THE LATEST | CANADADr Craig says that a new culture needs to be adopted where medicines are not just piled up on people, but the underlying causes of a disease are addressed instead.
“I’m not saying that medicines are bad. I think medicines have a role to play and there are some medicines that really do amazing things, but we need to get the balance back again, because increasingly the pharma industry is looking to get more and more people on lifelong medication,” Craig told Hannes Sarvs in an interview .
She cites the example of statins used for heart failure, and notes that the severity of the condition for which they are prescribed is going down all the time, as is the age at which they are prescribed. “And obviously, that’s a huge benefit to the pharma companies. They make a huge amount of money from it. And yet, it’s not good for patients,” she says. “If you look at in a more independent and different way, and you look at the number of people that need to be given this medicine for their life to be saved, and the number of side effects they’ll get from having the medicine, then the balance doesn’t work out the way that we’re claimed.”