Everyone knows the cost of prescription medications it the US is very high. In fact, there is a whole industry that caters to people that need large or constant quantities of said medication, either due to a person's age or for health reasons, in order to make them affordable. But why? Why is prescription medication so expensive in the US? And is there something we can do about it? There are many reasons that explain why the costs of medications are higher in the US than elsewhere, however,...

In a previous posting we discussed the history of opioids in the US and how it grew into an epidemic. This epidemic had a lot of caregivers in various forms. Some of it was in the form of the governing bodies not doing their job. Others were in the form of marketing and advertising to doctors and consumers alike. Yet others were in the form of companies looking out for their bottom line. In the clip below you can see the extent to which some companies went in...

Most people think our current opioid crisis began at the end of the past century. After all, it was in the 1990s when most of us began to hear news about a wonder drug that alleviated all of our pains and aches. Before that, all such wonder drugs were additive, yet Oxycodone, or as most of us know it, Oxycontin, promised no addition. How could this be? How could such a drug exist? The answer is simple, it was false advertising and misinformation. In a recent NPR PodCast,...