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Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs: Inside the Harzardous World of Legal Drugs - Rilegato
Combining a moving personal memoir with investigative reporting, an award-winning journalist offers a critical look at the flaws in the regulation of prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the power of the international pharmaceutical industry.
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Recensione:
"Explosive."—People
" [Bitter Pills] could save your life."—San Diego Union-Tribune
"The best popular book I've read on the subject."—The New York Times Book Review
"Chilling...fascinating...poignant."—Newsday
"If you have concerns about drugs your family members have been prescribed or are taking over the counter, Bitter Pills will help make you a more informed consumer."—Rocky Mountain News
"One of the year's best books...startling...sobering."—Philadelphia Inquirer
"Absorbing...insightful...fascinating and often frightening." —Kirkus Reviews
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:
" [Bitter Pills] could save your life."—San Diego Union-Tribune
"The best popular book I've read on the subject."—The New York Times Book Review
"Chilling...fascinating...poignant."—Newsday
"If you have concerns about drugs your family members have been prescribed or are taking over the counter, Bitter Pills will help make you a more informed consumer."—Rocky Mountain News
"One of the year's best books...startling...sobering."—Philadelphia Inquirer
"Absorbing...insightful...fascinating and often frightening." —Kirkus Reviews
From the Trade Paperback edition.
It began with a pill. One pill.
My wife's gynecologist gave her samples of a new antibiotic to treat a urinary tract infection so minor, she didn't even know she had it. The doctor told her to take this new wonder drug twice a day for three days.
Your doctor gives you a pill, you take it. When I left for work the next morning, I said good-bye to Diane as she swallowed the first pale yellow oval tablet with breakfast.
Six hours later I was bringing her, delirious, to the emergency room. Our lives haven't been the same since.
Diane called me at work several hours after she took that pill and said she felt strange. I knew something was really not right, because my wife comes from a long line of "it's just a flesh wound" stoics who underreact to all physical discomfort. She said she was disoriented and hallucinating. Her mouth was dry, and she felt tingling in her left arm and hand. She was having trouble talking.
After we spoke, she found herself wandering around in her small home office, and when she located her desk, she couldn't figure out how to turn off the computer she writes on every day. When she went to lie down, she started shaking uncontrollably and then saw white. She was sure she was dying.
Then she heard the phone ring. It was me, calling to see if she was feeling any better. Luckily, she was able to reach over, pick up the receiver and mumble to me about what was going on. I called her gynecologist, who told me to take her to the hospital. When the cab got me home from the office, I found Diane lost in her closet. She stammered that she wanted to get dressed to go out but couldn't find her white shirt. I looked down and saw that it was an inch from her hand.
Married people can afford to panic only one at a time, so I pretended I was not scared as I helped her on with the shirt and took her to the hospital closest to where we live in Philadelphia, which happens to be Pennsylvania Hospital, the oldest hospital in America and one of the very best. As Diane spoke--haltingly, elliptically--to the ER doctors, more symptoms emerged. Her jaw was terribly sore from clenching against what we assumed had been a seizure. Her pupils were fixed and dilated, like blobs of black ink. She said she felt as though something were "melting" just behind her green eyes.
It was late Friday afternoon at the ER, just before the weekend rush, so we got a good, slightly private, curtained-off area. An emergency medicine specialist and several neurology residents tag-teamed in and out of our space. Each one asked a slightly different version of the same questions. I worried that we weren't being clear because there didn't seem to be any accumulation of knowledge taking place. They all had tests they wanted Diane to perform.
"Spell the word "world' backwards," one asked. She did it and was then asked to name the U.S. presidents in reverse chronological order.
"Can you spell "world' backwards?" the next one asked. Then he requested that she touch her finger to her nose.
"I'd like you to try to spell--" the next one began.
"--yeah, yeah," Diane said, "'world' backwards." But she was bobbing in and out of full lucidity. Only seconds after cracking a joke, her mind would be sluggish again, and she would barely respond when I stroked her cheek or her shoulder-length brown hair.
