--> Super prescription #7 Ginkgo biloba
Take 60 to 120 mg twice daily of a standardized product containing 24 percent flavone glycosides and 6 percent terpene lactones.
This popular herb improves circulation, has potent antioxidant properties, improves memory, and reduces one's tendency to get blood clots.
General Recommendations
Enzymes aid in the digestion of food and are essential for all the metabolic activity in the body. Take 1 to 2 capsules with each meal.
Cordyceps sinensis is a revered fungus used in Chinese medicine as a supplement to combat fatigue and the aging process. |
| Super prescription #7 Probiotic
Take a product containing 4 billion active organisms, twice daily, thirty minutes after a meal. It supplies friendly bacteria such as Lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidus, which fight fungus and prevent its overgrowth.
General Recommendations
Calendula (Calendula officinalis) tincture or gel can be applied to the affected area in-between treatments of tea tree (Melaleuca alternifolia) oil. This herb has an antiseptic effect and promotes skin healing.
Thuja (Thuja occidentalis) oil has potent antifungal effects. Apply 2 drops to the affected area twice daily. |
 But I would never take a prescription drug long term. And it is long term use that the pharmaceutical industry is promoting to the general public. They want everyone in the world to take prescription drugs every day for the rest of their lives. Statin drugs certainly fall into that category. One of the primary marketing messages about statin drugs is that you need them to reduce your cholesterol level and bring it into a healthy range. But you don't need statin drugs in order to achieve a healthy level of cholesterol, as has been demonstrated right here. |
 REPPED: Mike: We're here with Carol Simontacchi, author of "The Crazy Makers" and a new book entitled, "Natural Alternatives to Vioxx, Celebrex and other Anti-Inflammatory prescription Drugs." Thanks for sitting down with us for a few minutes, Carol.
Simontacchi: Thank you. It's a pleasure.
Mike: What gave you the motivation to write this book? Why do you think it's important for people to read?
Simontacchi: Well, over my professional lifetime, I have developed a huge amount of skepticism about the pharmaceutical industry. |
 Nobody, to my knowledge, has done any research on this particular statistic when it comes to prescription drugs. If such research were conducted, I wouldn't be surprised to find that taking certain drugs greatly impairs a person's ability to operate a vehicle safely.
So what can we do about it? The problem is that such a large percentage of the U.S. population is doped up on these drugs that you couldn't ban them from driving because you would have tens of millions of people who would have to start using public transportation. |
 Ray Strand, author of Death By prescription. His websites are raystrand.com and releasingfat.com. Do you have an email newsletter on that site that people can subscribe to?
Dr. Strand: Yes, I do. I have an email newsletter that comes out monthly, and it's about various subjects. People can go to releasingfat.com and sign up for my free newsletter. It's there, and it's available. I have raystrand.com, where they can see my nutritional recommendations, and that is more of a membership webpage. Plus, it has some basic information. |
| You have to have a pharmacist who is going to fill that prescription, and then the patient takes it and must take it properly. So this chain of events is always occurring. The problem that most people have is that they just trust the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, the doctor and the pharmacist, and they just have that blind faith, which I try to point out in the book. As I go through the first part of the book, you can’t read without starting to realize what the truth is. |
| Mike: So I would encourage readers to just check out the first 20 pages of Death by prescription. I don't think they will ever look at their medicine cabinets the same way again.
Dr. Strand: That’s true, you know. I always use one thing that really points out the fact, which is that, once the FDA approves the medication or a drug for use by the general public, they know less than half of the serious adverse drug reactions when that drug is released. It is just impossible to know them all. Well, they find out, and the next question should be, "How do they find out the others? |
| Strand: When I did the research for the book, it was really interesting to find out that various studies show that between 70 to 90 percent of the time when a patient comes in to the doctor and asks for a specific drug that he saw on a commercial or in an advertisement, he walks out with a prescription for that very drug. So the drug companies know that it is effective, and it doesn’t really shine a great light on physicians and their prescribing habits.
Mike: Do you see this as well in your practice? Do you see patients coming in and asking, or even demanding, a drug they have seen on TV? |
| We are starting to see about six or seven types of causes of death in the country, outside of prescription medication, which are really closely tied to our lifestyle. People need to know that heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, stroke -- I mean the list goes on and on -- are really closely related and can be prevented by a healthier lifestyle. So I have really changed my practice to be more involved in wellness and health -- a part of which is teaching people healthy lifestyles. That’s where I have gone in the last ten years.
