This news report must surely come as no surprise for Malaysians who fall sick all too often. If you don’t have medical coverage by your employers, you will know what USM lecturers need not do — the price of medicine in the country is outrageous.

For the information of those who did not read the report, pharmacies and doctors mark up the price of medicine by up to more than 300 per cent; with, no prizes for guessing the right answer, doctors being the worse culprit.

What do doctors do? Well, they sell you generic drugs (drugs which are made not by the original makers/inventors) at more than 300pc mark-up. And you trust doctors?

It makes me wonder. With such a huge profit margin of more than 300pc, why would any doctor want to dispense the original patented drug where the margin is less?

Generic drug may be as good as the original one. But after a 300pc mark up, it would almost be as expensive as the original so why not give the patients the original? Surely, when generic drugs were made, they were intended to be good substitutes at a much, much lower price!

This is why doctors should not be allowed to dispense medicine. Why allow them to do so when they are not pharmacists. Doctors know very little about medicine. They may be experts in diagnosing illments and recommending cures. But please leave the dispensing to the profession who are really trained — the pharmacist.

Pilots fly planes. When there is engine trouble in the air, the pilot does not do the repairs, the flight engineer does. We trust pilots when they fly, but can we trust them to repair the engine?

If the answer to the above is not, why should we allow the doctor to dispense drugs?

 

this is an article someone sent to us. makes interesting reading for sharing with visitors to this blog.

 

The Age of Autism: Something Wicked — 1

By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 (UPI) — The Combating Autism Act passed by the U.S. Senate earlier this month includes millions of dollars for research into possible environmental causes of autism.

It’s about time.

Specifically, the bill authorizes $45 million to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to spend over five years in clinical research on possible environmental factors.

While that may sound like a good chunk of change, it’s minuscule compared with spending on (so far) fruitless searches for an “autism gene.”

In previous installments of this column, I’ve sketched the natural history of the disorder beginning with child psychiatrist Leo Kanner’s landmark 1943 paper, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.”

And I’ve suggested that from the very beginning, an environmental trigger — something harmful coming from the outside in — was alarmingly evident. As Macbeth put it, there’s reason to worry that “Something wicked this way comes.”

Kanner identified 11 children with what he called the “markedly and uniquely” different disorder of autism. The first child in his case series was born in 1931, the last in 1938. While Kanner focused on the parents’ high educational attainment, we proposed a different way of connecting the dots:

– Case 1, Donald T., grew up in Forest, Miss., which is smack in the middle of national forest land that was being replanted by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the early 1930s.

– Case 2, Frederick W., was the son of a plant pathologist.

– Case 3, Richard M., was the son of a forestry professor at a southern university.

What might unite those cases? Mark Blaxill of the advocacy group SafeMinds suggested agricultural chemicals, in particular ethyl-mercury-based fungicides that came on the market about 1930. They were patented by Morris Kharasch, the “father of organic chemistry,” who also invented thimerosal, the ethyl-mercury-based vaccine preservative some blame for the huge rise in autism diagnoses.

Whether you subscribe to the thimerosal theory or not, any environmental link is a worrisome prospect. And evidence for such a link has expanded over the years.

Recently I had a fascinating conversation with Thomas Felicetti of Beechwood Rehabilitation Services of Langhorne, Pa. I came across work he had done more than a quarter-century ago that strongly suggested a “chemical connection” in autism.

He summarized that work in the journal Milieu Therapy in 1981, and it is riveting to read in light of everything that has come after — namely, hundreds of thousands more cases of autism. Felicetti set up a study at the Avalon School in Massachusetts where he was teaching at the time.

“The experimental design was rather simple and straightforward,” he recounted in the paper — comparing the occupations of 20 parents of autistic children, 20 parents of retarded children and 20 parents of “normal” children who were friends and neighbors of those attending the school.

“The results did, in fact, suggest a chemical connection,” he wrote. “Eight of the 37 known parents of the autistic children had sustained occupational exposure to chemicals prior to conception. Five were chemists and three worked in related fields. The exposed parents represent 21 percent of the autistic group. This compared to 2.7 percent of the retardation controls and 10 percent of the normal controls. The data, subjected to statistical analysis, demonstrated a chemical connection.

“The results of this study point in the direction of chemical exposure as an etiological factor in the birth of autistic children.”

Felicetti is quick to acknowledge that such a small study was not definitive. “This particular study was occupations, and it was all different occupations,” he told me. “There were chemists, there were chemical assistants who would suck chemicals through pipettes in those days. There were roof tarrers who were exposed to chemicals through the roof tar. A variety of occupations.

“But again that’s as far as I went with it. It was a pretty good study but suggestive — because we couldn’t find any particular chemical and because we only looked at occupations.”

But it’s worth coming to a full stop at his simple and straightforward conclusion that a “chemical connection” was evident in the etiology of autism. Plus, he was building on earlier work that already suggested such a connection (more on that in an upcoming column). And further disturbing studies have followed.

It’s also significant that the study tried to roughly control for “occupational status” — “It did try to have the control groups of equal occupation and social class,” Felicetti said. Contrary to all the speculation that brainpower and education correlate with autistic offspring, job status had nothing to do with it — roof tarrers are not perched atop the economic ladder, so to speak.

The key was the job itself and its exposure to chemicals. Felicetti told me the plant pathologist and forestry professor from Leo Kanner’s 1943 case studies also would have met his test for occupations with chemical exposure.

So yes, maybe Kanner’s kids had especially bright parents — but maybe they were up to their elbows in mercury fungicides, and Lord knows what else, before anyone knew how dangerous that was. (Perhaps fittingly, Kanner said the forestry professor was “very much immersed in his work.”)

One of Felicetti’s observations in the 1981 article is haunting: “It is especially ironic that many of the parents of the autistic youngsters in our study could not specify the nature of the chemical agents. One can only speculate that they had blind faith in the safety precautions of the plants and in the reassurances of their employers. …

“We seem to be coming out of an era when individuals routinely assume that occupational exposure to a wide variety of chemicals is a safe pastime. However, … research indicates this awakening may be too late for substantial numbers of people and for many future generations.”