After nearly five years of marriage, this was the first medical emergency we ever had to face. The only thing that kept me from really losing it was a woman in the next cubicle who already had lost it. Dragged in by the police in the middle of a major psychotic episode, she screamed continually in English and Chinese about everything from her husband's homosexuality to her close personal friendship with the president of the United States. Her screams pierced the crackly trauma calls from ambulances all over the area, which were being broadcast on a loudspeaker system for the ER staff to monitor. The combined noise was oddly stabilizing, a constant reminder that things could be considerably worse.
After several hours of neurological exams, the word came back--from a place called the Poison Control Center--that all of Diane's symptoms had been previously reported as reactions to the antibiotic she took. The drug is called Floxin. She had, as we now say, been "Floxed."
My wife took a pill. It made her sicker than she was before.
World backwards. Tell me about it.
The ER doctors, however, were not through with us. They still wanted to run more tests. Even though Diane's symptoms, such as "acute delirium," were consistent with a reaction to the Floxin, they could also be caused by a brain tumor, a stroke or a big horrible infection with larger neurological implications, like spinal meningitis. They wanted to do a CT scan.
I got to sit in the CT control room and watch the machinery visually slice and dice. There is nothing quite so frightening as watching your loved one's brain being scanned for tumors, especially when you're not exactly sure what a normal brain looks like. But it is also very moving to peer directly into your wife's mind. What spouse hasn't at one time or another wished to be able to do that?
Back in the ER after a clean scan, we were then told the prevailing wisdom about all adverse drug reactions: that the effects would subside when the medication left her system. And we were sent home--with a supply of the milder, cheaper antibiotic she probably should have taken in the first place for her urinary tract infection (UTI)--to wait for that to happen. On our way out, we walked past the main ER desk. On the wall behind it was a light box for reading X-rays, which was still illuminating pictures from the inside of Diane's brain. To the left of the viewer was a shiny metal towel dispenser. It was adorned with Floxin advertising magnets that had been left by some enterprising drug sales rep.
At that moment I thought the Floxinalia would actually make a nice detail for our emergency room horror story, the recitation of which would commence as soon as Diane was fine, ostensibly in a couple of days. But her symptoms did not disappear as promised. Some waned, but new ones developed. Besides the "melting" and the fixed pupils, she had really aggressive, buzzy insomnia, visual distortions that made the world seem six-dimensional and aphasia: she would get halfway through a sentence and just couldn't get the rest of the words out. For a woman with a high school trophy for "best negative debater" sitting on a shelf behind her desk, this was probably the scariest symptom of all.
Over the next two weeks, she endured an electroencephalogram (EEG), which tests electrical function in the brain; a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of her head, which offers more structural detail than the CT scan; and a spinal tap, to check the cerebrospinal fluid for infections, as well as some blood work. All these tests just to rule out any other possible explanation for her continuing symptoms than an adverse reaction to the drug--the same drug that was supposed to be long gone from her system. While the tests themselves were creepy, what they were testing for was absolutely horrifying. I found myself weighing which awful result would be most acceptable, watching the life we had planned to have pass before my eyes.
The tests all came back on a Thursday, one of the most harrowing days of our lives. As we were read the results over the phone by our internist, I found myself mentally checking off all the nightmares that had been eliminated by the process--"brain tumor, no; stroke, no; AIDS, no." But Diane still wasn't well. The doctors concluded that the drug reaction had triggered some genetic predisposition to neurological illness. Since her body hadn't been able to correct the situation naturally, she would need to take a combination of heavy-duty drugs, each with its own possible side effects, to do it. If, in fact, it could be done at all.
But at least that urinary tract infection had cleared up.
It has now been five years since Diane got Floxed. In that time, we have learned more than we thought we'd ever want to know about what has been called "the other drug problem." The one with legal drugs.
Since that day in the emergency room, I have been on a quest. An investigative journalist and exasperated husband, I am trying to find out if my wife was the victim of a pharmacological foul-up or just a statistically acceptable casualty of "friendly fire" in the war on disease. I am also trying to find meaning in our experience, a married couple searching for each other through a medical emergency that never seems to end, the siren never completely quieted.
