Social prescribing comes of age

Social prescribing represents a steep learning curve for many doctors says Craig Sams, but it’s rocketing up the agenda

The setting: a GP surgery. Receptionist: “The doctor will see you now.” Doctor: “Hi, how are you getting on with your low-carb diet? Are you getting the regular exercise we agreed? Can we de-prescribe the Metformin? Let’s do a few tests to see whether you’re ready to come off the drugs. By the way, how are you getting on with your cookery classes? Let’s see if we can finally wave type 2 diabetes goodbye.”

Bad news for the pharmaceutical industry but ‘social prescribing’ is on a roll and there will be a lot more of it in the future. Professor Tony Avery, the NHS National Clinical Prescribing director has said the aim is to bring about a ‘culture change’. He sees social prescribing as transforming modern healthcare, saving money and improving people’s lives. Not only that, but adverse reactions to medication are estimated to cost NHS England over £2 billion a year (not to mention the impact on people’s lives and health). The number of disability claimants doubled from 2021 to 2022. 8.3 million Britons are now on antidepressants.

The College of Medicine’s Beyond Pills Campaign is pushing hard to stop the overprescribing of medicines. The college says that 1.1 billion medicines are prescribed unnecessarily. Its chair Michael Dixon (medical advisor to King Charles), has said ‘Medicine…is no longer affordable or sustainable. A new medical mindset is needed which goes to the heart of true healthcare.”

Back in the 1930s an experiment in social prescribing called the Peckham Experiment engaged with 950 local families to get them on the track to health. They had a gym, a swimming pool, cookery classes, a vegetable garden and workshops about health. Members would have a medical health check once a year and were monitored on a regular basis. The kids did better at school, marriages were more stable and women were empowered (knitting groups helped with this). Social and community activities were organised by the members and helped reduce isolation, loneliness and alienation, illness levels fell dramatically. William Beveridge who drafted the plan for the NHS, was impressed and envisaged similar health centres up and down the country. When the Government put his plan to the British Medical Association in 1948 they were not impressed and the Government was forced to back down and agree that all ‘health services’ would solely be via the GP’s surgery. The Peckham Experiment closed down two years later.

But social prescribing is finally rocketing up the agenda. There are now 15 Pain Cafes in Cornwall helping people manage pain without painkillers, relying instead on exercise and psychological support. Dependency on antidepressants has been shown to cause more harm than good (as anyone who watches Happy Valley already knows). Time to kick the diazepam.

Increasing awareness of the benefits of phytonutrients (the kind of stuff the health food industry has been emphasising for decades) is filtering through to the medical industry and impacting on social prescribing. It was the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus who famously said 500 years ago: “Prevention is better than cure.” With life expectancy rates going backwards, increasing rates of alcohol and drug-related deaths and hospitalisations, along with record levels of obesity, social prescribing is happening just in time. Will people be taking their prescriptions into the health food store? Or will the pharmacies try to capture this newly lucrative business?

The Bromley by Bow Centre in East London is pioneering the ‘new’ approach to health and wellbeing, and it is a model that is being emulated in more and more places.

Yes, the first reaction is ‘I told you so’ - but the fact is that these people are serious. At least so far.

How long will it be before doctors prescribe yoga and pilates classes or give out free prescriptions for herbal medicines and supplements? Will you get free cookery classes on the NHS?

There’s still a long way to go, but at least the direction of travel has finally changed. The Government has just allocated £50 million to support 42 Integrated Care Boards across the country to help doctors to ‘de-prescribe’ their patients and get them on the path to wellness without drugs. There will need to be proper support for the medical profession - they know it makes sense but it’s a steep learning curve for many doctors. They didn’t teach this kind of stuff at medical school.

Pity Poor Pharma

Mexico has just passed a law that bans American agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration from acting freely in the country.  This was a response to the US arrest of Salvador Cienfuegos, former Defense Minister of the Mexican Government, on charges of drug trafficking. 

What’s going on in Mexico? The drugs gangs are all at each others’ throats, fighting over an ever-diminishing pie.  There are now only 6 American states left where marijuana is illegal - in all the rest it is legal or allowed for medical purposes. The impact on Mexico’s drug gangs has been horrendous.  Almost at a stroke the lucrative American market has collapsed. 

With the marijuana market gone the Mexican drug gangs had to start pushing Fentanyl even though it meant competing with American legal pharmaceutical companies, but boy is it profitable.  A kilo of heroin costs $6000 and can be sold for $80,000, a mere 13 times profit.  A kilo of Fentanyl costs $4150 per kilo and sells for $1,600,000 as it is 100 times stronger than heroin. That’s a stonking 385 times profit.  As a mere organic grocer like me, who’d go out of business if I aimed for a 2 times profit those figures are pretty impressive.  Just think if vitamins were that profitable.

