By Ethan A. Huff | Natural News | May 14, 2012

(NaturalNews) It is a known fact that the drug industry makes a whole lot more money on pharmaceuticals that patients must take perpetually for chronic conditions, rather than on those they take occasionally for isolated illnesses. This is why Big Pharma has worked hard over the years to get as many people as possible hooked on drugs that must essentially be taken for life, including six classes of drugs in particular that you or someone you know is probably already taking.

Ever since direct-to-consumer drug advertising became commonplace on television, in magazines and even on billboards starting in the 1990s, more Americans than ever become convinced that they have some novel new disease that requires ongoing treatment with medication. And these conditions include things like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, depression, asthma, gastroesophageal reflux (GERD) and many others.

But many of these conditions have essentially been made up, or at least grossly overblown, for the purpose of selling new drugs. Individuals are made to feel as though they must take a drug for the rest of their lives in order to mitigate the symptoms of these new and novel conditions. And the consequence of this has been a massive upswing in the number of pharmaceutical drug addicts in America today, conveniently making Big Pharma very rich in the process.
 

The big three - behavioral drugs, statins, and antidepressants

Writing for AlterNet.org, Martha Rosenberg recently outlined six types of drugs that drug companies hope you and your family will get suckered into taking for the rest of your lives. And rounding out the top three, though not in this particular order in Rosenberg's piece, are behavioral drugs, statin drugs and antidepressants.

Every year, the age at which children are "pre-diagnosed" for conditions like ADHD, bipolar disorder and other so-called "behavioral" problems gets younger and younger. More than 20 million American children, in fact, have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, even though the vast majority of them are simply immature children that have yet to develop into adults (http://www.naturalnews.com/033131_psychiatric_disease_labeling.html).

This is precisely how Big Pharma has been able to rope more parents into drugging up their children, by convincing them that their children have inherent behavioral problems that must continually be addressed by drugs that calm or "normalize" them. And the same is often true for children and adults that are diagnosed with depression and told they must take antidepressants for an indefinite period of time (http://www.naturalnews.com/031267_antidepressants_medical_fraud.html).

Then there are statin drugs, which purportedly normalize cholesterol levels and prevent cardiovascular problems, but that must be taken throughout a person's life. Even though statins cause many other health problems, even raising the risk of cardiovascular events, many patients fear that if they stop taking them, their arteries will become clogged and they will be worse off in the long run.

Hormone replacement therapy, proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) for "heartburn," and asthma-control medicines are three other major drug categories that require constant use as well, even though they only address symptoms while doing little or nothing to address the underlying health problems involved. Incidentally, each of these classifications is also linked to very serious side effects.

"[Pharma executives] have shown less interest in medicines like antibiotics that actually cure disease than in those that only treat symptoms," wrote Melody Petersen of Our Daily Meds about the issue. "Most blockbusters are pills for conditions such as anxiety, high cholesterol or constipation that must be taken daily, often for months or years. They are designed for rich Americans who can afford to buy them."

Sources for this article include:

http://www.alternet.org