Along the way, I have met the people behind the studies, the statistics, the press releases and the lawsuits: heroes, scoundrels, geniuses and idiots, victims and victimizers, the amorphous "less than one percent" of the population who have the adverse reactions you read about in the fine print on your drug labels and even the people who massage the numbers to get them under one percent. I have seen close up what happens at that moment when science officially becomes commerce, when exciting new drugs are handed over from the lab nerds to the marketing types. I have watched everyone in the pharmaceutical food chain describe everyone but themselves as unhealthily arrogant. I have seen the world's top drug cop, the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), excoriated as a "thug," a "bully" and even a "killer" by an industry-friendly legislator. And I have listened to the head of one of America's largest drugstore chains turn to me and growl, "These drug companies always hide under the cloak of "We're these great research and development houses and without us there would be no medications.' I think they're full of shit."
The Eu...
My wife's gynecologist gave her samples of a new antibiotic to treat a urinary tract infection so minor, she didn't even know she had it. The doctor told her to take this new wonder drug twice a day for three days.
Your doctor gives you a pill, you take it. When I left for work the next morning, I said good-bye to Diane as she swallowed the first pale yellow oval tablet with breakfast.
Six hours later I was bringing her, delirious, to the emergency room. Our lives haven't been the same since.
Diane called me at work several hours after she took that pill and said she felt strange. I knew something was really not right, because my wife comes from a long line of "it's just a flesh wound" stoics who underreact to all physical discomfort. She said she was disoriented and hallucinating. Her mouth was dry, and she felt tingling in her left arm and hand. She was having trouble talking.
After we spoke, she found herself wandering around in her small home office, and when she located her desk, she couldn't figure out how to turn off the computer she writes on every day. When she went to lie down, she started shaking uncontrollably and then saw white. She was sure she was dying.
Then she heard the phone ring. It was me, calling to see if she was feeling any better. Luckily, she was able to reach over, pick up the receiver and mumble to me about what was going on. I called her gynecologist, who told me to take her to the hospital. When the cab got me home from the office, I found Diane lost in her closet. She stammered that she wanted to get dressed to go out but couldn't find her white shirt. I looked down and saw that it was an inch from her hand.
Married people can afford to panic only one at a time, so I pretended I was not scared as I helped her on with the shirt and took her to the hospital closest to where we live in Philadelphia, which happens to be Pennsylvania Hospital, the oldest hospital in America and one of the very best. As Diane spoke--haltingly, elliptically--to the ER doctors, more symptoms emerged. Her jaw was terribly sore from clenching against what we assumed had been a seizure. Her pupils were fixed and dilated, like blobs of black ink. She said she felt as though something were "melting" just behind her green eyes.
It was late Friday afternoon at the ER, just before the weekend rush, so we got a good, slightly private, curtained-off area. An emergency medicine specialist and several neurology residents tag-teamed in and out of our space. Each one asked a slightly different version of the same questions. I worried that we weren't being clear because there didn't seem to be any accumulation of knowledge taking place. They all had tests they wanted Diane to perform.
"Spell the word "world' backwards," one asked. She did it and was then asked to name the U.S. presidents in reverse chronological order.
"Can you spell "world' backwards?" the next one asked. Then he requested that she touch her finger to her nose.
"I'd like you to try to spell--" the next one began.
"--yeah, yeah," Diane said, "'world' backwards." But she was bobbing in and out of full lucidity. Only seconds after cracking a joke, her mind would be sluggish again, and she would barely respond when I stroked her cheek or her shoulder-length brown hair.
After nearly five years of marriage, this was the first medical emergency we ever had to face. The only thing that kept me from really losing it was a woman in the next cubicle who already had lost it. Dragged in by the police in the middle of a major psychotic episode, she screamed continually in English and Chinese about everything from her husband's homosexuality to her close personal friendship with the president of the United States. Her screams pierced the crackly trauma calls from ambulances all over the area, which were being broadcast on a loudspeaker system for the ER staff to monitor. The combined noise was oddly stabilizing, a constant reminder that things could be considerably worse.
After several hours of neurological exams, the word came back--from a place called the Poison Control Center--that all of Diane's symptoms had been previously reported as reactions to the antibiotic she took. The drug is called Floxin. She had, as we now say, been "Floxed."
My wife took a pill. It made her sicker than she was before.
World backwards. Tell me about it.
The ER doctors, however, were not through with us. They still wanted to run more tests. Even though Diane's symptoms, such as "acute delirium," were consistent with a reaction to the Floxin, they could also be caused by a brain tumor, a stroke or a big horrible infection with larger neurological implications, like spinal meningitis. They wanted to do a CT scan.