Mike: What a fascinating journey. |
| But I am sorry to say that I think most physicians just give this recommendation lip service, while, in actuality, they write the prescription. That’s what is happening. It is partly demand by the people and the patients, but it is also due to our training, and being inundated by the pharmaceutical reps that come into our office promoting their products.
Mike: I have heard a statistic that says the pharmaceutical companies spend an average of $10,000 per year, per physician just marketing to the physicians in the United Stated.
Dr. |
 OTC) drugs work, and how they can reduce your body's ability to absorb, assimilate, and utilize the nutrients in your diet.
THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD OF DRUG SPECIFICITY
Over the decades since pharmaceuticals went high-tech, drugs have tended to become more and more specific—targeted to affect a single activity in the body, with as little effect as possible on other activities.
Drugs do not "correct imbalances" or nudge a malfunctioning body system back to its perfect function. (One possible exception is when hormones are given to someone who has a hormone deficiency. |
| OTC) drugs work, and how they can reduce your body's ability to absorb, assimilate, and utilize the nutrients in your diet.
THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD OF DRUG SPECIFICITY
Over the decades since pharmaceuticals went high-tech, drugs have tended to become more and more specific—targeted to affect a single activity in the body, with as little effect as possible on other activities.
Drugs do not "correct imbalances" or nudge a malfunctioning body system back to its perfect function. (One possible exception is when hormones are given to someone who has a hormone deficiency. |
 With Concerta, I see Matt. Not his ADHD," said the tagline in an ad featuring a freckle-faced, grinning kid in Parade magazine in 2005. The ad promoted the pill as an academic booster, claiming it would improve math scores by "up to one full grade." In tiny print on the next page was a long list of warnings about Concerta's dangers, including that it could "lead to dependence."
That danger of dependence had already become real for tens of thousands of young Americans. |
 But do we know the full price for today's spiraling prescription drug culture? At one level, we know something about the immediate benefits of specific drugs. Pfizer's blockbuster, Lipitor, seems consistently to lower cholesterol levels and hence reduce cardiovascular risks, although there is still relatively little evidence that it prevents premature deaths, which might be something we want to know before we routinely prescribe it for everyone over fifty — itself a serious proposal by some of the world's top cardiologists. |
| National spending on prescription drugs, mainly via the Medicare law, will cost us trillions over the next decade; closer to home, pills are becoming the defining medical issue, perhaps more important than a doctor's visit or your next CAT scan. Their cost can break a senior's retirement fund — or send him running to the border for relief, not something most of our parents ever envisioned as part of their golden years.
Lastly comes government, for with the rise of pharmaceutical financial power has come a rise in its political clout. Its main tools are money, media power, and lobbying. |
| Their peephole was the Medicare prescription Drug Act, which the industry was able to rewrite to forbid the federal government from negotiating for lower drug prices — something citizens of every other industrialized democracy (and many undeveloped ones as well) take for granted. That the congressman who shepherded the bill is now the $2-miUion-a-year president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the industry's big lobbying group, takes no one by surprise.
The new pharma money also encourages regulatory permissiveness, both here and abroad. |
| But in the process of wrestling with that issue, Hayes quietly became a convert to the notion of direct-to-consumer (DTC) prescription drug advertising. It wasn't a big stretch for him; unlike so many academics, not to mention FDA careerists, Hayes arrived unburdened by elitist opposition to advertising in general. Both his mother and father were employed in the industry — his father eventually became president of CBS Radio — and one summer young Arthur, as a student, worked in the mailroom of the ad giant McCann Erickson. |
| And while cocaine might be hip, prescription drugs were uncool on a number of levels. On the cultural plane, drug makers were the domain of the blue-chip world, with which the baby boom had yet to fall in love. The growing alternative-medicine movement, with its reliance on herbs and vitamins, appealed to a generation concerned with what was natural. The movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest rekindled old suspicions about psychiatric medications, one of the industry's most profitable monopolies. |
 Instead, we put them in prison, dose them up on drugs and blame them for their actions when I believe they've actually been instigated by the prescription drugs and toxic chemicals in their foods.
