By Bonner Russell Cohen and AnneMarie Schieber
Review of SICK: Unmasking Big Medicine (Daily Caller News Foundation), 52 minutes, 2024
The public health establishment’s response to COVID-19—prolonged lockdowns and school closures, vaccines that provided no immunity and didn’t stop transmission, and mask mandates that served no public health function—came as a rude awakening to many people.
How could so many physicians and once-revered institutions get so many things wrong? For those who have experienced the heavy hand of Big Medicine in recent years, the pandemic only confirmed their worst fears. A documentary by The Daily Caller sheds new light on the corruption and dishonesty that pervade a health care system dominated by Big Medicine.
Cure Worse than the Illness
When a person misbehaves in public, it is not uncommon to hear someone half-jokingly say, “He’s off his meds.” He may, in fact, be on his meds, and his condition is no joking matter. SICK adroitly delves into the human wreckage left behind by a medical system that has actively promoted chemical dependency for decades.
The 52-minute film lets people caught up in the madness tell their own stories. One woman’s dependence began when she was an 18-year-old student trying to cope with the typical stresses of college life. A physician in Nashville, who had routinely prescribed painkillers to his patients, began experimenting with them himself and wound up addicted.
Another woman’s husband, Woody, was given the prescription drug Zoloft to deal with work-related stress. Over time, the man spiraled out of control and was found hanging by a rope in his garage. What are sold as anti-depressants frequently prolong and deepen depression.
Pressured and paid by Big Pharma to prescribe their latest offerings, doctors frequently downplay a drug’s side effects. In many cases, doctors may not even be fully aware of what exactly the drugs are doing to their patients, prompting one health care professional in the film to recommend patients seek the advice of pharmacists, who are generally better versed in what a pill can do.
Follow the Money
Lack of transparency and conflicts of interest abound in a system where money talks. Pointing to the influence of Big Pharma, a health and life coach says: “They fought harder against ivermectin than they did against fentanyl.” There was no money to be made from ivermectin, regardless of its effectiveness in combatting COVID-19.
The newest frontier in the ever-expanding world of Big Medicine is the lucrative opportunities presented by transgender ideology. There is good money to be made in puberty blockers and other gender-altering treatments, and Big Pharma doesn’t want to miss out. Confused adolescents undergoing the transition from childhood to teenager can wind up irreversibly mutilated for life, but that is of little concern when big bucks are at stake.
No New Ground
While SICK gives some interesting examples of earnest people harmed by pharmaceuticals, the documentary comes up short on several fronts.
Many of the cases of overprescribing are years out. The medical doctor in the film went into recovery in 2004, according to his online description, and the wife who lost her husband to suicide while on Zoloft has been a drug safety advocate for two decades. There have been more recent examples of overprescribing harm, like the Massachusetts mother accused of killing her three children while taking a cocktail of psychotropic drugs.
It is not clear how much “overprescribing” of opioids is taking place today. Legislators came down heavy on prescribing practices when the opioid crisis picked up steam a decade ago, and people who use these drugs can describe full well the hoops they must jump to get the drugs they need and take responsibly.
The documentary needed more voices of authority than mere big pharma critics. Of the five or six voices in the film, only one was a medical doctor. The documentary was dominated by the voice of Charlie Fagenholz, who was presented as “Dr. Charlie Fagenholz,” a “holistic physician.” According to his online description, Fagonholz is a chiropractor, a profession well known for its animosity to pharmaceuticals.
The “fitness trainer and life coach” described himself as “managing the largest bank in the country” at one point in his life, but it was not clear why he was featured in the film other than to promote his new profession.
Symptoms of a Broken System
Unfortunately, the film didn’t spend much time exploring what makes medical professionals so quick to pull out the prescription pad. It is easy to point the finger at aggressive marketing by Big Pharma, but you can’t sell something to an unwilling buyer.
Patients today demand “quick fixes,” whether to lose weight or deal with stress. How many patients want to do the heavy lift of serious lifestyle changes? How many doctors have the time or freedom to follow through on lifestyle recommendations? More and more, health care professionals work for big hospital corporations who demand allegiance to them, not just the patient. Fifteen-minute visits with a physician a few times a year will do little to advance effective alternatives to prescription drugs.
The other problem is third-party payers. There is no hazard in demanding any treatment at any risk when someone else is picking up the tab.
Listening to the voices in SICK about the dependence on drugs may make you sick, but any film or article that opens your eyes to the realities of health care is welcome, and for that Daily Caller should be commended.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph.D. (bcohen@nationalcenter.org) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research
AnneMarie Schieber (amschieber@heartland.org) is the managing editor of Health Care News.