Swindled

You've been swindled. At least that's the conclusion I've come to. It wasn't the hucksters or the snake oil salesman. It wasn't big business, big medicine, or some greedy hospital administrator. It was most likely pharma with a large dose of helping from your doctor. Plain and simple.I've learned quite a bit being a hospice medical director. Covering dozens of new admissions a week has given me much insight into doctor prescribing habits. Often it is my job to decide with meds are necessary and covered by hospice, which are necessary but not covered by hospice, and which are useless.Do you have any idea how many useless and often harmful meds our patients are on? I'm not just talking about end of life, but healthy patients to.Can we talk multivitamins? Almost every patient I encounter is prescribed a multivitamin. Healthy, unhealthy, living, dying. When your in the grasps of stage five thousand and one lung cancer and your brain is riddled with mets, you have no business being on a multi. It's not going to help you. It's not going to provide that last bit of energy to overcome the calamitous collapse that is approaching rapidly. In fact, there is plenty of data to suggest multivitamins are harmful if not neutral at best. Even in healthy people.How about Vitamin D? I swear to g-d, every patient I encounter is on some sort of D supplement. Never mind that the vast majority of medical evidence implie...
Source: In My Humble Opinion - Category: Primary Care Authors: Source Type: blogs