Statistics are boring (well, for most people). What I aim to do here in order to make this as brief yet interesting as possible is to break the info down and delve deep into the meaning of these Numbers with a capital N.
The last blog post about this discussed anecdotal stories of how over-prescribing medication in the US is doing more harm than good. For those who don’t like anecdotes as partial evidence, there are tons of statistics out there to support this theory of an overmedicalized society. Just Google “prescribed medication history in the US” from earlier years to present day. Using Google Scholar will get you peer-reviewed articles from PhD level scholars in the fields they study.
First, we’ll delve into the top 3 most prescribed medications in the US and which diseases they supposedly treat. Then we’ll take a look at some charts and numbers showcasing the statistics of these prescribed medications over the years in the US. We’ll further analyze this information by ascertaining how effective these medications have been over the years in terms of how well they’ve treated the diseases they were meant to treat–again, by looking at the Numbers on these diseases. Woohoo!
From this website, I found a report on the top 10 drugs used in the US from July 2019. To keep this shorter, we’ll focus on the top 3. Sorry, no pretty pictures this time. Just lots of drug names you and I can’t pronounce, along with their equally complex commercial names in parentheses, followed by what each medication is supposed to treat. I summarized it right below:
- Atorvastatin (Lipitor)
- Levothyroxine (Synthroid or levoxyl) Treats: hypothyroidism
- Lisinopril (Prinivil) Treats: high blood pressure and heart disease
So there you have it: a fairly recent report of statistics on the top 10 US prescribed medications at this time of posting. And as you can see from the summary above, the top 3 medications purportedly treat the following disorders: high cholesterol, hypothyroidism, high blood pressure, and heart disease.
I’m curious to see how effective these medications are with treating each of their designated diseases by looking at the percentage of people with these diseases presently. But more on that later in this post. For now, let’s research further on the total amount prescribed of these medications over the years up until presently.
For Atorvastatin (Lipitor), our top-selling drug for a little while now, let’s check out its drug usage statistics. First, a little history from Wikipedia about this drug:
It was produced by the Warner-Lambert pharmaceutical company in 1985 and after many expensive clinical trials was introduced into the market by 1996. As quoted by the amazing Wikipedia:
“By 2003, Lipitor had become the best selling pharmaceutical in the United States. From 1996 to 2012, under the trade name Lipitor, atorvastatin became the world’s best-selling medication of all time, with more than $125 billion in sales over approximately 14.5 years.”
Although we’ve yet to ascertain its effectiveness, we can certainly see how very commercially successful and profitable this drug has been in the US! It’s kept its top position in total sales all the way up until 2019! Impressive…..
Here’s a chart to help visualize how much the sales of Lipitor have increased over the decade, from 2007-2017 :
Source: https://clincalc.com/DrugStats/Drugs/Atorvastatin
As Borat would say, “Whoa whoa wee whoa!” From 70 million or so prescriptions in 2007, sales have peaked to a new level in 2017 to over 100 million prescriptions! No wonder it’s a billion-dollar market….
I wonder now…how effective has Lipitor been in treating high cholesterol to reduce heart disease, as its aim has been since the beginning? I sought out the nifty US Census Bureau Abstracts to see how cholesterol levels and heart disease over the years in the US have been. But to my dismay, these very nifty abstracts have lost funding since 2012 thanks to the Fiscal Year Budget….! The past abstracts are incredible sources of statistical information, so I highly recommend you look over the statistics in the past abstracts. However, we won’t be able to see the statistics on heart disease using this source, so onto my next source: the Centers for Disease Control, or the CDC.
From this CDC webpage, I discovered that in 2016:
- 12% of adults ages 20 and older had high cholesterol.
- 95 million adults age 20 and older had total cholesterol levels higher than 200 mg/dL, and
- 29 million US adults had total cholesterol levels higher than 240 mg/dL.
This doesn’t seem like too many people (though it certainly could be a lot lower). But I was truly amazed when I Googled “US statistics heart disease’ and looked over more statistics on the CDC website.
