(NaturalNews) Even though the vast majority of elderly drivers use one or more medications, few of them area aware of the effects that their drugs can have on driving performance, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Alabama-Birmingham and released as a report by the nonprofit AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
"That's really scary," said Peter Kissinger of the AAA Foundation. "The risks are real."
The researchers interviewed 630 drivers between the ages of 56 and 93, and found that 78 percent of them were taking one or more medications. Yet only 28 percent of the respondents knew of the potential risks from driving while medicated. Only 18 percent of those taking drugs especially known to impair driving ability -- including ACE inhibitors, beta blockers and sedatives -- had received warnings about the effects from their doctors or pharmacists.
Health care workers yet "are not effectively communicating known risks," Kissinger said.
The researchers also found that awareness of the risks of driving while medicated decreased with age, while the number of prescription medications used increased.
Studies have conclusively linked certain drugs or combinations of drugs to an increase in the risk of automobile collisions. However, the exact number of crashes caused by medications is still unknown because few safety agencies regularly test for the presence of drugs in drivers' systems after a crash, except when alcohol use is suspected.
An aging population and the increasing prevalence of multiple prescription use are only likely to worsen the problem of uninformed medicated drivers, Kissinger said. To attempt to reverse the trend, the AAA Foundation plans to release a free web-based resource known as Roadwise Rx in early 2010. Roadwise Rx will include a searchable database of the effects that drugs have, individually or in combination, on driving ability. Users will also be able to input personalized data, such as age, sex and weight. The program will be able to advise users about potential drug interactions, the effects of food, and when driving may be unsafe.
Sources for this story include: wheels.blogs.nytimes.com.
Showing posts with label medications. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medications. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
FDA approves Crestor for people who have no health problem to correct
(NaturalNews) Big Pharma has been trending this direction for a long time: marketing medicines to people who don't need them and who have nothing wrong with their health. It's all part of a ploy to position prescription drugs as nutrients -- things you need to take on a regular basis in order to prevent disease.
The FDA recently gave its nod of approval on the matter, announcing that Crestor can now be advertised and prescribed as a "preventive" medicine. No longer does a patient need to have anything wrong with them to warrant this expensive prescription medication: They only need to remember the brand name of the drug from television ads.
This FDA approval for the marketing of Crestor to healthy people is a breakthrough for wealthy drug companies. Selling drugs only to people who are sick is, by definition, a limited market. Expanding drug revenues requires reaching people who have nothing wrong with them and convincing them that taking a cocktail of daily pharmaceuticals will somehow keep them healthy.
All this is, of course, the greatest quackery we've yet seen from Big Pharma, because once this floodgate of "preventive pharmaceuticals" is unleashed, the drug companies will be positioned to promote a bewildering array of other preventive chemicals you're supposed to take at the same time. Did you take your anti-cancer pill today? How about your anti-diabetes pill? Anti-cholesterol pill? Don't forget your anti-Alzheimer's pill, too.
The logical argument of the drug companies who push these "preventive" prescriptions is essentially that the human body is deficient in pharmaceuticals, and that deficiency can only be corrected by taking whatever brand-name drugs they show you on television. Forget about deficiencies in zinc, or vitamin D, or living enzymes; what your body really needs is more synthetic chemicals!
The FDA agrees with this loopy logic. And why wouldn't it? Subscribing to this pharmaceutical delusion is an easy way to instantly expand Big Pharma's customer base by tens of millions. Overnight, the market for Crestor ballooned from a few million people with high cholesterol to the entire U.S. population of 300 million people.
If Crestor can help healthy people be healthier (which it can't, but let's play along with this delusion for the sake of argument), then it's only a matter of time before they start adding Crestor to infant formula. I mean, why not? If it's so good for healthy people, then it must make babies healthier, too, right?
So let's add Crestor to sports drinks. Let's sprinkle it into the iodized salt supply. Let's drip it into the municipal water! (Don't laugh: This idea of dripping cholesterol drugs into the water supply has already been suggested by more than one doctor.) Let's merge the pharmaceutical supply with the food supply and charge people prescription drugs prices for "functional" foods laced with these chemicals!
Not taking any medications? You have a pharmaceutical deficiency, and it needs to be corrected by taking more prescription drugs. But don't bother with actual nutrition, because nutrients have absolutely no role in preventing disease, the FDA claims. No nutrient has ever been approved by the FDA for the prevention or treatment of any disease whatsoever.
The message from the FDA is quite clear on this: Nutrients are useless, and you should eat medications as if they were vitamins.
Patented Big Pharma chemicals, after all, provide all the nutrition you'll ever need!
The FDA recently gave its nod of approval on the matter, announcing that Crestor can now be advertised and prescribed as a "preventive" medicine. No longer does a patient need to have anything wrong with them to warrant this expensive prescription medication: They only need to remember the brand name of the drug from television ads.
This FDA approval for the marketing of Crestor to healthy people is a breakthrough for wealthy drug companies. Selling drugs only to people who are sick is, by definition, a limited market. Expanding drug revenues requires reaching people who have nothing wrong with them and convincing them that taking a cocktail of daily pharmaceuticals will somehow keep them healthy.
All this is, of course, the greatest quackery we've yet seen from Big Pharma, because once this floodgate of "preventive pharmaceuticals" is unleashed, the drug companies will be positioned to promote a bewildering array of other preventive chemicals you're supposed to take at the same time. Did you take your anti-cancer pill today? How about your anti-diabetes pill? Anti-cholesterol pill? Don't forget your anti-Alzheimer's pill, too.
Medications are not vitamins
The very idea that these drugs can somehow prevent a person from becoming sick in the future strains the boundaries of scientific credibility. Only natural therapies like nutrition can prevent the onset of disease, not patented chemicals that don't belong in the human body in the first place.The logical argument of the drug companies who push these "preventive" prescriptions is essentially that the human body is deficient in pharmaceuticals, and that deficiency can only be corrected by taking whatever brand-name drugs they show you on television. Forget about deficiencies in zinc, or vitamin D, or living enzymes; what your body really needs is more synthetic chemicals!
The FDA agrees with this loopy logic. And why wouldn't it? Subscribing to this pharmaceutical delusion is an easy way to instantly expand Big Pharma's customer base by tens of millions. Overnight, the market for Crestor ballooned from a few million people with high cholesterol to the entire U.S. population of 300 million people.
If Crestor can help healthy people be healthier (which it can't, but let's play along with this delusion for the sake of argument), then it's only a matter of time before they start adding Crestor to infant formula. I mean, why not? If it's so good for healthy people, then it must make babies healthier, too, right?
So let's add Crestor to sports drinks. Let's sprinkle it into the iodized salt supply. Let's drip it into the municipal water! (Don't laugh: This idea of dripping cholesterol drugs into the water supply has already been suggested by more than one doctor.) Let's merge the pharmaceutical supply with the food supply and charge people prescription drugs prices for "functional" foods laced with these chemicals!
Pharmaceutical deficiency
That's really where all this is headed. When medicines are approved as preventive "nutrients" for the human body, it's only a matter of time before the industry starts talking about your "pharmaceutical deficiency."Not taking any medications? You have a pharmaceutical deficiency, and it needs to be corrected by taking more prescription drugs. But don't bother with actual nutrition, because nutrients have absolutely no role in preventing disease, the FDA claims. No nutrient has ever been approved by the FDA for the prevention or treatment of any disease whatsoever.
The message from the FDA is quite clear on this: Nutrients are useless, and you should eat medications as if they were vitamins.
Patented Big Pharma chemicals, after all, provide all the nutrition you'll ever need!
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