Trust only safe Online Pharmacies
While most mail-order pharmacies within the United States operate within the law, the offshore mail-order pharmacies are known to sell many products, especially unapproved therapies, that are potentially dangerous, even deadly.
Some of these firms may offer, unknown to the customer, counterfeit or bogus drugs, dangerous controlled drugs, and drugs used in “alternative” therapies.
Vioxx. Fen-phen. Guidant defibrillators. Ephedrine. Our unplanned national health system causes Americans to die every day. Faulty medical devices or unexpectedly dangerous drugs prove the cause. Yet we have no idea how many are killed. We don’t know how many are maimed. Without changing our way of studying and surveilling medical treatments, we’re not going to know.
Though drug manufacturers are held to higher standards than any other group, frequently these standards are not enforced. Pharmaceutical companies are required by law to perform studies of how well their drugs work in the community. Recent reports note two thirds of these studies never start. When they are begun, it is often at the end of a drug’s patent life.
Buying prescription medications online? Make sure your online pharmacy is safe and located in the United States before purchasing medications from them. I would only trust pharmacies that have licensed doctor’s working for them and ship out medications that are only in the United States.
Drug Manufacturers Working for the FDA
The FDA office supposed to oversee long-term drug surveillance is budgeted at less than one million dollars per year. A large part of FDA operations are paid directly by the drug companies.
Lack of surveillance is not due to evil drug companies and medical device makers desperate to leave the public ignorant of their dangerous treatments. Unexpected long-term drug effects have nearly sunk Wyeth and Merck in recent years. Hundreds have died, many thousands lost jobs and pension funds lost tens of billions.
Suffering families should not have to struggle in the courts for years or decades to seek redress for problems endemic in the American medical care system. Winning a lawsuit doesn’t help you when you’re dead. Many catastrophes occur because we have a medical care system, not a national public health system.
Protecting Your Health
Protecting the public health, your health, and our health care companies can be accomplished expeditiously. First, long-term surveillance of medical care results should be handled by a government agency not beholden to funding from the people it regulates. The databases necessary to see what works and what doesn’t exist in the hands of the HMOs and insurance companies.
To obtain Medicare HMO and other Federal contracts, they should agree to let their data, privacy encrypted, be studied by public health experts who can determine for all of us what medical treatments work, how much they cost, and what their long-term effects are.
We need a system dedicated to the health of us all. Otherwise we will continue to save or kill people every day, and we won’t know who or why.
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