The Truth About Rx Drugs (a practical how-to)

The current coronavirus situation has brought up the reality much more clearly to me that the average person does not know how to sift through scientific jargon or data. Believe me, I have trouble myself. So I’m going to show you some important things I’ve learned that are practical for everyone to know in dealing with their own Rx drugs.

If you believe in maximizing your own health and taking full responsibility for it, then this article is for you.

Because of direct marketing to consumers (since 1983 in the US) and the way big pharma frames what they do as ‘science’ (instead of manufacturing/commercialism), many people are left with the impression that big pharma is where the real medicine is, and by default assume natural medicine either doesn’t really work or is weak by comparison. Whether or not you take Rx drugs you need to know how to read a package insert because sooner or later you’ll need to be able to help someone you know.

What is a package insert? It is the formal statement of the studies that got that drug approved that is supposed to come with every package of the drug.

It is printed on thin paper folded up like a tiny white map and neatly pressed like a U into the box. You can find the digital version online by doing a web search with the term “prozac pdf” (or the name of whatever drug you’re looking for). When you get a prescription most often a substitute with a brief summary of most common side effects is given instead. That is not adequate.

Here is what I recommend …

1. Read the full list of adverse effects of the Rx

First — the black box warning. Black box warnings were first implemented in 1979[1] for drugs with more drastic, potentially dangerous side effects. They have become more common during the 2000s and have been placed and more and more medications that were rushed through to approval or were not as well studied or understood as they should have been before approval. You should always pay close attention this kind of warning and consider an alternative Rx that doesn’t have one and has been shown less drastic in its ‘adverse events.’

Prozac has a black box warning because it played a part in the popularization of the term “going postal” after a man who’d been on Prozac committed murder-suicide at his work place in 1989 and many, many other incidents of violence were committed by persons taking it, resulting in studies showing Prozac takers were nearly 11 times more likely to commit acts of violence than those taking other medications. The FDA opts to place a black box warning on the Rx packaging rather than take it off the market. Prozac’s black box warning is woefully inadequate as it should warn people about the increased propensity to violence.

Prozac – Adverse Reactions section: The listed symptoms or conditions are a pretty good indication of when you’ve been dosing too high. The idea is that if a drug is good enough to take it will be effective at levels that do not induce bad side effects.

Side effects are linked to dosage levels. I strongly recommend you be skeptical about the standard dosage levels set for most medications. Standard doses are set in studies for the purpose of totally eliminating the symptoms of conditions within the study timeline parameters, but could still be at levels high enough to be too much over time. These dosage levels are also responsible for the side effects you see listed.

Have empty gel caps ready for splitting up doses into smaller, more appropriate ones for you. I had to do this with Prozac. I took Prozac for four years from about 1990-93. At that time the lowest dose of it was 20 mg and I quickly found out it was way too much for me. I began having weight gain, slowing of metabolism/digestion, and was experiencing numbness of the lower torso and gonads. So I started cutting doses in half using empty gel caps. At my next trip to the MD he argued with me that the 10 mg I’d been taking was not enough to do anything. He was wrong. I knew my body and trusted it. I did not give an inch. I was 90 lbs at the time, sized like an adolescent. He tried to tell me body mass has nothing to do with dosing. He was dead wrong. A few years later (after many people on Prozac went “postal”) Eli-Lilly started making 10 mg puvule doses of Prozac (especially for pediatrics and adult anxiety/panic disorders).

2. Now for something even your pharmacist probably won’t tell you about — the dishonesty contained in study group stats

The study group are the individuals who get the drug being studied for approval. The ‘placebo’ group are those who get something without any sort of active medicinal ingredient — like a sugar pill.

First, what is a placebo? It is not a ‘sugar pill.’ We must understand placebo effect as a quality of the human mind — suggestibility and desire to improve — that is able to subconsciously instruct changes in mood or health. So placebo is the ability of the human being to improve based on suggestion or belief: part of our capacity for healing or at least improvement of health.

It is very important to understand why a placebo group must be included in every study for it to be considered a fully controlled study of any proposed Rx medication. It is to establish the number/percentage of placebo subjects who get improvement so that this baseline placebo effect is accounted for in the study group by subtraction from study group improvement. Unfortunately that bit of math is never done. Let’s do it with the head-to-head stats for Prozac study in the ‘very much improved’ category as highlighted below:

The placebo group showed 3% who were ‘very much improved’. That amount should be subtracted from the percentages for those getting Prozac:
– Those getting 20 mg Prozac: 8% – 3% = 5%.
– 40 mg people: 12% – 3% = 9%.
– 60 mg people: 19% – 3% = 16%.
That’s not a big placebo ‘very improved’ percentage, but I can tell you the original studies from the late 1980s on this drug showed much less statistical improvement. And that brings up the even deeper reality of Rx drugs and big pharma: they will redo studies until they get the results they want, keep massaging the data until they get the numbers they want. FDA rarely does anything to stop them.

It is a shell game of information more akin to propaganda than pure science.

In any case, that is how to get a more honest reading of a package insert and better understanding of what to expect or what your Rx may be doing to you. There are other issues with Rx drug studies (like the way they often benefit from survivorship bias), but I’ll leave it at that for now.

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[1] https://www.pharmacytimes.com/contributor/timothy-o-shea/2016/03/10-black-box-warnings-every-pharmacist-should-know