But to a legal pharmaceutical company those figures are pathetic.  Xanax costs 2p to make 1 mg and sells for £100 per mg.  That’s 5000 times profit for Pfizer.  Prozac costs 9p to make 20mg and sells for £185 per 20g. That’s 2000 times profit for Eli Lilly. 

Bear in mind, however, that the manufacturing cost doesn’t include all the research on the drug and then ‘educating’ doctors in how to prescribe it and the endless fines for illegal marketing and health care fraud.  Pfizer holds the record for the largest criminal fine - $2.3 billion in 2009.

The great thing about being a pharmaceutical company is that you can take the occasional billion-dollar fine in your stride.  Even better, you never go to jail.  Mexican pharma-dealers are always at risk of a prison sentence for their wrongdoings, something corporate pharma executives never have to worry about.  They just pass the cost of fines on to their shareholders.

But legalised marijuana has had a damaging effect on the sales of opioids and alcohol and antidepressants.  Potheads drink less booze and actively avoid opioids like Fentanyl or oxycontin and would rather take CBD than take an antidepressant. 

Marijuana legalisation’s been bad enough for the drug business but worse challenges are on the horizon.  In November 2020 Oregon decriminalised all drugs.  Instead of spending $375 million a year arresting and prosecuting drug users, Oregon is now going to open a dozen drug treatment centres to help addicts get well.  With $100 million a year coming in from the tax on legal marijuana sales they can afford it.  For blacks this is particularly good news as, even though drug use is no higher among black people, a heck of a lot more of them are stopped, searched and arrested for possession - drugs are the leading cause of jail time for people of colour.

So who else is making money out of illegal drugs?  You and me. ‘Our’ UK Government-backed Angel CoFund has shares in Small Pharma, who are raising £12 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange to research DMT, the most powerful psychedelic of all.  If they did the research here they’d go to jail,  so they will do it legally in Canada.  The Canadians are already spearheading the use of psilocybin from magic mushrooms - a couple of doses and depression is alleviated that would otherwise require a lifetime of antidepressant use.  More bad news for the makers of Prozac and Xanax - and doctors and pharmacists.

Luckily the pharmaceutical companies have harvested £6 billion from governments for their coronavirus vaccine research.  Making vaccines is usually bad business - you give someone a shot and they don’t need another one.  But lavish subsidies make it worthwhile.

Just think if the cash that has been spent on vaccine research had gone to protect people in care homes and making sure everyone’s vitamin C and D and zinc levels were adequate.  Prevention sounds nice, but profitable?  Forget it.

Cheaper alternatives are challenging big pharma

Time to break the prescription drug addiction cycle

Craig Sams offers an alternative perspective on the culture of prescription drug addiction, saying a natural solution could be more effective in treating depression

A conversation took place three years ago between a good friend of mine and her doctor. Her husband had left her and she was extremely depressed. She went to see her doctor.

The doctor gave her a prescription for a very addictive 30mg pill that she would have to take every day for the rest of her life. She would sometimes be more prone to suicidal thoughts and less inhibited about acting on them. If she ever tried to stop taking them because she couldn’t stand the side effects, the doctor would not be able or willing to help. She eventually went cold turkey and now experiences periodic electric shocks in her head; which other people who have given up call ‘the zapps.’ Some people reduce the level of addiction by gradually reducing the dose level from 30mg to 26mg to 24mg to 22mg, right down to 6mg or 4mg, at which point it is much easier to get off. But no drug company provides that means of escape. If you go on the internet, there are some people in Holland who will provide you with reduced dose pills that make it a lot easier and safer to give up, but neither the NHS nor any drug company or doctor will help you with that.

What the doctor could have said: “Go out to a field and select half a dozen psilocybe cubensis mushrooms and eat them. Sit down in a comfortable spot and let them take effect and enjoy the journey. If that doesn’t do the trick completely, repeat after five weeks and you should be fine.”

Of people who take psilocybe just once, 94% experience a dramatic remission of anxiety and depression. The New Scientist recently called on the government to allow mental health researchers to study psilocybin. They do now, but the subjects have to buy it on the black market which invalidates the clinical results. If everybody who was depressed just took a few mushrooms the drug companies would be out of business.

Patrick Holford, the nutritionist, therapist and columnist in NPN, has just released a compelling rap called ‘Big Pharma Man: it’s a grand scam – he don’t give a damn’. It describes the criminality, fines, fraudulent research and cover-ups that have led to millions of lives being ruined by drugs that don’t work and are addictive. Just Google ‘Drug rap Patrick Holford’ and enjoy.

