GPs in mission to halt pill-popping menace
HUNDREDS of GPs are staging a grassroots rebellion to stop the blanket prescribing of drugs on the NHS.
They say family doctors are letting millions of patients down by handing over pills rather than using a change of lifestyle as the most effective medicine.
GPs in England last year prescribed 1.1 billion items at a cost of £9.2billion, with many allegedly doing more harm than good.
Instead, they argue, there should be a new focus on diet, exercise and wellbeing to beat chronic long-term conditions like diabetes, heart disease and obesity.
Leeds-based GP Dr Angela Goyal, who is leading the revolt, said: “We are prescribing too many pills. Sometimes patients need a pill but many times they don’t.
“We know most drugs do not work in most people. We have to treat many patients with drugs to derive benefit in just one patient. As a GP I am fed up of this and want this to change. What we need now is a National Health Service not a National Sick Service.”
NHS figures show the most prescribed item last year was the statin Atorvastatin, which was dispensed 37,342,946 times.
Complained
Three different classes of antidepressants were prescribed 40,470,955 times while aspirin, paracetamol and co-codamol were routinely dished out.
GPs have complained that not enough emphasis is being placed on lifestyle intervention like using nutrition and food as medicine, exercise as a way to beat mental illness and low carb diets to reverse Type 2 diabetes in a bid to tackle some of the greatest challenges facing the NHS.
There is a now a massive movement in the NHS which challenges a decades-long reliance on pills like statins. Experts say disputing what healthcare professionals are taught could save tens of millions of lives and prevent the NHS wasting billions on drugs that do not work.
They use heart disease, which kills around 180,000 a year in the UK, as an example. For decades it was thought it was caused by saturated fat but many experts are now convinced insulin resistance is the biggest contributory factor.
Some claim there is no evidence of a single person suffering a heart attack or dying from not taking statins which are the most commonly prescribed drugs in the UK despite many complaining of side-effects.
In 2007 doctors issued 11,168,367 prescriptions for Atorvastatin. That number rocketed to 32,321,934 in 2016 and jumped to 37,342,946 last year.
The £9.2billion figure for the number of drugs issued by family GPs in England relates to the net ingredient cost and excludes VAT and dispensing costs.
The drugs that cost the most were those used to treat diabetes with the NHS spending £1billion on the disease. Antidepressants cost £235million. Including hospital dispensing the cost of drugs handed out each year on the NHS comes to more than £17billion.
Consultant cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra – whose bestselling book The Pioppi Diet helped overweight Labour Party deputy leader Tom Watson shed seven stone and put his Type 2 diabetes into remission – said lifestyle changes like cutting out sugar and ultra-processed food, a daily 30-minute risk walk, meditation and at least seven hours a sleep each night would improve the nation’s health more dramatically than anything that comes out of a bottle.
He said: “The almost four decade campaign to lower cholesterol through diet and drugs has failed to curb heart disease because the fundamental hypothesis was fatally flawed. The fear of cholesterol has driven a multibillion dollar cholesterol lowering diet and drug industry that has actually increased the risk of heart disease, and been a major root cause of Type 2 diabetes and obesity epidemic by driving up consumption of ‘low fat’ foods laden with sugar”.
Official guidelines say men should consume a maximum of 2,500 calories a day and women 2,000.
The NHS Eatwell Guide, drawn up
by Public Health England, says meals should include potatoes, bread, rice, pasta or other starchy carbohydrates, with low or reduced-fat cheese and yogurt and preferably unsaturated oils and spreads. But experts claim the advice is wrong and has turned us into a sugar-obsessed nation reliant on medication.
Processed foods now make up half the average Briton’s diet with most coming from starchy and sugary sources. More than two-thirds of men and almost six in 10 women are now overweight or obese.
The obesity crisis sweeping the UK means 12 million are now at increased risk of Type 2, a preventable disease brought on by unhealthy lifestyles.
Overall, diabetes now costs the NHS more than £10billion a year – not just drugs but hospital stays and amputations etc – 10 per cent of its budget. By 2035 there will be five million Type 2 sufferers, Public Health England estimates.
NHS England said: “GPs have always provided advice on exercise and diet and encouraged patients to get more active to improve their lifestyles so they do not need medication and the long-term plan for the NHS will include further steps to keep people healthy.”