More Bad News for The Pharmaceutical Industry--A Broken Paradigm

Note: This blog is a reprint of a Guest Opinion piece written in August 2007 by Drs. John Neustadt and Steve Pieczenik, and published in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

The news for the pharmaceutical industry has been very bad lately. A study published in the August 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society conclude that people who use the histamine-2 receptor antagonists (“H2 blockers”) medications that block stomach acid, which include Zantac, Prilosec and Tagamet, have a nearly 250% increased risk of dementia.

Just a few months earlier, in May 2007, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning for the diabetes medication, Avandia, which was shown to increase the risk of heart attacks by 30-40 percent, and last year the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that the risk of hip fracture increases by 22% after one year and nearly 60% after four years in people taking proton-pump inhibitors, another class of stomach acid blocking medications that includes Prilosec, Nexium, Prevacid. These revelations are just the surface of a very serious problem in the American healthcare system that are putting millions of people at risk.

This story of medications causing dangerous, sometimes fatal, adverse effects is not new. Another JAMA study in 1998 concluded that fatal drug reactions for hospital patients “appear to be between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death,” and that the rate of fatal drug reactions had been stable for the past 30 years, killing more than 100,000 people annually. We don’t want to give the impression that we condemn pharmaceuticals; however, the data are clear, medications can be very dangerous as well as very helpful. One has to always balance out the potential risks with the potential benefits, and that discussion should always be between you and your physician.

It’s not even that pharmaceuticals per se are the culprit, but it’s the underlying paradigm in medicine that needs to be changed. The current philosophy underlying medicine today is that diagnoses are based on symptoms and treated with medications to simply suppress the symptoms instead of identifying and treating the underlying causes of disease. For example, depression is treated conventionally by prescribing antidepressant medications, which, while they may be very helpful, do nothing to correct the underlying biochemical causes of the depression. Taking Prozac may lift someone’s mood and help them through a difficult period, but no one has a deficiency in Prozac.

In contrast, a medical system that approaches diseases by first evaluating the underlying biochemical causes of the disease and then correcting them using targeted biochemical therapies, can correct the underlying causes. The biochemical pathways for depression are well documented. Without being too complicated, the mood-lifting hormone serotonin is produced in the body by transforming the amino acid tryptophan into serotonin, and requires vitamin B6 and magnesium to do so. There are other relevant pathways for generating mood and energy, but this simple example illustrates a central point about the underlying biochemical dynamics of depression.

The concept of causality versus symptoms is a major shift in paradigm, which the pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession in general have not accepted. The premises for this new biochemical medicine are simple:

• Premise 1: health and disease are biochemical;
• Premise 2: if someone was healthy and they’re not now, something’s changed in their biochemistry;
• Premise 3: if you identify and treat the underlying biochemical dysfunction(s), disease may be prevented and cured.

Dr. Pieczenik’s case is a perfect example. Several years ago he was diagnosed with mature-onset asthma, for which he was prescribed steroids and an inhaler. He refused to take these medications because he knew that they would cause their own adverse effects. Instead, he made an appointment with Dr. Neustadt, who ordered a comprehensive biochemical screen that tested more than 450 variables of biochemical function. Biochemical testing revealed the underlying cause for Dr. Pieczenik’s asthma. His symptoms resulted from an inability to produce the hormone epinephrine, which is a bronchodilator, because he became deficient in copper, which is required to convert the amino acid tyrosine to epinephrine. Within two weeks of starting the therapy to realign his copper, all of his breathing difficulties stopped and he has had no breathing problem since then.

The problems with the pharmaceutical industry and our current medical system stem from an inherently incorrect philosophy where symptoms are treated and not their causes, and medical testing does not evaluate the underlying biochemical causes of disease.

These revolutionary concepts in medicine and how they can help you are described in great detail in the book, A Revolution in Health through Nutritional Biochemistry, written by Drs. Neustadt and Pieczenik. It is available on Amazon.com.

About Drs. Neustadt and Pieczenik
John Neustadt ND studied naturopathic medicine at Bastyr University, is clinic director of Montana Integrative Medicine (www.montanaim.com) and president of NBI Testing and Consulting Corp (NBITC, www.nbitesting.com) and Nutritional Biochemistry, Inc. (NBI, www.nbihealth.com) in Bozeman, Mont. He is an editor of the next edition of the textbook, Laboratory Evaluations for Integrative and Functional Medicine, and the author of the books, Thriving through Dialysis with Jonathan Wright, MD and A Revolution in Health through Nutritional Biochemistry with Steve Pieczenik, MD, PhD.

Steve Pieczenik MD, PhD, trained at Cornell, Harvard and MIT. He is a board certified psychiatrist, was a board examiner in neurology and psychiatry and is chairman of NBITC and NBI.