Healing the healing industry

The older I get, the more skeptical I get about conventional medicine and the more convinced I am that the Chinese and the herbalists are probably onto something. This creates a dilemma, because I earn a living developing data entry systems used in clinical trials, but since I'm one of those people who goes right to the side effects section when prescribed a medication, I'm always leery of the latest miracle drug.

I have a fairly sizable amount of weight to lose, and there was a time when doctors would have prescribed fen-phen, until that drug proved to damage the heart far more than mere obesity did. And certainly the pharmaceutical industry hasn't exactly had a great run of late, what with NSAIDs being yanked from the market and other drugs leaving the scene before they can hit the market.

The latest casualty is Pfizer's Torcetrapib, for which Phase 3 trials were suspended in December "due to an increased rate of mortality (death) in patients receiving the combination compared to those receiving atorvastatin alone." The failure of Torcetrapib, which was "revolutionary" because of its function of raising HDL, the so-called "good" cholesterol, which clears LDL, the "bad" cholesterol from the blood; affects not just Pfizer shareholders, but also those who work at Pfizer. Because partially as a result of the failure of this drug, Pfizer is cutting 10,000 jobs and closing five research sites.

There has long been an unspoken war between the pharmaceutical industry and the producers of nonpatented substances such as nutritionals. There's a resistance to research into the healing effects of these non-patented materials because the profit motive just isn't there. Last week we saw researchers at the University of Alberta announce that "the molecule known as DCA was shown to shrink lung, breast and brain tumours in both animal and human tissue experiments." If, and it's still an if, DCE, or dichloroacetate, is as effective as these researchers believe, then further research is indicated. But where is this research going to take place? Pfizer budgeted $800 million for the Torcetrapib/Atorvastatin trials. This kind of money for failed trials is the reason pharmaceutical companies give for high drug prices -- because of the cost of research, the end result of which is unknown.

Pfizer just blew $800 million on a failed Phase 3 trial, and now thousands of people are going to lose their jobs. There has to be a better way to get safe, effective medications to market, and there has to be a better way to keep people healthy than to blow money on developing drugs when there are substances most people either have in their kitchens, or can easily obtain, that warrant further studies. Cranberry juice has been shown in some studies to raise HDL. Moderate consumption of nuts can raise HDL and lower LDL. Cinnamon can help reduce triglycerides. But we're not going to see a whole lot of funded research into these, because the profit motive just isn't there.

It's highly unlikely that drug development is going to be taken out of the for-profit model, so therefore the government needs to start funding research as a public works project. But when the Bush Administration has actually CUT cancer research funding, we can hardly expect them to fund research into anything else, especially into substances that don't stand to make profit for the pharmaceutical industry.

I believe that many people now popping statins and hoping for even better cholesterol drugs would be perfectly willing to instead drink a glass of cranberry juice or pop a cranberry concentrate tablet; to sprinkle some cinnamon into their oatmeal; to have a handful of almonds as a snack instead of a candy bar -- if they knew definitively that they would see the kind of results they now see from prescriptions that cost them hundreds of dollars a year.