Our Guest Dr. Ray Strand
SID: Hello Sid Roth here your investigative reporter here with Dr. Ray Strand and I say it is outrageous! It is almost hard to believe that the third leading cause of death in the United States of America; you would think it would be things like cancer, heart trouble. No! It’s medication; is that true Dr. Strand?
DR. STRAND: That is correct. The biggest drug problem that we have in this country are legal drugs; because it is the third leading cause of death, over 180 thousand deaths each and ever year in the US alone.
SID: What is the reason, what is the real reason for this?
DR. STRAND: Well the real reason is there is inherent risk to medication. There’s just, anytime even if you take penicillin, aspirin, Tylenol; there is just an inherent risk of drugs because it is a foreign substance to the body. And sometimes a body does not like it and it has adverse reactions. And we try to eliminate it; the doctors are always trying to look at weighing the risk of doing something, with the health benefit; and so we are always caught in this but people need to understand that there is an inherent risk to drugs. And that we need to understand this to avoid it, because over half of these Sid should and can be avoided if people just knew what to do.
SID: Now were you, as a new MD, were you shocked when you first realized this?
DR. STRAND: Well yah, and I think that physicians even today are really scared by that and don’t believe that statistic; because we don’t keep track of them, but these are studies that have been well done, well documented. And in my practice, you know, when I first got into medicine, I think that we are a little bit naïve. You know, we think that we are going to cure the world, and save all these lives. And when you first hurt someone with a medication, it is a real shocker. And my situation was actually with a neurologist’s daughter, who came in with a serious pneumonia, we gave her a drug an antibiotic called Erythromycin, and then for her fever just gave her some Tylenol. But she went into liver failure so bad, we had to fly her to the University of Minnesota Children’s hospital. And what they told me that this was frequent to see people with Tylenol even alone having liver damage severe enough to…
SID: But wait a second Doctor – Tylenol? You get this over the counter. Bufferin – you get these, I mean that should be safe; you don’t even need a prescription for it.
DR. STRAND: You know and that is what people think, because they are over the counter and I can get them without a doctor’s prescription, they should be safe, but yet over 80% of those drugs that you get over the counter were once prescription medication. And they do have some serious adverse affect we need to know and understand.
SID: Tell me about another situation.
DR. STRAND: Well another situation, is you know we use drugs for children that were really never tested on children
SID: Wait never tested, you mean the drugs that we give children, were tested just in adults?
DR. STRAND: That is correct, in fact, 80, 85% of the drugs are never tested that we use on children, in children.
SID: That could have a horrific affect on a child.
DR. STRAND: Well yes it can they are smaller they have a different metabolism system and now the FDA is recognizing that problem since 1998 they are trying to encourage drug companies to test in children, but most drugs these pediatricians have to use they just have to figure it out basically on there own. But another drug was a drug called Propulsid that’s now been taken off the market. It was used for reflux, acid reflux in adults but we use it for children who are spitting up; especially preemie babies, but it had a very bad side effect, called sudden death and it took us years to figure that out.
SID: You know I come from the school of thought as a little child I go to the doctor, the doctor knows everything. But you know, and I know now that I have my gray hair, better that there is a lot of guess work involved.
DR. STRAND: You know Sid, I think that people need to understand they should not have blind faith in the pharmaceutical industry, in the FDA, in their doctor, or in the pharmacist; because the greatest link in this chain of events in taking medication is the patient. And you have to be really a little bit suspicious because they know there own bodies. They know when things are not quite going right or they might be reacting, and they need to be telling your doctor, and they need to be suspicious about it and they need to be upfront with everybody, and understand to avoid the serious problems that can happen.
SID: But, let’s take a look at some of these institutions which I have read about in some of your books. Let’s look at the FDA. I never knew, that it is the pharmaceutical companies that are funding the FDA to test one of their drugs to see if it is good or not. Isn’t there just an ulterior motive in all of this?
DR. STRAND: Well you know it was probably…
SID: I know you want to be protective, but I have to tell you that it appears that way to me doctor.
DR. STRAND: Well it does. They passed a law in 1992, called the Drug User Fee Act, and so a drug company, to put in a new drug application had to pay the FDA two hundred and fifty thousand dollars; a quarter million. Well that was…
SID: Why didn’t our government just fund it why did they have to pay it?
DR. STRAND: I don’t know. I mean we are spending all of this money why do we do that? The sad thing is now that user fee has become so popular that over 50% of the FDA’s budget come from the pharmaceutical industry that they are suppose to be protecting us against and making sure that these drugs are safe and effective. You know we get into the effective but we are not so sure about the safe; because once the FDA has approved a drug, they know less than 50% of the adverse drug reactions when they release it to the public.
SID: So wait a second now, that sounds really dangerous. Less than 50, so how do they find out the other 50%?
DR. STRAND: Well that would be the question that I would ask.
SID: I have figured that out already; us!
DR. STRAND: Us! We are the guinea pigs; that is how they find it out and I call it the great clinical trial; you! Because that is how we find it out. The trouble is Sid, that we as a physician or the medical community does not have to report this back to the FDA even if we are suspicious that the drug caused a problem. It is a voluntary reporting system, and less than 1% of these ever get reported back to the FDA. So it is a very archaic system and even then it gets reported back to the committee who originally approved the drug; so they are not an unbiased person in this whole realm of drug reactions and that is why it takes several years for drugs like Vioxx to come off the market. Or people…
SID: I have often wondered about all of these television commercials that we are having now on drugs now, and we don’t even know 50% of the side affects. I mean a famous rabbi said if a blind man leads another blind man; won’t they probably fall into a ditch? Fifty percent of us are falling in a ditch on drugs that are new, because we don’t know the side affects.
DR. STRAND: Yah and the sad thing is, is that the FDA puts this on us and we are trying to approve these drugs and yet we don’t know what they are causing. But the question should be why are the drug companies advertising on television, the magazines, and all of this, to a public, that they can only get the drug, only if the doctor prescribes it? Well the studies show Sid that if you go in and ask for a specific drug that you saw on television, 90% of the time you come out of the doctor’s office with that exact drug. That is why the drug companies are advertising to the public.
SID: Oi Vey! Listen we are being sold, on our television sets to buy drugs, and they don’t even know 50% of what is going wrong with the individual who takes these drugs. I mean, I am telling you this is very serious business! But there is an answer. Don’t go away, we will be right back.
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