If you listen to the radio show, or you’re a patient of mine, you know a big thing for me is helping people get off their medications. I like to say that a lot of medications are a life sentence. I mean, how many of you have gone into your doctors office and heard: “Oh, it looks like you’re cured. You don’t need such and such prescription anymore. Congratulations!”

It almost never happens. Generally, if you’re prescribed pills for blood pressure or cholesterol, or if you’re given hormones for a thyroid condition or insulin for diabetes or an inhaler for asthma, chances are that you and your doctor just sort of accept from the beginning that you’re going to be on that treatment forever.

Just think of how great of a position this mentality puts drug companies in. They know that if they can get one person to swallow one pill, they’ve got a steady revenue stream for the rest of that person’s life. From a business perspective, that’s fantastic! But from a social perspective, it’s overwhelming drug dependency.

The Money

Americans spend $425 billion a year on medicine and U.S. pharmaceutical companies export $47 billion worth of drugs every year. That’s $472 billion in revenue every year for the pharmaceutical companies. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the U.S. federal government’s annual discretionary spending on education, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, International affairs (all the embassies, consulates, etc.), energy & the environment, scientific research, social security, unemployment and food subsidies combined.

The reason I emphasize this is to drive the point home that this much money really matters. Look what the U.S. government does with that much. A lot. In fact, the only portion of the Federal budget not included in this comparison is the military budget. Everything else the government does, it manages to do it with less money than pharmaceutical companies pull in every year. What do drug companies do with it? They find ways to protect themselves and find ways to turn it into even more money.

The Results

• Prescription drug overdoses kill more people than illicit drug overdoses.
• 130 million Americans are on a regular prescription, meaning they have no plan or intention of getting off of it. That’s a little more than one out of every three of us.
• The U.S. is the most medicated country in the world, and that includes our kids.
• The leading cause of death in the United States is iatrogenesis, or death by medical mistakes, which includes bed sores, hospital infections, mis-diagnosis, doctor error and yes, medication errors and overdoses.

As a doctor, if I’m looking at my country, my culture, and I’m seeing that one out of every three of us can’t do without some sort of medication, I’m going to start looking for patterns because that’s really alarming! The problem is, only part of the pattern is that we’re a sick society. That is to say, we are indeed sick, but that’s mostly because we eat junk and don’t exercise. Stop eating junk and start exercising and our healthcare crisis would largely subside.

The real pattern is in the drug companies. They’re ruthless and they’ve got their hands on the levers of power. Some examples:

• In 2004, national guidelines were written to advise doctors on how to handle cases of high cholesterol. The guidelines were written by nine doctors. Eight of them received money from statin drug manufacturers.
• The first psychologist to recommend using stimulants to treat ADHD was a guy at Harvard named Dr. Joseph Biederman. He got $1.6 million from the drug companies that manufacture stimulants. Now, 15 percent of our kids are said to have a neurological disorder that requires constant medication. As a doctor, if I actually believed that, I’d be extremely worried.
• The pharmaceutical industry is number one in terms of spending money on lobbying. In 2012, they spent more than $230 million on lobbying alone. They spent another $50 million that year in campaign contributions.
• They spend $4 billion a year marketing to us. You know the commercials: ask your doctor if you should take this sleep aid. Ask your doctor if you should take this antidepressant. Ask your doctor this, ask your doctor that. My show is called AskDrErnst. Go ahead, ask me. I say no.
• They spend $24 billion marketing to doctors. That’s eight times more than they spend marketing to us.
• They spend $3.5 billion on kickbacks to medical doctors who write prescriptions for their drugs. If someone was offering you a piece of a $3.5 billion pie just to write a little something on a piece of paper, would you do it?

The scariest thing they buy, however, is scientific research.

The Scientific Reliability Quandary

When you take a prescription, you trust that it has been well-studied. You don’t suddenly want your ear falling off or to keel over with a heart attack. Think about it, you are putting a chemical into your body. Do you know what it is? Of course not! If you’re like most people, you aren’t a biochemist. You’re a truck driver or a lawyer or an engineer or a cook at a restaurant. You’ve got to trust that these companies have done their research and they’ve got your best interest at heart. And you’ve got to trust that the government agencies that make sure these drugs are safe are doing their job as well.

Every time someone conducts a scientific study, someone pays for it. They pay the researchers, pay for the facility, the equipment, etc. Universities and government spend money on scientific research, but so do drug companies. If  there’s some scientific research on a new drug, it’s almost always the company that stands to profit that pays for the research.

To date, statin manufacturers funded all of the major studies published about statin drugs.

These companies only publish the studies in journals if they favor the drug the company manufactures. If they get a favorable study, they’ll often change the name of the authors, re-write it a little bit and submit it to academic journals more than once.

Studies that end with un-favorable conclusions for the drug companies don’t get published, and the scientists and researchers who worked on the study often get fired. That puts a lot of motivation for these scientists to participate in scientific fraud—which is rampant–just to keep their jobs. One research firm, called Cetero, was found to have forged results in more than 1,400 studies.

The problem is that these companies are sort of untouchable. They’ve got the money to pay settlements in the billions, first off. In 2009, Pfizer paid $2.3 billion to settle civil and criminal cases because of illegal marketing on their part. It’s almost pocket change to them. The craziest thing is that prosecutors determined that yanking Pfizer’s ability to operate as a company, that is to say, shutting them down completely, was not an option because they were “too big to nail,” much like the Wall Street firms that got bailed out in 2008.

The Government Oversight Failure

Lastly, the FDA is more on the side of the drug companies than it is on the side of the consumer. New York University professor, Charles Seife, released an expose to Slate magazine in 2015 exposing how the FDA redacts crucial info from reports when it finds cases of scientific fraud in drug company research. The FDA even admits that it does this to protect these companies.

Ultimately, you’ve got to look after yourself. I like the old Hippocrates quote: “Let Food Be Thy Medicine and Medicine Be Thy Food.”

There is a place for prescription medicine, but when 70 percent of us are on a prescription at any given time, and one out of every three of us will be on one for the rest of our lives, there’s a problem, and it’s not actually a health problem. It’s a greed problem.

There are ways to combat our country’s most common ailments like high blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, inflammatory diseases and more just by changing your diet and habits. And that’s the silver lining. Posts like this are so gloomy, I know, but we need to know this stuff and we really need to know that there’s an alternative. You don’t have to be a slave to your medications. Learn how to eat; learn how to live.

Dr. Aaron Ernst, D.C. is host of News Talk 1110 WBT’s “AskDrErnst” show and clinic director of Maximized Living Charlotte.

He specializes in providing customized nutritional and detoxification total body healing programs, utilizing the 5 Essentials of Maximized Living.