“Prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death” Dr Peter C. Gøtzsche, M.D.

“Most patients will derive no health improvement from medication. We should tackle the root causes of disease instead.” Dr. Aseem Malhotra, M.D.

Prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death, and most patients derive no health benefit from these killer drugs. And many people will be misdiagnosed by physicians, then given a drug that they don’t need. An estimated 371,000 people die every year following a misdiagnosis, and 424,000 are permanently disabled. Therefore, a total of 800,000 people suffer serious harm from misdiagnosis. According to the study’s lead author, Dr. David Newman-Toker, MD, PhD, “We focused here on the serious harms, but the number of diagnostic errors that happen out there in the U.S. each year is probably somewhere on the order of magnitude of 50 to 100 million. That’s potentially 100 million people a year being misdiagnosed and then given inappropriate, harmful drugs. All drugs have side effects, and if the drug your given is unnecessary with no benefit, all you receive are the side effects. SSRI drugs are a case in point. Quoting from Danborg et al (2019), “Millions of people are treated with antidepressants like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs). This clinical practice is based on short-term trials that have exaggerated the benefits and underestimated the harms. We also know too little about long-term harms.”

Further, “There are many problems with placebo controlled trials of antidepressants. The trials are of short duration, a median of only 9 weeks; withdrawal effects are almost always introduced in the placebo group because the patients were already in treatment before they were randomised; lack of effective blinding; attrition; and selective reporting of major harms. Published papers have therefore exaggerated the benefits and underestimated the harms. Despite these difficulties, we do know that short term use of antidepressants can cause irritability, anxiety and panic, emotional flattening, dyskinesias, sexual impairment and also suicidality and aggression, even in healthy adult volunteers. In observational studies, antidepressants have been linked to increased risk of dementia; they may induce depressogenic effects; and the prevalence of treatment-resistant depression appears to be increasing. Antidepressants have stimulant effects and rather than acknowledging this drug harm, it has led to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder in about 10% of children aged 10–14 years under the care of mental health services, which is a far worse disease than depression and is often treated with antipsychotics. Similar results have been reported for adults. Despite the fact that we base our clinical practice on short-term trials, many patients continue on the drugs for years. A major reason for this is that they have difficulty coming off the drugs again because of withdrawal effects, which for SSRIs are very similar to those the patients experience when they try to stop benzodiazepines.” Many physicians, in a conflict of interest, foisted these nasty drugs on society.

When we look for root cause of disease, what do we find? Most diseases are caused by our exposome, including environmental factors. I was sickened to see a recent NY Times article entitled, “Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine.” Such an uninformed article results from “The Medicalization of America.” While most diseases are not because of hereditary genetics, the Times article starts with lauding a methodology called CRISPR for gene editing, stating that CRISPR is “opening up what seemed like an almost limitless horizon for Crispr-powered therapies and cures.” This is looking for diseases in all the wrong places – namely the genome.

In reading Dr. Rapapport’s (professor at Berkeley) work, we learn that most genome-wide-association studies (GWAS) have not detected large effects of common genetic variants on disease incidence. The small effect sizes identified from single nucleotide polymorphisms detected by GWAS are consistent with studies of monozygotic twins that point to contributions of entire genotypes toward cancer and cardiovascular disease of 8% and 22%, respectively. Thus, in weighing the relative influences of heritable genetics and environmental exposures on chronic diseases, the modest effects of heritable genetics suggest that exposures and/or gene–environment interactions (G × E) are major causal factors. Indeed, about half of the 50 million global deaths in 2010 were attributed to 18 environmental exposures, led by tobacco smoking, particulate air pollution and indoor smoke, high plasma sodium, and alcohol use. The clear implication is that epidemiologists seeking unknown causes of chronic diseases should employ a balanced strategy that characterizes both heritable genetics and exposures at high resolution. However, because the human genome project mistakenly focused exclusively on the genome, it did not motivate the discovery of causal exposures. Indeed, etiological research still focuses on only a few hundred chemicals or mixtures that are quantified by combinations of questionnaires, deterministic models and some measurements. By continuing to explore such a small universe of exposures, we limit our chances to discover unknown causes of disease.

What does this mean? Most diseases are from exposures to chemicals and are therefore preventable. A big component of your exposome is your diet, including what you eat and drink. What you breathe is another huge factor. And because most diseases are not genetic, gene therapy is not the solution. If you want to be healthy, pharma’s drugs and physician’s procedures won’t do it for you. Lifestyle changes will. Remember, most people don’t receive benefit from drugs. They do receive benefit from what they eat and drink.