Van Vugt: Anomalies In Our Drug Companies

IN ONE of my previous columns I have written about the topic: Medicines versus herbal food supplements. I want to take up this issue again because I feel an urgency to bring the issue under the attention again of our new health secretary, if not under the attention of our new President himself.

Last July 12 Sun.Star published a report under the heading "Pinoys warned vs unlabeled supplements." The report insisted that food supplements should carry the label "No approved therapeutic claim" but now it should be put there in Tagalog or Filipino, so that the ordinary Filipino may understand how important the warning is.

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A warning indeed it is, like the label: "Smoking is dangerous for your health", is a warning. This is clearly deceiving the public. In the same issue of Sun.Star there is an advertisement under the heading: "The healing power of MX3." The ad gives a testimony of a lady by the name of Johanna Cardona that states exactly the opposite of what the drug companies want us to believe. The ad shows, complete with pictures before and after, how a patient is cured from a serious skin disease by a mangosten food supplement called MX3. No doubt the food supplement has cured effectively the disease, and without any side effect.

This shows again that the label "no approved therapeutic claim" is an outright public deception, if not a public corruption. The drug companies are competing here with the food supplement companies. It is almost like a war. In fact, there is still a pending case filed by the Chamber of Herbal Industries of the Philippines, Inc. for a preliminary injunction against the order of DOH. The powerful drug companies are deceiving the public and corrupting the industry by employing sales agents, who go around in beautiful cars to sell their products like drug peddlers and corrupting the doctors with commissions for prescribing their medicines.

It is high time that this dirty practice of the drug companies is stopped in order to protect the public health of the Filipino people. I myself come from a country where the health consciousness of the people is so high that the country is flooded with healthy food supplement stores which make the products available to the people at reasonable prices.

Recently I was a victim myself of these dirty practices. For six days I was in the hospital drugged with antibiotics, supposedly to cure an inflammation at the pancreas. When I was released from the hospital the doctor prescribed an additional 40 capsules of expensive antibiotics which I refused to buy, because I had noticed already the bad side-effect of the antibiotics: an extreme dizziness. The doctor declared me cured from my pancreatitis, even after I didn't take the additional 40 capsules.

What I regret most is that the poor people in our country are subjected to these kinds of practices. They never can afford these expensive medicines. For them it is cheaper to die. In any case, I guess my doctor must have been thinking: he is a foreigner, he can afford. Yet, I had to borrow money from a friend in order to be able to pay my hospital bill of P 50,000.

In the hospital I had a quarrel with my wife because she wanted to ask a second opinion from another doctor, but how can you do that while you are under treatment of the doctor. Besides, doctors are usually reluctant to give an opinion because that is seen as against the professional code of ethics, certainly when it concerns the issue of medicines versus herbal food supplements.

Thanks to the Sun.Star which in its July 12 issue published the two contradicting items (the new item and the ad) which in my opinion exposes so clearly the big anomaly the drug industry is in the Philippines.

(For your comments email: arnvv@yahoo.com or call 851-9809)