The don't need to be punished as mush as they simply need to be nourished. I know this stands at odds with the current "incarcerate everybody" mentality that dominates the culture here in the United States, the land of prisons -- but it's the truth. Why are we the country with the greatest prison population in the world? |
 They might be zoned out on prescription drugs, and when you add a cell phone to the equation, they do become a danger to the other drivers on the road. But there are individuals who are perfectly capable of talking on the cell phone or operating other non-visual electronic devices while they are driving. For example, I'm recording this article while I'm driving, and I have a perfect driving record.
I think the real test of driver safety should be determined by the reaction time of individuals, not simply noting whether they using a cell phone or other portable electronic device. |
| Another third or so are caused by people on alcohol or illegal drugs. So prescription drugs are causing just as many accidents as people doped up on cocaine, marijuana and alcohol. And occasionally there are really bad drivers -- people who are taking antidepressant drugs, smoking pot, drinking beer and trying to talk on a cell phone to hook up their next drug deal. They're an accident waiting to happen. But fortunately, that's not what you will normally see on the street.
So should cell phones be banned from the hands of drivers? |
| And in terms of real dangers to public safety, cell phones don't even come close to the dangers posed by prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs. Approximately 40% of all drivers are on at least one drug at all times, and if you include nicotine and caffeine, that number goes up to around 70%. The abuse of drugs is the root cause of the vast majority of automobile accidents. |
 The source of the 1-to-10 ranking data is prescription tracking. So-called "health information organizations" (including IMS Health, Dendrite and Verispan) purchase prescription records from pharmacies. According to the authors, IMS Health buys records of about 70 percent of prescriptions filled by community pharmacies. Pharmaceutical companies purchase the records and use them to identify high-prescribing doctors. |
 And those solutions more often than not come in the form of prescription drugs.
In contrast, people who refuse to be victims look for answers within themselves. They understand that they have the ability to alter their outcomes by making new decisions, by learning new information and by shaping their lives one day at a time, in a way that serves their long-term goals.
If Acomplia is approved, will likely be a blockbuster success regardless of whether or not it actually works. |
| REPPED: I've often wondered how many traffic accidents are caused by people who are doped up on prescription drugs. If you think about it, most traffic accidents are actually caused by people who either make poor decisions or who have terrible reaction times. And so when some crazy driver pulls out in front of them, they don't have the quick reactions to prevent the accident and they just plow right into the other vehicle. |
 This gives a whole new meaning to the term “expiration date” on prescription drugs.
What's my advice on all this? Join the Underground Railroad. Do anything and everything you can (legal, that is) to counter the monopoly power of the pharmaceutical companies. If your family member dies and leaves behind extra medications, find someone else who can benefit from the same prescriptions and give them away. If a drug company representative contacts you to try to shut you down, send their information my way. We'll go public with the whole story and turn it into national news. |
| See IMS National Sales Perspectives, Jan. 2006. Gross domestic product in 2005 in U.S. dollars for Argentina ($172.1 billion) and Peru ($72.9 billion) is from World Economic Outlook Database, Apr. 2005. Accessed from International Monetary Fund website (imf.org) in Apr. 2006. Year 2004 consumer spending figures are from U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis "Table 2.4.5U. Personal Consumption Expenditures by Type of Product." In 2004, Americans spent $227.2 billion on gasoline and other motor fuel, $200 billion on "meals at limited service eating places," $ 117. |
| And if that data show a strong correlation, prescription drugs need to carry strong warnings and physicians need to start warning patients not to drive when they consume these drugs.
Then again, most doctors and patients alike routinely ignore drug safety warnings. Come to think of it, cigarette packages quite blatantly tell people that smoking causes lung cancer, and the general population hasn't figured that one out yet, either. |
| Given some of the well-documented side effects of many prescription drugs, I'm shocked that doctors aren't warning more people to avoid driving when they are on these drugs. For example, statin drugs continue to be hyped up by drug companies as a miracle pill for high cholesterol. They are heavily promoted by drug companies who, of course, minimize the toxic side effects of these drugs and exaggerate their benefits.
One of the better-known toxic side effects of statin drugs is brain fog. It can also cause confusion, forgetfulness, and chronic muscle pain. |
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