President Trump didn’t get any money from Big Pharma to get elected and so he has dared to say he’ll take action to deal with America’s opioid epidemic, where four out of five heroin addicts started on prescription opiods; drugs that are more addictive, expensive and dangerous than heroin. Meanwhile, Americans will continue to die at a rate of more than 1,000 a week from opioid overdoses. The makers of the drugs keep a database of doctors. Special attention goes to the ones who run ‘pill mills’, dispensing drugs at huge profit for themselves. These are doctors who swore the Hippocratic Oath: first do no harm. Hah! When Purdue, manufacturers of the opiod medication, ended up in court it paid $600 million in fines, and the executives who were found guilty of the criminal charge of selling OxyContin ‘with the intent to defraud or mislead’ paid $35 million. If someone sold $50 worth of heroin they would go to jail for a few years. These pharma guys get off light; the fines are insignificant compared to the billions of dollars they continue to make.

In my view it’s time to legalize all drugs, make them all available on the NHS, then let informed people choose how they want to get well instead of spending lives of misery hooked on drugs that have terrible side effects, which are treated with more drugs that also have terrible side effects. The alternatives are safer and cheaper.

Is it any wonder that I haven’t been to a doctor since 1965? I just say no to prescription drugs.

Just Gimme the Drugs,Man - a critique of Big Pharma

Every now and then I clear my spam filter of missives from American lawyers offering me the opportunity to cash in on a bonanza from a class action lawsuit against one of the big drug companies. Huge amounts of money are being made by suing Big Pharma for peddling drugs that don't work, that they knew didn't work and that have awful life-destroying side effects. Respected scientists and medical researchers are shown to have conspired to distort the results so that patented drugs with few beneficial effects were prescribed to millions of gullible patients who wrongly assumed that they could trust their doctor. Just go to www.legaltube.com/breaking-news-hot-list.aspx for all the latest opportunities to get redress.

I'd love to cash in but I haven't taken a prescription drug in more than 45 years, apart from a handful of aspirin and whatever local anaesthetic my dentist uses to numb my gums. I suppose knowing that the life expectancy of doctors is just 58 years and that they are the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA (225,000 deaths a year) is enough to make me wary. But you can’t blame them for dishing out drugs that are backed by peer-reviewed research and articles in prestigious medical journals.

The EU authorities have approved drugs that are submitted on the basis of obfuscation (not mentioning negative outcomes in trials) and on pure fabrication of data. Research data and methodology are distorted to achieve the desired result or you can just make a false assertion and hope to get away with it. All the evidence, in the EU and the US, is that a lot of drugs get approved that are worthless or dangerous.

There is a show at the Wellcome Museum called High Society. It shows a great 1895 ad in which Bayer heroin and aspirin are advertised side by side - heroin being their ‘heroic’ non-addictive replacement for morphine. Selling drugs can be a nasty business, whether they’re legal or illegal.

WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer paid $75 million to settle claims in Nigeria over killing 11 children and leaving dozens disabled by trialling Trovan on kids with meningitis. Hernia sufferers who had the Kugel mesh patch ended up with all sorts of horrible bowel injuries. Denture creams can cause zinc poisoning. Drugs for diabetes and acne are linked with worsening rather than restoring health. GlaxoSmithKline paid out £475 million last October including £60 million to the whistleblower who alerted authorities to problems with their antidepressant manufacture. More than 13000 lawsuits have been filed against them over their anti-diabetic drug, Avandia, amid claims that at least 83000 heart attacks by 2007 arose from a drug that was known to cause heart attacks as long ago as 1999.

So what does the EU do to improve its control over these scandalous risks? It collaborates with drug companies to crack down on herbal medicines, Ayurvedic and Chinese Traditional Medicines that have been used with remarkably few if any negative side effects for hundreds of years.

Why not crack down on the drug company CEOs? Fines are not enough. They make a fortune out of selling drugs to state-controlled health services. They can easily take the occasional fine in their stride. If a customer of a dope dealer dies it’s front page news and the evildoer has his money confiscated and goes down for a 5 stretch. Why not chief execs?

The Alliance for Natural Health is doing its best to stop this nonsense. Give them money. Sadly, our own Government has no power in this arena - drugs, like agriculture, are controlled in Brussels by unelected Commissioners (in Russia they used to call them Commissars) who collude with drug companies to make sure that your health is under their control, not yours. Read Big Pharma by Jacky Law for an insider’s view into how the drugs business works.

From time to time I take home-grown drugs: comfrey, nettles, viola, hawthorn, wormwood, fennel, melissa lemon balm, to name just a few illicit or potentially illicit medications that help support my generally reliable good health. I grow them myself in my garden, organically. Soon I may face prison if I don’t cease and desist from what could become criminal activity. To the barricades, comrades!