AircraftOwner Online

The FAA may be improving your health and extending your life without either of you knowing it!

    John Abramson MD, in his book Overdosed America, makes compelling and referenced arguments about how the pharmaceutical industry is pushing as many drugs as possible on the American public—whether they do nothing, hurt, or even kill people. Fortunately, the FAA does not allow many of these medications for use by pilots so we may be inadvertently helping ourselves by avoiding medications.

    Antidepressant medications are an example. Many studies show that for mild depression, common antidepressant drugs do not do anything more than placebo. In addition, many of these medications have serious side effects.

    Unfortunately, the FAA does not prevent all medications which have potential harmful effects. Cholesterol lowering medications are a classic. In spite of all the pharmaceutical company advertising, both direct to consumers and physicians, the studies of cholesterol lowering medications effect on heart disease in people without documented coronary artery disease already is absent. Thus, we are poisoning a lot of people’s livers without helping their hearts.

    Claritin, the antihistamine drug approved by the FAA because it is not sedating, is an example of a drug which does not work because it is under dosed. The effective dose of Claritin is four times the standard tablet dose but the manufacturer did not want to test that dose because it is sedating at the higher, actual working level. Thus, they made a fortune on a drug (now non prescription with generics available) that was non-sedating and did not work very well. You might as well be taking M&Ms every morning.

    A place where a lot of people (and many pilots) get into trouble is with prescription pain medications. Many of the new medications such as Oxycotin do not work any better than generic narcotics, but because of their formulation, are much more addicting. It really breaks my heart when a professional pilot loses his medical due to narcotic abuse that was precipitated by a physician prescribing these new, expensive, and highly addictive narcotics. A truly despicable example is Tramadol which is a semi synthetic narcotic which was promoted as non addiction by its manufacturer. Unfortunately, after the drug was introduced, independent studies showed Tramadol was more addicting than non synthetic narcotics!

    The Center for Medical Consumers ( http://medicalconsumers.org/ ) and Evidence
Based Drug Therapy ( http://www.ti.ubc.ca/ ) are good sites for unbiased information about drugs. Unfortunately, the FDA ( fda.gov), is hard to navigate and the most important data is very, very hard (or impossible) to find. That important information is the results of 18 months and/or 10,000 patient uses of drugs and the summary of adverse drug events reported by consumers and physicians (which is under reported).

    What about “ask your doctor” which is promoted by the direct to consumer (DTC) advertisements that you are bombarded with on TV, magazines, and newspapers? (I enjoy seeing these advertisements and thinking “I am doctor and I do not have a clue what that medicine is indicated for or what its’ side effects are!” Do not ask me, I do not know!) The first problem is the DTC advertisements have miss information and omissions that the FDA has monitored at levels as high 65% of the time. The second problem is that most physicians get their new drug information from drug representatives (actually, they are salesman) which drop sample off at their office. These folks are there to sell drugs, not to provide totally impartial information.

    The next source of information for your doctor is from continuing medical education (CME) courses. Unfortunately, CME courses have been hijacked by the pharmaceutical industry by providing physician speakers who are paid handsomely for their promotion of the industry’s drugs. (If you want to see if your physician is a pharma hired gun, check them out at ProPublica
( http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/ ).

    I frequently tell patients “Stay away from doctors, they just make you sick.” There is truth in jest, especially when drugs and profit are involved. Maybe the FAA is smarter than we thought!