Thursday 31 July 2014
Big Pharma Meds Almost Sent Me to an Early Grave, While Pot Helped Ease My Disease
‘I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease 10 years ago this August, and looking back those were some pretty horrific days. Within months of being diagnosed I was ready for my first (and hopefully only) surgery to remove over a foot of my diseased colon. At 18 years old I was getting an unintentional crash course on how the American healthcare system works, and the hell of being a human lab rat for corporate pharmaceuticals.
After almost a decade of taking and struggling to pay for Johnson & Johnson’s most profitable drug, Remicade—a drug that brought in $9 billion last year alone—I sought to find out more about this relatively new drug, which was first approved, only for use in treating patients with Crohn’s disease, by the FDA in 1998. Remicade would later be approved to treat seven more conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis and psoriasis. What I found was disappointing, but unfortunately, not all that unexpected in the American healthcare system.’
