PRESCRIPTION DRUG REFORM.

This petition calls to attention the U.S. federal government to monitor the overpresciption of drugs/medication to U.S. seniors and U.S. citizens in general.

Over the last few years there has been a lot in the press/media about the overprescription of drugs/medications to Americans.

There is often poor record keeping and communication between various doctors as to how many medications patients are on and the possibility that the ill effects for which the patient is visiting the doctor may in fact be caused by multiple drug prescriptions that are having damaging interactions in the patients bloodstream and with the patients body chemistry.

Elderly people are particuliarly susceptable to this and can sometimes be on 5, 10 or 15 different types of various medications, including steroids.

Often times when the elderly become disoriented, weak and ill the family assumes that this is simply a normal part of aging and that the individual is simply becoming senile.
 
Their ill health and confused state of mind may be caused by the massive amounts of prescription drugs which they may be on which is wreaking havoc on their body chemistry and disrupting proper body functioning.

Also, many people are prescribed corticosteroids drugs for long periods of time. When corticosteroids or other steroid drugs are prescribed and used for long periods of time the body will actually stop making the naturally occuring steroids which the drug is imitating because it senses adequate amounts in the blood stream.....sometimes the body will stop making these normally and naturally occuring steroids permenantly because the body systems which make them atrophy from lack of use, this causes prescription steroid drug dependency and can cause the patient/person to become severly ill or die if they attempt to stop the drug after long term usage.

This can also occur with other prescription drugs, not only steroids, creating further dependencies.

You can be quite sure that many elderly are often committed to hospitals and nursing homes after being diagnosed with senility and other ailments when in fact their simply being poisoned from long term use of massive amounts of prescription drugs.

Their needs to be a better system of electronic interconnected record keeping and communications between our nations doctors and hospitals to prevent this from happening.

Independent government bodies who are staffed by doctors and medical professionals need to be established who do not stand to profit off prescription drug dispensing and sales and can step in when records indicate that a patient is on too many prescription drugs (2-3 or more?) and can determine how many of these drugs are neccessary and also determine the potential damage which may have been done to the patients body and body systems from prescription drug poisoning.

This would greatly reduce the billing for prescription drugs to Medicare and Medicaid and also reduce hospitalizations and committals of elderly to nursing homes who could live independently if they were weaned off excessive medications with monitoring by professionals.

Often drugs are prescribed to control vague symptoms which are actually the side effects of prescription drugs the patient is already on and not a disease symptoms. This further confuses and disrupts the patients bodily systems, increasing the complexity of their over prescription drug poisoning.

An example of adverse side affects would be when a patient is taking an over the counter or presciption decongestant, antihistamine or cough syrup, these three cold medicines are known to increase blood pressure, a patient may be prescribed cold medications, or be on, over the counter cold medications which the doctor is not aware of, when he checks the patients blood pressure he may find it to be high and prescibe high blood pressure medications to lower it not knowing that the patients blood pressure is high because of over the counter cold medications or cold medications prescibed by other doctors who are not communicating with the patients doctor.

Other drug prescriptions and over the counter drug usage can have similiarly dangerous adverse side affects which may be misdiagnosed as disease and not side affects because of poor patient to doctor or doctor to doctor communications.

We the undersigned agree witht the sentiments of this author and wish for our federal government regulatory bodies such as Health and Human Services, the FDA and any other regulatory bodies which could affect positive change in this area to take action on this matter to protect the elderly and all Americans. 

And also for pharmaceutical companies to better inform patients and doctors of adverse side affects and advise against multiuple drug prescriptions.

Also cycling people on and off prescibed drugs to give bodily systems a chance to recover and not atrophy.

Bodybuilders who use steroids have been doing this for years to prevent testicular and adrenal gland atrophy and destruction from testosterone usage. They know that if they don't cycle on and off the steroids their bodily systems which produce natural testosterone are destroyed and their bodies become effeminized from lack of testosterone.

This same process happens with almost all synthetic drugs when they are used regularly and over a long time period.