Prescription medications are drugs that are created to make patients feel better, either by preventing or curing a disease, or by treating the ailment that one suffers from.

Overview
Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars every year in an effort to create new drugs. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tries to protect citizens by heavily regulating the approval of new drugs. Because of the strict requirements the FDA puts on medicines, only about 1 in every 5,000 to 10,000 new drugs gets approved for marketing. Since pharmaceutical companies spend so much money on drugs that never get approved, they go all out to make money on the drugs that do get approved. There’s nothing wrong with that. If health companies didn’t make money they would go out of business and none of us would have any medicine.

Drug Testing & Approval
Now, let’s go back to the FDA’s strict drug approval process. As hard as the FDA tries, their drug approval tests are very limited. The clinical trials (tests) that are run on new drugs are very small in scale – the largest studies only being done on a few thousand people. And not only that, but the FDA lacks the resources (cough cough money) to do the drug testing that Americans deserve. What all this means is that there is no real way to know if a drug is safe until it has been tested (aka sold) on the American public. That’s why many people choose not to take a medication that is less than a few years old.

Big Pharma
Big Pharma are far from angels they have been caught repeatedly hiding side effects and doing other shady deeds), but neither are they the evil corporate empire that many people make them out to be. Every year these pharmaceutical giants save so many lives and improve the quality of life for others. And thanks to capitalism they are handsomely rewarded. The pharmaceutical industry earns a profit of over $100 billion per year.

Traditionally, it didn’t matter financially whether a drug was effective, ineffective, or caused side effects in a patient. Big Pharma still made money on every prescription sold. Now, does Big Pharma deserve to be rewarded financially when their drug actually harms someone? If they deserve money for helping people, that means they also should be held accountable for hurting people. Especially when they downplay the risks of side effects or lie about them and hide test results completely.

What should people do who’ve suffered side effects? They should stand up for their rights and sue. They should NOT enter a class action lawsuit, as that will leave them with peanuts. They SHOULD enter a MASS TORT lawsuit, the kind that pays the victim a lot of money. And they should get a lawyer that will only get paid if their case is won. They should also know the lawsuit won’t negatively affect their doctor.

If you have been the victim of a drug’s side effect, click here to see a list of drug side effects that offer medical compensation.

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Congratulations! You now have a sound grasp to the basics of pharmaceuticals. If you’re like other intelligent people, you’ve enjoyed the taste of knowledge and you’re hungry for more. Now it’s time to be like Alice and travel deeper into the rabbit hole. So go ahead, click the link below. Do it, you know you want to.

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