doc @ the crossroads

The last four days I've felt better than I have 4 a lomg time, &; I atftribute it to the new meds. I'm amazed at how few prescription drugs I'm taking -- I count four: Sinemet, which is cheap and plentiful, a generic covered by insurance. Two respiratory meds, Advair amd Combivent, both of which are prohibitvely expensive in the US for reasons I'll get into below. Acyclovir is also quite inexpensive, and 90% covered.

Glutathione is an experimental treatment, unrecognized by the FDA. It costs about $100 for a 35-day supply. The vitamins, Turmeric, and patent medicine (Loratadine) are readily available and cheap. Co-Q10 costs about $40 for a month supply of liquid, which the body absorbs more easily than the pills. The cheapest nicotine patches run $60/month.

Advair and Combivent are good examples of how big pharma holds us hostage. Besides COPD patients like me, millions of asthma sufferers are dependent on these drugs.  The copay for both is around $350 a month. This has asthmatics screaming, when they can get enough breath, and for good reason. I don´t know what Advair costs in Europe, but Combivent and similar inhalers are either given away or sell OTC for five whatevers (Marks, Francs, Lire, Shillings), because they keep people out of hospitals, thus saving everyone money.

Because I refuse to give big pharma their cut of the action, I buy those two prescriptions out of Canada. My Advair Diskus (It's called Salmeterol and Fluticasone Propionate [a generic version of a brand or "premium"  drug]) is from GSK, the maker of Advair, but is marked "For Sale Only in India and Nepal." The Combivent is genuine, trade-marked Boehrenger/Ingelheim, but the box and instructions are in Polish. A three-month supply of both costs about $325, which is a whole lot better than the thousand-plus in copays if I bought them here.

This is just one of the ways pharmaceutical giants hand us the shitty end of the stick. Respiratory medicine is a racket, but the worst corruption of American health care occurs, or so I´ve heard, in the area of cancer medication. But that´s another story.


We´re just about done here, but no little tour around the neighborhood of Parkinson´s medication is complete without a telling of the cautionary fable of the pharmaceutical and the herb. The new pharmaceutial was synthesized in the laboratory a few years into the new century, and all the fond hopes and dreams of the company, Amalgamated Everything, were with the infant pill. It was tiny, only 1 mg, and cheap to make, but very expensive. Just the copay alone ranges from $3-$5 per pill! The good thing is patients take one pill a day, but the bad thing is most can´t tell what it does for them, if anything.

At first MD´s would explain to their patients that Azilect, for that is the newcomer´s name, worked with Levodopa (Sinemet) to help its effects last longer, but clinical trials, whie they didn´t disprove the assertion, found no evidence to support it. So the story changed a couple of years ago, and now Azilect is touted as slowing the progess of the disease. But this contention is in doubt also.

All we really know about Azilect is it´s 1) bad for the liver, and 2) costs a lot. On the other hand, there´s an herb -- I´m sure I don´t even have to name it -- which works extremely well in conjunction with Sinemet, removing all signs of nausea and reducing symptoms. Big pharma hates the herb, as it's a common weed, and Bog or God holds the patent.

Tomorrow I´ll wrap this up, and add up the numbers, and have a few general comments about health care in America.