Heart disease, even today, is still the leading cause of death for men and women!!! In fact, about 647,000 Americans die from heart disease each year, which is one in every four deaths. How on Earth could this be with Lipitor purportedly treating high cholesterol as a way to prevent heart disease?? It just doesn’t add up… In this case, it’s easiest to conclude that Lipitor is just not working the way it should be.
I mean really…. Just think about it. Lipitor is the top-selling drug in the US and has been for over a decade. It’s supposed to treat high cholesterol to prevent heart disease. And yet here we are, with staggering statistics on US citizens with high cholesterol levels and heart disease deaths each year. If the medication was working so well, wouldn’t we see a drastic decline in deaths per year? Wouldn’t we at least see less than 1 in 4 people dying each year from these diseases if the medication were working so well?
As sobering as that was, it’s time to analyze our second top-selling drug in the US: levothyroxine. A manufactured form of the thyroid hormone thyroxine, levothyroxine became the second most commonly prescribed medication in the US as of 2011. In 2016 it became the most commonly prescribed medication in the US with over 114 million prescriptions. Levothyroxine is used to treat hypothyroidism. I wonder again…. how effective has levothyroxine been in treating just that? This time I’m looking at the Military Health System for chart statistics to answer this question.
These charts should help illustrate how effective levothyroxine has been to treat hypothyroidism. Just focus on the light green line in each chart.
As you can see, from 2008 to 2017, the cases of hypothyroidism for males increased from about 34,000 cases in 2008 to about 45,000 cases in 2017. In other words, hypothyroidism has been on the incline for males! Here’s the chart if you’re interested in seeing this with your own eyes, from the Military Health System website:
Looking at the females graph now for hypothyroidism, we can see that there is still a slight increase in hypothyroidism cases: from a little over 175,000 cases (note: the statistics for hypothyroidism in women is so much higher because women are 5 to 8 times more likely to have thyroid issues over men) in 2008 to about 200,000 cases in 2017! Yikes…. That is certainly not a good sign for levothyroxine’s effectiveness. Here is the chart:
Last but not least, we’ll focus on Prinivil, which supposedly treats high blood pressure and heart disease. We don’t even need to analyze the heart disease part though, since we did with Lipitor already. So already, that is not a good sign for Prinivil…. But let’s look at high blood pressure statistics in the US.
Again from the CDC website we can see that hypertension (the fancy word for high blood pressure), affects 1 in every 3 adult Americans. That’s about 75 million American adults, or 32%. Yikes!! Here’s a graph of the prevalence of hypertension in 2017 from the CDC web page:
Now I don’t mean to be a nag, or a cynic, or a technophobe by writing about all this. All I’m trying to do here is help everyone visualize—with statistics, fancy charts and graphs from highly recognized sources—how effective these medications are at treating the diseases they were meant to treat. The fact that the number one selling drug right now, Lipitor, has failed to reduce heart disease so that it is no longer the major leading cause of death in the US truly surprises me. How can anybody believe in its effectiveness when it’s been around for over a decade and has failed to significantly reduce the number of deaths for the most leading cause of death in the US? The other two most prescribed drugs mentioned here have also failed on this premise.
It truly amazes me that we can still believe in the efficacy of these medications, even when there’s been no significant, holistic reduction in the diseases they were meant to treat. It’s not the citizens who are to blame, though. Big Pharma companies have brainwashed us into thinking they’re the only path to take when our health is suffering.
It’s a shame, really, how we’ve gone down this path. Sometimes, the solution is far simpler but more difficult to accomplish because it takes discipline and perseverance to prevail over. What I mean to say is, there are two paths you can take for a healthier you:
Which one do you think works best in the long run?
Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor. I do believe some medications are absolutely necessary for survival. (Please get vaccinated when you need to!) I simply believe that we don’t need to take nearly as much medication as we’re being prescribed today.