ENG102 Research Paper Draft; Needs proof of peer evaluation and review focusing on weaknesses and ares for improvement.
America on Drugs
As of January 2012, over twenty-five percent of adolescent children (ages nine to seventeen years) and forty-one percent of senior citizens (aged sixty-five years and older) contribute to a total of almost half of the American population engaging in prescription medication utilization. With the average life expectancy up to seventy-seven years, in conjunction of the nation's main death related diseases (including strokes, heart disease, and cancers) being down an average of two percent each, the nation, and its habitual use of medications is on the rise. With each generation beginning use of stimulants such as Vyvanse, Dextroamphetamine, and Methylphenidate earlier than their precursor, our nation's comfort with such chemical therapies has excessively grown also. Following the seemingly quick fix methods displayed throughout our daily media, the same expectations have flooded into the pharmaceutical industries abilities via prescription drugs. Additionally, contributing to not only our nation's prescription users, but abusers, is our vastly increasing senior population throughout the country. Therefore, the main factors contributing for about half of the American population engaging in prescription medication usage are overprescribing, quick fixes to avoidable health concerns, as well as a rapidly expanding senior population.
Commonly, Americans are becoming overprescribed due to both prolonged treatments, as well as being prematurely diagnosed in hopes to inevitably dodge potentially worse health conditions. Currently, over twenty-five percent of American adolescents are prescribed a routine medication before nine years of age (Barrett 1). Around this time, children are approaching the concrete period of operations for thinking logically, and any disturbances to the natural chemical balance in the brain during this period can result in negatively impacting how an individual will potentially react to drug use of any kind. The anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG) portion of the brain contributes to chemical consistency of both addictive and obsessive factors, and is also a focal destination for such stimulant drugs. Creating an infraction to a child's natural chemical balance too early impacts the likelihood of acquiring these personality traits, as well as lessens an individual's negative perspective on health altering side effects.
Although our nation's illicit drug use numbers among teens and young adults are down, those whom have engaged in illegal drug activity have most commonly evolved into prescription drug abusers. A horrific new trend gaining national attention is the act of pharming; a potentially fatal action of taking random combinations, or quantities equivalent to overdosing, of prescription drugs. Pharming, as well as selling prescription medications, is most common among teenagers due to being both the highest prescribed and utilized stimulant drug demographic (Banta 8). The abuse of prescriptions beginning to surface is adequately supported by generations growing up to premature exposure to brain altering chemicals. Our nation's fascination with prescribed remedies is continuing to consume lives at younger, more impressionable, stages of awareness in life.
Also contributing to American's being overprescribed, consumers of antidepressants are being prescribed through practitioners who are underqualified for psychiatric prescription drug medication diagnosing procedures and evaluations. With the most common administrators of antidepressant medications being primary care practitioners, opposed to clinically trained psychiatry specialists for therapeutic drug treatments, misdiagnosing in vast amounts has become the norm. This being increasingly hazardous with the nation's antidepressant utilization gradually growing over four hundred percent in just the past twenty years (Wood 1). In regards to the drastic increase, Dr. Grohol states that, "about eight percent of people ages twelve and over with no current symptoms of depression took antidepressant medication, often leading to an additional hypnotic or antianxiety prescription" (Barrett 7). Prescriptions have become the base for upsells of secondary medications, rather than maintaining focus on the goal outcome of the primary therapeutic treatment.
Additionally, with the American population now accustomed to speed, endless searching for quick fixes regarding healthcare fuel the pharmaceutical distributors impact on society. Advancements in the pharmaceutical industry's research and discoveries have also inflated expectations of each therapeutic medication's abilities. Patients often receive false hopes before routine medication utilization; Person expresses, "nine out of every ten patients begin treatment believing it to be short term, only to end up in long term treatment. People need to realize that even with prolonged exposure most medications help to treat causes, but do not usually cure" (3). In aspects of intensive medication therapies such as antineoplastics and antibiotics, these forms of treatment are most often prescribed in combination with antidiarrheals or narcotic pain relievers to create a synergistic effect; these drugs often must be prescribed together in order for a patient to tolerate the primary drug response.
Also, with prescription drug demand on the rise throughout the United States, a new bill passed in March of 2012 has intensions of accelerating the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) new drug approval (NDA) process. Amidst the anticipation of a sped up NDA process following a shortage of vital medications such as anesthetics, antibiotics, and cancer medications early in 2012, therapeutic equivalents from India and Australia have been allowed access to be dispensed by the U.S. government to fill void treatments (Mitka 9). With drug shortages dramatically effecting patient care and therapeutic outcome, the FDA has now been issued new guidelines regarding manufacturing standards and advance shortage awareness. The executive order was signed last October by President Obama, although the U.S.'s 2012 drug shortage has become the third consecutive year the issue has become increasingly pronounced. In hopes of alleviating future catastrophic medication shortages, new options of approval available through the FDA include Fast Track, Accelerated Approval, and Priority Review; in hopes of keeping up with America's demand on prescription development and availability.
Furthermore, allowing for new medications to be provided to the public sooner may not only alleviate shortage concerns, but additionally has potential to wipe out fake pharmaceutical profit and demand. The pharmaceutical black market profit seizures in the U.S. have undergone an increase from $11 million in 2010, to $16.8 million as of 2011 (Park 12). While the FDA's list of approved drug manufacturers decreases, our population and its need for drugs proceed to flourish. Speculation of many commonly prescribed medications for allergies, cholesterol, blood pressure, asthma, migraines, and diabetes are in the works of becoming available over the counter (OTC) to keep up with the rise in America's legal drug market supply and demand. Although this may have an immediate beneficial response, healthcare workers are precautious towards possible long term outcomes from the decision. Dr. Korczynski remarked, "What it could do is take these medications out of drug interaction screens. I think there's a perception with this process that physicians would actually be cut out of the loop and I would never be an advocate of that" (Simbra 8). With the American population's options of either becoming overprescribed by a primary care practitioner, or risk potentially serious health consequences with self-prescribed medications, there is inevitably one common outcome; those who seek public or private available drug therapies, shall receive.
