Drugs lost in black hole If you want to gamble your life away, be my guest - but don't say I never warned you about the dangers of prescription drugs. Hundreds of thousands of people have kicked the bucket due to some adverse drug reaction or another, and countless more suffer from their side effects every single day. If it's that bad with drugs the FDA has approved, imagine the horrors that await people who take prescription drugs that haven't received the FDA's OK. If you're thinking that it's illegal for a doctor to prescribe a drug that hasn't been approved by the FDA, you're right. But that hasn't cut down on the number of doctors who peddle unapproved drugs. I don't believe they're deliberately deceptive, they're just ignorant - or careless. Take your pick. Either way, you end up with the raw end of the deal: Taking prescription drugs that have never been proven to work on whatever your problem is - not to mention drugs that have never been proven to be safe (though a "safe" prescription drug is an oxymoron, anyway…). Who knows? The prescription you just filled might be one of the more than 65 million prescriptions per year that are written for unapproved drugs. Of course, it would be hard to check if your prescription falls in that category or not, since the FDA refuses to release any kind of formal list of unapproved drugs to the public. After all, doing so would probably raise plenty of questions, not the least of which would be why they haven't pulled unapproved drugs off the market. I've never been one to give our government too much credit, but even I'm wondering how this level of ineptness is possible. One U.S. congressman chalks it up to a "black hole" in the approval system. When a new drug comes up for approval, it's given a tracking number that the FDA uses to track it through the approval process. Pharmacies use that same number as an order number to stock their shelves. And there's no rule that drug companies can't fulfill orders until they have FDA approval. Worse yet, there's nothing in the tracking number that indicates whether the drug has been approved or not - which means that pharmacists are often just as in the dark as the doctors. In fact, a recent survey showed that 9 out of 10 pharmacists didn't even know it was possible for them to dispense unapproved drugs. But there's another black hole that's every bit as dangerous as drugs that slip unnoticed through the approval system… Obviously taking one drug is risky enough - but taking a bunch of drugs at once is a gamble that I, for one, am not willing to take. It's as reckless as playing chicken or Russian roulette, in my opinion. And almost everyone's doing it. It starts with one drug for your cholesterol or high blood pressure. Then as each side effect pops up, another drug is added to deal with it. It's whack-a-mole medicine, if you ask me. And it's downright dangerous. I guarantee you it won't be too long before the effects of the drugs will be far worse than the problems you were hoping to treat. There's no classification that lists polypharmacy (that's the technical name for the poisonous cocktail of drugs) as a cause of death - and I'm sure Big Pharma is fighting to keep it that way. Because if more people knew the truth, business would be sure to take a nosedive. Some estimate that polypharmacy is responsible for 28% of hospital admissions - and is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States. You don't have to be popping 10 pills a day to fall into this category, either. Taking as few as two drugs can be all it takes to experience a negative interaction. If you think you have no other choice than to stay on the drugs you're taking, at least be smart about it. Keep a list of your meds and their doses. Show the list to your doctor when he's prescribing you something - and to your pharmacist when you get the prescription filled. (Doctors don't know everything, you know.) And if you're bound and determined to mix your own a cocktail, stick with an occasional vodka martini - and leave the drug cocktails to the fruitcakes in the FDA. | 
