I was just watching news in New York, a few weeks back, and came upon an advertisement. A lawyers’ firm in New York was inviting patients to send information on the side-effects of drugs they were taking to them directly so that they could get the patient compensation from the multinational petrochemicals corporations called the drug companies! Normally, one comes across such advertisements to sue doctors for malpractice, negligence and what have you. I then learnt that the US now permits drug companies to be sued directly for dangerous side-effects of drugs. This must have been a great relief to American doctors who were the target of the ambulance-chasing lawyers so far. Now, the lawyers, armed with this new law, are after the drug companies as they are the real large sharks that net trillions of dollars compared to doctors and hospitals that look like small fry now.
Soon, there will be legal firms specialising in attacking the drug lords instead of poor doctors. When this gathers full steam, many of our doctors need not have the anxiety of being sued for anything and everything. One of the advertisements that I saw looked like the pharmacology textbook’s chapter on statins. The lawyer was saying that almost everyone on statins gets muscle damage with or without symptoms like muscle-ache, etc. Between 10%-47% of people on statins become diabetics within their first year on statins; kidney damage is not unusual; and liver damage is a certainty. “If you have any one of those symptoms, do write to us and we will get maximum damage from the drug companies for you. No legal fees. If we win, we will share the booty.” So went the message of the advertisement. Does that not look attractive?
While it is good for doctors to feel safe, it is good for the patients also, since the drug companies may not go out of their way to wine and dine doctors to prescribe their medicines for indications for which they have not been permitted in the first place. Interestingly, this law does not cover vaccination injuries! Vaccine manufacturers must be richest among the drug lords, hence, they could make the government exempt them from this law. Extending this further, very soon, the cunning angiogram/angioplasty industrialists might pass on their mistakes on the device-makers.
The man-on-the-street has so much faith on the chemical drugs and surgery as the custodians of their well-being and their lives that they are ready to accept anything, in the name of science. Truth is otherwise. A substantial part of human healing is well outside the realm of materialistic reductionist science. Thinkers in mainline science seem to have woken up. In an article, in 2011, Michael Crow, the president of the Arizona State University and a leading science administrator, wrote that the US National Institutes of Health’s annual budget of $30 billion should not be just confined to molecular biological and other conventional ways of looking at human health; it must also look at health as a human experience in its biological, sociological and environmental angles. People’s feelings, their emotions and beliefs also matter in personal and societal health. I feel, we should be less arrogant about our scientific knowledge. Did our ancestors know how to communicate with plants and animals to know about our present knowledge of herbal and animal sources of therapy?
With the Damocles’ sword hanging no longer on their necks of consumers’ claims, doctors should now be able to think outside the box for better intervention outcomes. With humility, better sense would prevail. Long live the time-honoured doctor-patient relationship which is very sacred and does the main job in healing, anyway. Let not mankind perish from the reductionist side-effects of drugs eventually.
