3. The pills we take

A recent AIMP seminar disclosed some sensational data: up to 60 percent of pills that we swallow are utterly ineffective. Furthermore, drugs manufacturers invent nonexistent diseases in order to maintain their profits.

Nearly half of Moscow residents use nootropil to stimulate their brain function: with the current hectic rhythm of life the little gray cells need additional support. All of my friends are quite happy with this stimulation, as their brains are now working much better. But! As it happens, it is not nootropil that does the trick but my friends’ suggestibility. At least, Professor Pavel Vorobyov, MD, head of the Hematology and Geriatrics Department at the Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy and chief of the Standardization Laboratory at the Institute of Health Management, argues: ‘Nootropes – extracts from cattle blood – have no effect whatsoever. Also ineffective are numerous ointments – e.g., the Una cream and others – that are offered by drug manufacturers in abundance. Last year, the Una cream became the subject of special research, which showed that it had zero effect.’

The situation with vitamins is even worse. Pavel Vorobyov has credible evidence suggesting that 60 percent of vitamins on the market are ineffective. Their producers without a twinge of conscience cash in on our desire to keep up with the civilized world in pursuit of a healthy lifestyle. Not even doctors know how to keep within the lucky 40 percent: they are themselves being duped. Recently a series of scandals exposed the practice of “independent experts” writing articles in influential medical journals about the miraculous properties of particular drugs, commissioned by the manufacturers of the drugs themselves. In return of appropriate remuneration of course. The humiliated journals are now desperately looking for a fool-proof method of avoiding skewed assessments of new drugs in the future. Meanwhile doctors advise people not to succumb to the latest craze and use vitamins in natural form - fresh fruit and vegetables.

There has also been a lot of speculation around the methods of treating impotence, prostatitis and chlamydiosis. This threesome brings fantastic profits to unscrupulous manufacturers. Finding a really effective drug is like playing the roulette.

Professor Vorobyov points out that there is a plethora of unnecessary drugs on the market today: e.g., appetite stimulators, weight reduction and brain stimulating formulas and importance pills. Vorobyov classifies cold and acute viral infection pills as unnecessary as well. I have often seen from my own experience that neither vaccination nor prophylactic pills can really ward off the flu. As they say, it takes a week to get over the flu without medication and seven days with intensive therapy.

Over the past 10 to 15 years pharmaceutical giants have felt rather depressed. They have tapped the market to the full and now there seems to be no more growth potential for them. True, there are still a dozen or so diseases that humankind, try as it might, has been unable to find a cure for. After long consideration, manufacturers came to a “wise” conclusion: to get on they need to invent new diseases. And they have been successfully translating this new business development strategy into reality.

“It is not clear if such a disorder as the chronic fatigue syndrome really exists. There are many question marks over human infection with the mad cow disease, slow viruses and the viral theory of cancer. The impression is that everything has been turned upside down: first a drug is created and then a disease is invented to match. It is an absurdity which has become the norm and an effective marketing policy,” Professor Vorobyov says.

You invest a couple of million dollars in molding public opinion around some new scourge of humanity and create a big stir around anew wonder pill, and you walk away with one billion.

Furthermore manufacturers are past masters at foisting life-threatening drugs on us. It takes truly outstanding salesmanship to sell in the name of health something that actually ruins it. According to Yuri Belousov, head of the Clinical Pharmacology Department at Russian State Medical University, ineffective and obsolete medications are used in 21 percent of cases. In other words, one pill in five that we swallow can kill. It has been proved by numerous lethal outcomes that analgin and its derivatives in particular, the much hyped pentalgin, as well as barbiturates are a real curse. It is an open secret to specialists that 50 percent of cough and cold remedies contain dangerous ingredients while one-third of non-steroid antiphlogistic drugs are highly toxic substances. In the whole of the civilized world the use of these “medications” has long been forbidden.

Russia is unable to do the same: virtually none of the domestic manufacturers can produce safe painkillers, inflammation of cough drugs. Should the state really show concern for the health of its citizens, the pharmaceutical industry will go belly up. That would mean a fall in tax revenues. If they cannot bring themselves to renounce these deadly profits, at least they should write on packages of analgin and other trash: “Health Ministry warning: this drug is dangerous to your health.”