text: have american drugs companies gotten out of hand? are they controlling the way that medicine is practice?  is every patient waiting for that super pill to make them healthy? american medicine before the invention of penicillin was mainly nutrition.  working at a hospital i see medicine pushed by drug reps.  some of these medicines are based on the idea of the sugar pill.  if you believe it will work it will.  here is a classic senario for you that happens all the time at the hospital.  a elderly patient comes in with a cold or a cough.  instead of doing cultures and finding what is the best drug for them they give a broad spectrum antibiotic such as rocephin.  this knocks out their normal flora of bacteria in their intestines giving room for c. diff. to become the predominate bacteria.  this causes diahreah and the patient comes back for dehydration and feeling really sick because of this bacteria.  vancomyacin is then prescribed to knock out c. diff.  it does to an extent but then your normal flora of e. coli end up mutating to vanc resistant ecoli.  this is not a neccessarily a bad thing since it is not a problem while it stays in the intestines.  but by this time the antibiotics have caused yeast infections such as thrush and what not and you are very sick.  the doctor ends up having the patient cathiterized and they develope an urinary tract infection with the vre.  they then develope sepsis and end up dying.  the catch 22 is that if they had not been prescribed the rocephin this would not have happened, but the drug companies have come up with a "list" of drugs that should be given to any patient presenting to the hospital with any symptoms of pneumonia, such as a cough.  it is called "core measures".  if they don't prescribe these medicines they are looked down upon by the hospital and drug companies even though these can ultimately end up killing the patient.