Drugs That Gobble Vitamins…

Below is a list of some of the more popular drugs that are or have recently been on the market and the vitamins & minerals that they are known to deplete from the body. This information is from the physicians desk reference.

It should be noted that this is in no way a recommendation to stop the medication that you are currently taking but to be aware of the bodies depletion of the above vitamins & or minerals with certain medications. Rather it is intended to enhance the communication between you and your healthcare professional as it pertains to your overall health picture.

Do You Know The Eight Drugs Doctors Would Never Take??? You Should!!!

Would doctors take the medications they prescribe to their patients? Not necessarily, as it was reported in a recent article in Men′s Health, June 22, 2008. A number of physicians were asked which drugs they themselves would refuse to take.

And it may surprise you especially if you are currently taking one of these drugs, but here is their list:

• Asthma drug Advair
• Diabetes drug Avandia
• Pain reliever Celebrex (a relative of the infamous Voixx)
• Antibiotic Ketek
• Heartburn medication Prilosec
• Heartburn medication Nexium
• Eye drops Visine Original
• Decongestant Pseudoephedrin

The doctors questioned also suggested alternative treatments. Unfortunately, all they could come up with were other drugs! You have to understand that is all they are trained in at medical school…You can find their recommendations in the original article in Men’s Health.

Here is a portion of a commentary by Dr. Mercola on this very subject:

“Seemingly positive and helpful articles like these really highlight how pervasive the conventional drug culture is. Although these drugs are exposed as being dangerous and best avoided at all costs, the writer failed miserably in providing ′healthier′ alternatives; in all cases but two, merely citing alternative drug treatments …”

Actually it was the doctors who failed miserably; the writer just quoted the doctors′ recommendations. Mercola then goes on to comment on three of the drugs on this list — the asthma, diabetes and heartburn/acid reflux medications — and suggests non-pharmaceutical alternatives. This would be a good time for me to restrict my own comments to Avandia. But it should be mentioned that there is a reason lawyers are targeting people who have had adverse reactions to this drug.

In May of 2007 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a safety alert on Avandia:

“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is aware of a potential safety issue related to Avandia (rosiglitazone), a drug approved to treat type 2 diabetes …”

The agency goes on to say that safety data from some controlled clinical trials showed a potential increase in the risk of heart attacks, but other data provided contradictory evidence. The agency then issues this warning to patients on Avandia:

“Patients who are taking Avandia, especially those who are known to have underlying heart disease or who are at high risk of heart attack should talk to their doctor about this new information as they evaluate the available treatment options for their type 2 diabetes.”

Why didn′t the FDA just mandate the removal of the drug from the market?

“FDA′s analyses are ongoing. FDA has not confirmed the clinical significance of the reported increased risk in the context of other studies. Pending questions include whether the other approved treatment from the same class of drugs, pioglitazone, has less, the same or greater risks. Furthermore, there is inherent risk associated with switching patients with diabetes from one treatment to another even in the absence of specific risks associated with particular treatments. For these reasons, FDA is not asking GlaxoSmithKline, the drug′s sponsor, to take any specific action at this time.”

If changing treatments poses such a significant health risk, why advise patients to talk to their doctors about their available treatment options, i.e. about switching drugs? And exactly what was the information available to the agency that made it so difficult for them to make a decision?

“Recently, the manufacturer of Avandia (GlaxoSmithKline) provided FDA with a pooled analysis (meta analysis) of 42 randomized, controlled clinical trials in which Avandia was compared to either placebo or other anti-diabetic therapies in patients with type 2 diabetes. The pooled analysis suggested that patients receiving short-term (most studies were 6 months duration) treatment with Avandia may have a 30-40 percent greater risk of heart attack and other heart-related adverse events than patients treated with placebo or other anti-diabetic therapy. These data, if confirmed, would be of significant concern since patients with diabetes are already at an increased risk of heart disease.”  FDA approval for Avandia was given May 1999 and this safety alert wasn’t issued by the FDA until May of 2007. My question is-What took so long to issue the Risk Warnings of serious cardiovascular complications after most of these studies that were conducted over a short 6 month period of time? It sure is odd that it took 8 years to issue this safety alert, in my opinion!

Of significant concern? Can you imagine a natural health product remaining on the market with a rap sheet like that. Does the pharmaceutical industry control the FDA, or what?

The sad thing about all of this is that type 2 diabetes is considered a life style disease that is both preventable and reversible. The American Diabetes Association readily admits this:

“People with diabetes have the same nutritional needs as anyone else. Along with exercise and medications (insulin or oral diabetic pills), nutrition is important for good diabetes control. By eating well-balanced meals in the correct amounts, you can keep your blood glucose levels as close to normal (non-diabetic level) as possible.”

Pharmaceutical intervention shouldn′t even be necessary in type 2 diabetes. Yet the drug peddling continues, with the active participation of the medical establishment.

It is a shame that every Healthcare Provider isn’t required by law to learn what Nutraceutical options exist…but we have to remember who has the greatest influence in a medical doctors education and training-it’s not the nutraceutical companies!

What Do Doctors Think Of Dietary Supplements???

The Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), a trade association representing the dietary supplement industry, conducted a couple of surveys among health care professionals to find out. What they discovered was that dietary supplement use was just as common among health care professionals as among the general public. However there are still some misinformed physicians that still believe that people who take multivitamin supplements are probably just wasting their money and boosting the profits of vitamin companies… They are the same doctors that believe that in our society of highly processed, genetically modified and fortified foods, we can obtain all the nutrients we need. This thinking in my opinion is so far from reality it isn’t worth repeating!

The first CRN survey, conducted in 2007, questioned 900 physicians and 277 nurses about their thoughts on dietary supplements. The survey revealed that 51% of the doctors and 59% of the nurses took dietary supplements regularly, comparable to supplement use in the general population. 79% of the physicians and 82% of the nurses also recommended dietary supplements to their patients, whether they themselves took supplements or not. The list of supplements taken and recommended included things like fish oils, in addition to vitamins and minerals and antioxidants.

 
The second CRN survey, released in 2008, questioned around 1200 orthopedic specialists, cardiologists and dermatologists. Among the orthopedic specialists 73% took supplements themselves; 94% of those who took supplements also recommended them to their patients. For the cardiologists surveyed those figures were 57% and 86%, and for the dermatologists 75% and 79%. Even many of the doctors who did not take dietary supplements still recommended them to their patients.

The doctors and nurses surveyed may not be nutrition experts, but they see the extent and consequences of poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyles in their medical practices; they just have to look at their patients′ expanding waistlines. How do you get obese on a “balanced diet”? Given the shear number of the overweight and the obese, how could most people possibly get all the micro-nutrients they need from the food they eat?

In 2007 investigators from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) examined the dietary habits of about 100,000 high school students to find out how many ate the recommended two servings of fruits and three servings of vegetables per day. The results of the survey, released just recently, were sobering. Only 32% got two daily servings of fruit and only 13% the recommended three servings of vegetable. Less than one in ten high school students surveyed ate enough of both. The adults questioned in the same survey didn′t do much better. So much for the balanced diet.

Lets have the Independent Vitamin Safety Review Panel, a group of physicians, academics and researchers, have the last word on this subject:

“In the past, over-conservative government-sponsored standards have encouraged dietary complacency. People have been led to believe that they can get all the nutrients they need from a ‘balanced diet’ of processed foods. That is not true. For adequate vitamin and mineral intake, a diet of unprocessed, whole foods, along with the intelligent use of nutritional supplements, is more than just a good idea: it is essential.”