To answer to health problems or prevent them, everyone needs information
about their body, their physiology, the origin of illnesses, medicines
etc.
To
take care of one's health it is not always best to resort to taking
medicine. Prevention, hygiene, surgery, physiotherapy, psychotherapy
or other non-drug options are sometimes the best bet. And when taking
a medicine is the answer, one must be able to choose the best preparation
adapted to the condition, which means the most effective and convenient,
the least risky, and the cheapest.
To
choose this best option, comparative information is needed, including
all the available data, without the information being hidden or
distorted. Only an independent source can provide such information.
Pharmaceutical companies or health product manufacturers cannot
be requested to provide, in the end, anything other than information
favourable to their products.
One
example, among others:
The majority of diabetics don't need
insulin but need first to lose weight and in the event of failure,
and only then, oral hypoglycaemic medicines. Among these medicines,
only a few have been shown to reduce morbidity and mortality in
clinical trials. Only those medicines should be used.
Yet many pharmaceutical companies continue to sell hypoglycaemic
drugs that are not as well evaluated as others. The trend for pharmaceutical
companies is to try to sell as much of their product as possible
and therefore to downplay the limitations of the medicine and to
exaggerate qualities.
Not
surprisingly the pharmaceutical industry seeks to maximise profits
in the shortest time. Promotion of medicines is a key element in
the process. But let's not ask them to provide rigorous comparative
information: that is not their objective.
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