Will I Need A Prescription For These Sugar Pills?
September 28, 2009 by JD
Filed under Health Care, News
Big Pharma is worried. Have you noticed that there are substantially fewer new drugs that are making it through pharmaceutical testing and being released to the consumer market? Especially in the mood treatment arena where Prozac and Valium have ruled for years.
Want to know one reason why?
Because evidently, sugar pills are as just as effective at curing us as many of comprehensively researched, painstakingly designed, and massively marketed medicinal cocktails being developed by companies like Merck and Smith-Glaxo. And it’s not that the new drugs don’t work. You don’t spend all those dollars on research and development unless you are pretty sure the drug will do what it’s supposed to do. The key to getting it to market is to ensure a minimum of overly dangerous side effects.
So the new drugs are typically effective in bestowing the medicinal benefits intended. It’s just that, during the clinical testing trials of these new drugs, the placebos are proving to work just as well at providing those same benefits.
New drug comes up for trial testing. A group of test subjects is selected. Some percentage of those subjects are given the real drug, while another group is given sugar pills that look like the real drug. Neither group knows whether they are getting the real thing or not.
Many of these tests are now showing that the group taking the placebo experiences an inordinately high number of member individuals who show the same benefits as those in the other group taking the real drug. In other words, in these cases, people even thinking they might be taking the real drug somehow fool their body into producing the same effects as they would expect if they really were taking the drug.
It’s really hurting the pharmaceutical industry because the FDA will not approve any drug where the placebo effect during testing distorts the true intended benefits of the drug.
As a result of this phenomena, scientists are beginning to discover that the power of the human brain can be a far stronger healing agent than Big Pharma’s black bag of pills, powders, and potions.
There’s a great article in last month’s Wired Magazine that gets into far more detail. You can read the online version here.
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