Is the growth of the pharmaceutical industry making us sicker?

By Dr. Ronald Hoffman

Members of the natural health movement (myself included) have long argued that despite acknowledged medical advances, today’s proliferation of pharmaceutical drugs threatens to undermine, rather than promote, the health of our populace. We’re often branded as Luddites, ignorant skeptics, even quacks.

So, this month, I was blown away by a scholarly article that seems precisely to support our assertion!

Entitled “Does Medical Expansion Improve Population Health?”, it was published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Its authors, Hui Zheng and Linda K. George, are mainstream researchers, not known as firebrands of the integrative health community.

In their sober, academic prose they declare: “This is the first study to examine the relationship between multiple measures of socioeconomic development and medical expansion and multiple measures of mortality/longevity, using data from a sizable number of countries . . .”

The key question they address is whether or not the soaring medicalization of advanced nations has brought with it improvements in established metrics of health for their citizens.

“The Western world has observed skyrocketing healthcare costs, explosive growth in the number of hospitals and health facilities, a burgeoning and increasingly specialized medical workforce, expansion of the pharmaceutical industry, and the extension of medical treatments to non-medical problems.”

To cite but a few examples, think age-related bone loss (osteopenia), “overactive bladder” (OAB), shyness (now called “social phobia”), menopause, and erectile dysfunction (ED)—all amenable to heavily-marketed new drugs.

Zheng and George point out that it’s been argued that medical expenditures do not necessarily guarantee better outcomes. The U.S. is a case in point.

The question: Why does an over-sized pharmaceutical industry have detrimental effects on population health?