I got to sit in the CT control room and watch the machinery visually slice and dice. There is nothing quite so frightening as watching your loved one's brain being scanned for tumors, especially when you're not exactly sure what a normal brain looks like. But it is also very moving to peer directly into your wife's mind. What spouse hasn't at one time or another wished to be able to do that?
Back in the ER after a clean scan, we were then told the prevailing wisdom about all adverse drug reactions: that the effects would subside when the medication left her system. And we were sent home--with a supply of the milder, cheaper antibiotic she probably should have taken in the first place for her urinary tract infection (UTI)--to wait for that to happen. On our way out, we walked past the main ER desk. On the wall behind it was a light box for reading X-rays, which was still illuminating pictures from the inside of Diane's brain. To the left of the viewer was a shiny metal towel dispenser. It was adorned with Floxin advertising magnets that had been left by some enterprising drug sales rep.
At that moment I thought the Floxinalia would actually make a nice detail for our emergency room horror story, the recitation of which would commence as soon as Diane was fine, ostensibly in a couple of days. But her symptoms did not disappear as promised. Some waned, but new ones developed. Besides the "melting" and the fixed pupils, she had really aggressive, buzzy insomnia, visual distortions that made the world seem six-dimensional and aphasia: she would get halfway through a sentence and just couldn't get the rest of the words out. For a woman with a high school trophy for "best negative debater" sitting on a shelf behind her desk, this was probably the scariest symptom of all.
Over the next two weeks, she endured an electroencephalogram (EEG), which tests electrical function in the brain; a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of her head, which offers more structural detail than the CT scan; and a spinal tap, to check the cerebrospinal fluid for infections, as well as some blood work. All these tests just to rule out any other possible explanation for her continuing symptoms than an adverse reaction to the drug--the same drug that was supposed to be long gone from her system. While the tests themselves were creepy, what they were testing for was absolutely horrifying. I found myself weighing which awful result would be most acceptable, watching the life we had planned to have pass before my eyes.
The tests all came back on a Thursday, one of the most harrowing days of our lives. As we were read the results over the phone by our internist, I found myself mentally checking off all the nightmares that had been eliminated by the process--"brain tumor, no; stroke, no; AIDS, no." But Diane still wasn't well. The doctors concluded that the drug reaction had triggered some genetic predisposition to neurological illness. Since her body hadn't been able to correct the situation naturally, she would need to take a combination of heavy-duty drugs, each with its own possible side effects, to do it. If, in fact, it could be done at all.
But at least that urinary tract infection had cleared up.
It has now been five years since Diane got Floxed. In that time, we have learned more than we thought we'd ever want to know about what has been called "the other drug problem." The one with legal drugs.
Since that day in the emergency room, I have been on a quest. An investigative journalist and exasperated husband, I am trying to find out if my wife was the victim of a pharmacological foul-up or just a statistically acceptable casualty of "friendly fire" in the war on disease. I am also trying to find meaning in our experience, a married couple searching for each other through a medical emergency that never seems to end, the siren never completely quieted.
Along the way, I have met the people behind the studies, the statistics, the press releases and the lawsuits: heroes, scoundrels, geniuses and idiots, victims and victimizers, the amorphous "less than one percent" of the population who have the adverse reactions you read about in the fine print on your drug labels and even the people who massage the numbers to get them under one percent. I have seen close up what happens at that moment when science officially becomes commerce, when exciting new drugs are handed over from the lab nerds to the marketing types. I have watched everyone in the pharmaceutical food chain describe everyone but themselves as unhealthily arrogant. I have seen the world's top drug cop, the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), excoriated as a "thug," a "bully" and even a "killer" by an industry-friendly legislator. And I have listened to the head of one of America's largest drugstore chains turn to me and growl, "These drug companies always hide under the cloak of "We're these great research and development houses and without us there would be no medications.' I think they're full of shit."
The Eu...
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- EditoreBantam Dell Pub Group
- Data di pubblicazione1998
- ISBN 10 0553103830
- ISBN 13 9780553103830
- RilegaturaCopertina rigida
- Numero di pagine417
- Valutazione libreria
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