Diabetes Drugs – A Miserable Failure to Improve Health

On December 17, 2008 the New England Journal of Medicine¹ put the nail in the coffin on another dismal year for the theory of drugs to treat disease, reporting that aggressive use of blood-sugar-lowering medication to prevent heart disease was a complete failure. Its not that lowering blood sugar in this patient population didn’t do anything: it made the patients heavier and more hypoglycemic. This new study follows the ACCORD trial, released earlier this year, which found a 22% increased rate of death in diabetic patients who were aggressively treated with medications.

It is almost impossible to comprehend the inane logic that props up the sales of billions of dollars of useless drugs. In the current study, authors were quite dismayed that lowering blood-sugar numbers didn’t produce any benefit, saying their finding “runs counter to the conventional wisdom on the issue, which holds that intensive lowering of blood sugar should reduce cardiovascular events.”

The elephant in the room is “conventional wisdom,” a system of logic that exists primarily to support the sale of ongoing drugs in higher doses, and seldom to actually fix the cause of the health problem. In this way of thinking numbers on paper are more important than the function of the human body.

There is a huge difference between normal blood sugar because a person is healthy and lower blood sugar because a person is drugged. The numbers may look similar on paper, and that is where the comparison ends, unless you are a Big-Pharma-trained medical doctor, in which case the number is the goal.

Physicians are not able to ponder the most rudimentary questions about what they are doing, such as: If I lower blood sugar in a patient with a drug, where is the sugar going? Why does this patient have high blood sugar in the first place?

In healthy people sugar goes into muscles and gets burned as fuel. With blood-sugar medications, sugar is typically forced into cells that don’t want it in the first place, killing the cells or otherwise being transferred to fat. This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul, a Ponzi scheme that moves sugar out of the blood and makes a number relating to a blood measurement look better – while at the same time making a difficult health problem worse.

This same lame system of logic is used to support the sales of almost every blockbuster class of drugs on the market today. I think we should call this the “Big Pharma Bubble.” Like the housing bubble, it is based on tens of billions of dollars of fraud. The Big Pharma Bubble has been slowly deflating over the past few years, as scandal after scandal hits the news. However, the bubble itself is still quite large in size – and it is getting ready to burst.