By Martha Rosenberg

It’s been said that Americans have the most expensive urine in the world because of all the unneeded vitamins they take. It certainly is true that if someone is eating right, they may well be getting enough vitamins without taking supplements. But there is another unneeded substance that Americans ingest, thanks to all the drug ads on TV, that is much more serious: unneeded prescription drugs. 

Unneeded prescription drugs are not just a waste of money, like vitamins. They are behind accidents and car crashes, suicides including military suicides, mass shootings like Virginia Tech and Columbine and unanticipated deaths from drug interactions. They raise our insurance rates and taxes and convince people who would have improved without medication (or who improved from the placebo effect) that they are "really sick" and need to remain on the meds. They violate the medical profession's oath to help and not harm at the deepest level. 

Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning? Do you wake up…hungry for food? You may be suffering from… Ads on TV selling drugs and the diseases that treat them are almost that ridiculous. 

Selling symptoms to suggestible people has been a gold mine for Big Pharma since it started advertising directly to the consumer almost 15 years ago. Thanks to such ads which actually “sell” diseases, millions of people who were once fine now have depression, insomnia, season allergies, GERD and assorted attention, pain and spectrum disorders. Worse, they want these afflictions because the medications that treat them have been made so glamorous. 

Taking unneeded psychiatric drugs is especially dangerous Allen Frances, M.D. Professor Emeritus at Duke University School of Medicine, recently said in a provocative interview with Opednews' Rob Kall. Temper tantrums in children can morph into "Disruptive Mood Disregulation Disorder," normal forgetting of old age becomes "Minor Neurocognitive Disorder," gluttony becomes "Binge Eating Disorder" and grief becomes "major depression." Choosing to go on a psychiatric drug "requires all the thought that you would put into a decision on who you are going to marry, what car you are going to buy [and] what house you are going to buy," warns Dr. Frances because it's often a one-way street. 

It is easier to acquire a diagnosis of a mental disorder than lose one says Dr. Frances and easier to go on the drugs than off them.  Many clinicians and patients report that "rebound" effects from terminating psychiatric drugs can be intolerable, forcing people to remain on them. Worse, rebound effects are often mislabeled as "the disease coming back" rather than weaning off drugs someone did not need to take to begin with. 

Another dangerous and unethical marketing area is specialty drugs, normally reserved for serious illnesses, now marketed to the general population.  Are you over 40 and experiencing back pain asks one Big Pharma "quiz" to determine if your back pain may be a "chronic autoimmune condition" and need a $20,000 a year drug to treat instead of an aspirin or Tylenol . Is it worst in the morning?  You may have "Ankylosing Spondylitis." 

Such drugs, in addition to their outrageous price, are linked to rare cancers, TB, lymphoma, allergic reactions, nervous system problems, blood problems, heart failure, lupus-like syndromes, liver problems, and new or worsening psoriasis. "Some people have died from these infections," reads the label on one. 

Taunting people with symptoms that almost everyone has--Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning? Do you wake up…hungry for food--would be obnoxious or funny--if it did not work so well. And taking prescription drugs you don’t need is not like taking unnecessary Vitamin C.