Our Daily Meds

I happened to listen to the On Point Radio Program on NPR this morning while making my fruit smoothie. If you didn't catch it, you need to hear what was said.

The program was about the pharmaceutical industry. New York Times reporter, Melody Peterson, has written a book about it called Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs." The book title just about says it all.

Peterson described how doctors are paid to push drug company prescriptions and that the doctors are monitored, so they know if they do or not. The doctors are paid just to attend dinners and hear drug company spokesmen promote their drugs. Some doctors make more than $100,000 just from the drug companies by following their "orders." (I think there is a pun there.)

Worse yet, Peterson also told how Madison Ave. marketing firms are hired to write the medical articles that appear in journals promoting their drugs. Then doctors get paid to put their names on the articles. People, this was on NPR radio this morning, not broadcast from Russia or China. They also explained that the drug companies get away with this because they are the largest lobbying organization in Washington. (Not that long ago is was illegal to advertise like they do.)

Now you know why half the commercials on television are all about drugs that you should be asking your doctor for. It appears that there is very little unbiased medical literature written anywhere in this country. I've had my own run in with a doctor who wanted to do a biopsy when all the info that I read said not to. But, he would have made $1500 for my sitting on his table for all of 5 minutes.

So what has all this got to do with raw food? Plenty. If fact, it was my distrust of that doctor that motivated me to take my health into my own hands and since then I've changed my relationship to food. As the first doctor, Hippocrates, said: "Let food be your medicine and medicine your food."

I've fired all my doctors. And before I take another pill I'm going to make sure I'm eating the foods that my body is designed to eat. The alternative is too...well, fucked up.