Unfortunately, with the expanding number of pharmaceutical consumer's throughout the US, follows an expanding number of life threatening mistakes. Top pharmaceutical company's private affairs with bribing both healthcare workers and law officials alike is increasing in notoriety; largely impart by the three million dollar fraud settlement amount issued to British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. Many of the company's top antidepressant, antiseizure, and antidiabetes medications were the choice therapies advised by privately paid off individuals to increase the already outstanding profit margin (Thomas 1). Not only was the company advising unethical medical diagnosis' to increase profit on drug expenditures, but also ignored negative risks towards consumer's health for unfathomable reasons.
Amidst the pharmaceutical giant's public billion dollar settlement, speculation of major drug manufacturing companies disclosing knowledge from the public of natural therapeutic alternatives is steadily increasing. Once audiences delve more deeply into facts relating to the ordeal, many come across a startling and dubious fact; around half of all prescription drugs in the United States are either directly or synthetically derived from plant life (Swerdlow 3). Among the presently known health aiding plants available, is the Madagascar rosy periwinkle. This plant alone is linked to helping cure not only Hodgkin's disease, but around ninety percent of the US's children related leukemia cases (Swerdlow 8). With such a promising outlook able to be given to patients and their families through nature, it becomes perplexing why this knowledge is not given notoriety. Revaluating the profit margins for both medical doctors and pharmaceutical distributors displays truth in the numbers of how America prefers to be drugged, naturally or not.
In addition to effective botanical therapeutic treatments being not only ignored, but dismissed by the FDA, a known cure for various life threatening health conditions, with little to no side effects, is receiving similar scrutinization. A therapy involving highly charged oxygen molecules, administered most commonly in an inhalant or intravenous form, has been shown to successfully cure a range of conditions including cardio vascular, liver, and kidney disease, diabetes, and miraculously a vast range of cancers and AIDS as well (Fassa 2). The FDA continues to condone the use or acknowledgment of ozone therapy, ensuring the pharmaceutical market expenditures continue to increase. The United States of America, officially banned a proven method of curing the same ailments that its top selling prescription drugs are designed to do during the 1940's. Even with this fairly easy procedure still curing patients in other countries around the world today, being frowned upon by our nation's largest financial contributors continually diminishes any hope for public acknowledgement of the treatment.
Annually, over three billion prescriptions are filled throughout the United States; the nation's leading consumers being our senior citizens with revenue contributing to over forty-one percent of total sales and making up only thirteen percent of the total population. Leading our nation's prescription drug profits makes our seniors the repeated prime candidates for patient targeted advertising. Those aged sixty years and older, continue to be the most common consumers of medication whom ask to be prescribed specific medications. This age demographic has always been the most common to relate back to having been referred to by pharmaceutical brand television commercials. The top three prescription drugs administered to seniors are also the most aired pharmaceutical commercials targeting antidepressant, antipsychotic, and antihypertensive patients, followed closely by those suffering from diabetes. A specific factor in the political department has also influenced the elderly to take advantage of what is given to them, regarding Medicare that is. President Barack Obama's Obamacare has saved seniors over four billion dollars (and counting) on prescription medications, thus influencing the continuation of drug therapies advised through medical physicians. With the savings of beneficiaries currently exceeding over $687 million, the government proceeds to encourage continual drug therapies aimed towards our elders (Watson 5). Although the drug providers insist quality assurance is behind the drastic changes in current Medicare reforms, many believe the underlying reaction the government is in pursuit of is providing continual medication therapy to as many patients as possible.
Ultimately, with such emphasis on aiding medical conditions with prescription medications, our nation continues its infinite search for magic pills in retaliation of avoidable health concerns. On average, a total of four to fourteen medications are utilized on a daily basis by those in the American senior population alone ("Senior Customers are Prime Targets of U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry" 3). This reality has contributed to warping our senior's views of medication limitations and interactions, opening the door to a new age demographic of drug abusers. Having surgeries be so common among this age group, rehabilitation therapeutics continue to play a factoring role to the growing misuse of opiates and benzodiazepines (May 1). Seniors often having a preconceived notion of "a pill to fix all" not only increases the likeliness of self-medicating, but often leads to mixtures of OTC drugs with a vast array of prescription medications (Person 7). Increased use of false authority, bandwagon, and stereotyping fallacies floods the patient targeted advertising for seniors. With this method proving to continue winning over new hopeful patients, unrealistic outcomes proceed to be the goal of a flourished senior pharmaceutical consumer market.
Overall, as the population increases, so do the targeting strategies of the pharmaceutical industry on America's medication consumer census. With increasingly alarming medication shortages and proven methods of curing some of our most fatal diseases being kept secret, it's as if the lives the medications are discovered to help save, have lost value. Added media pressure, encouraging even health altering "quick fixes" for emotions and behaviors completely normal for the human species, continue to increase while the ages decrease. From beginning the use of daily oral prescription stimulants among adolescents for attention deficit hyperactive disorder, to our senior citizens becoming an unexpected drug abusing demographic; America shows no sign of losing its reputation as the highest prescribed nation in the world.