients at affordable prices. Remarkably it never discussed the role of patent monopolies.
About 5.8 million American adults may no longer be prescribed drugs to treat high blood pressure under recently revised guidelines, according to a new study.
Buried beneath the avalanche of recent news reports about the latest Obamacare-mandated funding cuts to the Medicare Advantage (MA) program is a related but far more disturbing story — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has taken a major step toward rationing medications to the elderly. Since passage of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, seniors enrolled in the Medicare prescription drug program have been guaranteed access to “all or substantially all” of the drugs in several classes of pharmaceuticals. President Obama’s health care bureaucrats, however, have proposed removing three of these classes from the “protected” list. 
Pop quiz: Is the proportion of American children suffering from the disease known as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder . . .
This highlights the 4.4 percent of the U.S. has bipolar disorder, as best we know. The global rate is about half that, though detection and diagnosis vary dramatically. Still, treatment for the millions of people with the at-times debilitating condition involves an impressive degree of trial and error amid arrays of pills.
The pervasive use of generic over brand-name medications was anticipated to be a money-saver, but recently prices are soaring, even up 6,000 percent for some common drugs that were once fairly low-cost.
Mince pies, pudding and brandy butter, chocolates, – Christmas truly is the season of sugar. The average British adult will consume the equivalent of 32 teaspoons of the stuff on Christmas Day alone, according to the British Heart Foundation.
The nation’s first new guidelines in a decade for preventing heart attacks and strokes call for twice as many Americans — one-third of all adults — to consider taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.