Are we sick from too much medication?
We suffer from an obsession with health that does not benefit it. According to the OECD, Spaniards are among those who go to the doctor the most – six visits per year per inhabitant – without need.
Are analytics getting stricter every day?
A clear case is that of cholesterol: the cholesterol threshold that is considered to require medication is increasingly lower.
The famous statins so widely dispensed?
Statins are prescribed here as if they were candy, but their side effects are not negligible: from muscle pain to diabetes... And right now a million Catalans are taking them: do they need them?
Does this hypermedication also cost us a fortune in taxes?
The more medications does not necessarily mean more health, but it does necessarily mean more health spending...
How much do we spend on medication?
Too much. Doctors in our public health system can prescribe up to 16,000 pharmaceutical specialties: who can handle so much information?
Maybe they are redundant?
Well, let's look only at the active ingredients and not at all the brands on sale: there are 3,000 ingredients marketed in Spain, and I have been dedicating myself to pharmacology for 40 years and I only know about 30 well.
Isn't this medicinal exuberance due to very unhealthy interests?
A health system in which a doctor can prescribe 16,000 medications is programmed so that they are not prescribed well.
How many would really be needed?
The Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine, to give you an idea, publishes a therapeutic guide that includes only four hundred and a few medications. And it is a guide that addresses absolutely all of our health problems.
Are we only overmedicating here?
In Sweden, of all health spending, only 10% is on medicines, the rest is for medical care and supervision; In Great Britain, they only spend 14% of that health expenditure on medicines. Here we reach 26%.
¿What about ganamos la farma eurocup?
We are the first in Europe in pharmacological consumption.
What is the secret of our failure?
Almost all medical visits end with a prescription for a medication and too many are from healthy people who come to the doctor for tests with too strict cholesterol criteria; or osteoporosis in women after menopause; or children who are diagnosed with ADHD...
Isn't prevention better than cure?
The thing is that most of these problems are not health problems: we are providing medical and pharmaceutical solutions to social problems.
Where do you detect this error?
The poorest quintile of Catalans takes seven times more antidepressants than the richest; women, more than twice as many as men; those over 65 years of age, seven times more than those under 65; The unemployed, four more than the employed, and those who do not have secure housing, take six times more than the rest.
Would that expense invested in housing cure more citizens than in pills?
It would be healthier for everyone, but the health system puts patches on a social malaise and the medicalized state turns it into a diagnosable and medicatable disease...
From which any pharmaceutical benefits?
Look at the new classification of psychiatric diseases from 2015: it says that sadness, 15 days after the death of a loved one, is pathological and that you should prescribe antidepressants, when in the previous classification from 2008 that period was three months.
Isn't the doctor there to help, after all?
Doctors should know more biochemistry and not believe that all discomfort is curable with a prescription. Let's learn to talk to people and, from there, get something more than a diagnostic label. There are many depressed women who are actually abused.
Who benefits from hypermedication?
The research that is done is what interests those who pay for it. And the main promoters of medical research in the world are pharmaceutical companies and medical publications.
And the punctures to lose weight?
Semaglutide? The European Medicines Agency has approved it while considering overweight a body mass index (weight divided by height in meters squared) of 30 or more...
Do you believe that 30 is not obesity?
The systematic meta-analysis of clinical studies indicates that those with a BMI between 25 and 30 live longer; Those of us between 20 and 25 live 9% less, and those between 30 and 35 live the same as those between 20 and 25. It is after 35 that they do suffer from obesity. Why is the BMI of obesity lowered while new drugs for overweight are approved?
