Read this disclaimer first!!
Thursday, Mar. 27, 2003 - 6:26 p.m.
Drug Pushers

I have received more details on how incompetent my doctors were.

After speaking with Suj, he guessed that reason that the referring doctor didn't recommend an HP test was because he was a) incompetent, or b) not up to date on things. Isn't b) another way to describe medical incompetency? I could be wrong. It really must be hard to keep up to date on everything.

I started my treatment Tuesday. Since then my ulcer has bothered me, like really bothered me three times. THREE TIMES. Randomly, too. The pain would start slowly, then very quickly pick up pace as the food passed it. As soon as it was all in the stomach, the pain was over. It is different from before, where the pain and discomfort often stayed there until I actively did something about it, like puke. Suj said that that was because they inflamed the ulcer even further when they were fucking it with the scope. Fucking brilliant move. At least I'll get over that soon enough, or so he says.

The bastard prescribed Pantoloc. $76 a pop (30 days) and I am on it for 60 days. He could have prescribed Losec for half the price and the same effectiveness.

But that isn't entirely his fault. Solvay Pharma, the makers of Pantoloc (I think), push for this by flooding the market with the "latest and greatest" new drug and ensuring higher prices. Medical associations get paid off causing the medical community to establish it as the drug of choice for ulcers, and it takes a pretty ballsy doctor to prescribe something else. I guess my specialist has the balls of a girl.

As it turns out, though, my inside sources tell me that Pantoloc's patent is running out. It's going generic in a couple of months; that is, anyone will be able to sell it. Solvay Pharma, not to be outdone by the market, launches Nexium (again, I'm not sure it's them, it could be AstraZeneca; in any case the same company that made Pantoloc). Nexium is the chemical mirror image, or enantiomer, of Pantoloc. In other words, it's the same damn thing. And no, the effects are the same between both isomers, unlike with thalidomide. Nexium will soon push out Pantoloc as the drug of choice, and the doctors won't know any better, because they don't have time and are not in the business of keeping track of the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, there is very little chemical or practical difference between Losec and Pantoloc. But the cost? Double.

This is nothing compared to Pfizer, though. Around 1998, they developed a meningitis treatment called Trovan, but they had nowhere to test it. Luckily for them there was an outbreak of it...in Nigeria.

Pfizer divided the victims into two groups: one group as to receive full strength Trovan; the other group was to receive the standard effective and accepted treatment. The problem? They only administered a fraction of the standard treatment in order for results of Trovan to look good. The result was that 11 Nigerian children died, hundreds of Nigerians suffered brain damage and 8 Nigerian families are suing.

To this day, Trovan has not been approved for use in children in the U.S., and can only be used in adults if there is no other treatment that works.

A few (what, 5?) American soldiers were killed this week in a war, and people are very upset over it. Well, you can bet that if they killed 11 American kids, there'd be very little left of Pfizer today.

No one at Pfizer is going to jail. No one is taking responsibility. The very fact that they are fighting this lawsuit is offensive. These aren't simply allegations. People KNOW that this is true. Oh, I forgot to mention: Pfizer never told anyone in Nigeria that about a mile away there was full-strength standard treatment available. For free.

You have to wonder why it is okay for them to get away with this, but why I would serve seven life sentences (or die) for shooting Jean Chr�tien and making off with the contents of his wallet. Or, to make a better comparison, why the Suret� de Quebec was so damn proud of themselves for nabbing "Mom" Boucher when this sort of shit happens all the time. I think perhaps this guy had the right idea.

2 scrawls at the end of this hall

The look: duped
The feel: angry
The taste: rotten
________________________