Prescription drugs are drugs that healthcare providers prescribe to their patients to ease their suffering, treat an illness or provide a cure for a disease. That much is understood; however, problems begin when one looks a bit deeper and sees that prescription drugs are created by the pharmaceutical industry, an industry which notoriously commits fraud, uses flawed studies to manipulate doctors, often times bribing doctors into using their products as well as pricing potentially life-saving medications too high. In this blog, we will be going over books that expose malpractice prescription drugs.
Before answering this question, one needs to understand the scale and size of the pharmaceutical industry within the United States of America. The industry is filled to the brim with individuals who are trying to maximize their own profit margins with very little regard for anything else. The pharmaceutical industry in the US is a $574.37 billion industry, and as a result, there is a great deal of money invested. Investors care the most about revenue, and this incentivizes these corporations to push for flawed studies and potentially dangerous drugs, and the industry is single-handedly responsible for the opioid crisis in the US due to them pushing dangerous and addictive opioid painkillers in the early 2000s. Malpractice of prescription drugs refers to the above and can be summarized as pushing dangerous drugs, conducting flawed studies and bribing doctors to push their dangerous medications.
1. Vanilla Ice Cream‚ Strawberry Smoothies‚ and Lots of Drugs By Richard Caits
This book is the story of a man whose mother was hospitalized due to a workplace incident. The book shows his journey as he tries to take care of her while being stuck in a complex and tumultuous healthcare system. The book is filled with bits of hope, friendship, and people trying to do the right thing for the ones they care about.
2. The Risks of Prescription Drugs By Donald W. Light
Prescription drugs have recently become the leading cause of many of the problems that people are starting to have. Examples of such are psychotropics, birth control pills, as well as biologicals.
3. The HPV Vaccine On Trial: Seeking Justice for a Generation Betrayed By Mary Holland
This book looks into how a generation of people were negatively affected by the HPV vaccine, a drug which many pharmaceutical companies sought to push as a game changer while ignoring many of the harmful side effects and potential deaths.
4. Culture of Death: The Age of Do Harm Medicine By Wesley J. Smith
This is a book that goes into great detail about how, in recent years, many doctors have withdrawn from the Hippocratic oath and have created a culture which looks into who might be worthy of given medical treatment or not. The book essentially critiques the modern bioethics movement.
5. Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis By James Davies
This book looks into the malpractice of prescription drugs, specifically in psychiatry. The book states that many doctors, often backed by pharmaceutical companies, prescribe psychiatric medication on the basis of the fact that people who are depressed and unhappy are the way they are due to their minds and not the fact that wider socioeconomic issues are making them unhappy.
6. Lies My Doctor Told Me: Medical Myths That Can Harm Your Health By Ken D. Barry
This book looks into the fact that many doctors themselves are deeply misinformed about modern medical research as medical research is expanding at a very fast rate. This leads to them perpetuating medical myths about their patients, and these myths can be harmful, as the book shows.
7. Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health By H. Gilbert Welch
This book states that many people in the United States of America are overdiagnosed and that they actually need far less diagnosis. This is due to the idea that early aggressive prevention is better than cure, a belief that has led to people being put on medications that make them more sick.
8. How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America By Otis Webb Brawley
This book looks into the biggest problems of the healthcare industry, namely the overtreatment of financially wealthier people and the undertreatment of the destitute and the poor. Amongst other problems, insurance companies don’t demand the best healthcare and often go for the least expensive options for their customers.
9. Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It By John Abramson
This book looks into how big pharma effectively ruined healthcare in the US by corrupting medical knowledge, misleading doctors, and withholding data from medical trials as corporate secrets. This leads to a serious problem of malpractice prescription drugs being given to people who are at their most vulnerable.
10. Surviving Your Doctors: Why the Medical System is Dangerous to Your Health and How to Get Through it Alive Richard S. Klein
This book tries to serve as a guide to patients seeking healthcare and explains how to navigate the complex world of the healthcare system within the US.
The books provided above are among the best-written and most informative and detailed ones on the subject of malpractice prescription drugs in the United States. The issue is quite complex, and there are a myriad of factors that have led to it becoming so widespread, but hopefully, the books above help paint a clearer picture.