Surgeon Gerard Delepine ended the conference “Preventing prostate cancers through PSA: financial scandal, human destruction”: “PSA tests must be banned.” Shortly afterwards, during the meal, this journalist told the two doctors next to him that in Euskal Herria most of them would be surprised by reading these words. They were astonished. “But, man, that prostate cancer prevention has been questioned here for a long time!”

It will be in France, because in Spain, including the Southern Basque Country, many imagine that you are making sensationalism with people's diseases. How to question prostate cancer prevention campaigns, let alone mass mammography screening for women's breast cancer? Rights we have just acquired!

And yet, there was no alternative doctor at the Bobigny meetings at the University of Paris XIII, they were the reluctant doctors, one of whom had been head of the ethics committee of the college of doctors, another of the director of the cancer institute... For the second consecutive year, they met to analyze the commodification of medicine: the excessive medicalization of the person, excessive diagnoses and treatments, and its reverse, that is, the insufficient attention that more and more citizens suffer. A few weeks ago, the debate on mammograms was mentioned in an Upcoming Net (2363). ), the scandal of prostate prevention campaigns can be a bloody example of the control that multinationals have acquired over human health.

“Touchez-pas à ma prostate”

Dr. Delepine put a number to the arguments of the well-known French campaign “Don’t touch my prostate!”: “France loses EUR 500 million a year to mutilate people.” Mutilate?

Among the documents that the institution has on its website, Formindep, a reference for many doctors (“For training and medical information that is of no more interest than human health”), one of them summarizes the advice that the family doctor should give to a man from the age of 50: “If you want to know my recommendation, the strategy is simple: more harm than benefits await from those tests. That is the view of the Higher Health Authority of France, of the United States, and of many expert associations worldwide. I do not tell you that you will not have prostate cancer: 3% of men die from it. Fortunately, it hits older men: The average age of 80 years, below 70 years, only kills 0.1% on average.

I do not trust these tests as the health authorities, it does not save lives (...). On the contrary, this campaign sometimes causes sexual disabilities and dizziness in men of early ages, as well as more serious accidents from prostate biopsies and other treatments.”

Operating healthy people

As many urologists are supporters of PSA protein (the controversial marker that has been considered representative of prostate cancer cells) and finger touching the grandeur of the prostate, leading to more and more doctors against these campaigns. In his view, statistics show that mortality rates do not decrease and, in return, destroy the lives of many healthy men. There has been much talk about men who have lost sexual ability from prostate surgery and those who cannot control their urine. But the matter goes much further, as was denounced in Bobigny.

Some cancer cells can be found in the prostatas of many men over 50 years of age, in half of men over 60 years of age. But only a few of them will turn into tumors, some of which will develop and some of which will be fatal. Forminded says: “The predictability of PSA is 30%, that is, 70 out of 100 who have a ‘non-normal’ PSA have no reed.”

In Bobigny, Yver, the young anato-pathologist, spoke. This specialist, who analyzes the samples the surgeons send him, so he can tell if they have cancer and what kind of cancer, explained that more and more prostatas and other completely healthy organs arrive. On other occasions, they have a few tumor type cells... "And how do you designate them?" he wondered aloud. And after all, when he heard an oncologist in the room, he showed that there are tumors that go back on their own, that is, they heal on their own... “In the end you realize that we are operating healthy people.”

Commodification of health

Check for prostate cancer, breast cancer, drugs that are mass-consumed by cholesterol... For doctors recruited in Bobigny, and for many who report around the world, they are only the symptoms of the bad path that Western medicine has taken in recent decades. What do they denounce?

As in the rest of the economy and social life, large corporations have become owners of health management. Medicine and health services in general are nothing more than commercial activities to care for people who are already sick with their health needs and, above all, with their fears. Those who spoke in this way are not young doctors, or alternative activists, these words and more raw were spoken by Dr. Didier Sicard (1938), appointed by Jacques Chirac as chairman of the ethics committee of French doctors.

Pharmaceutical multinationals have modified the entire health system according to their interests. These gigantic companies, which also work in the field of chemistry and energy, have almost total control. They move lobbies to obstruct any law as they have flourished. They change public opinion with strong marketing ramifications. They act through an army of salespeople in doctors' decisions.

Just as banks have drowned public institutions to increase their profits, the pharmacoindustry uses a similar logic: all the health money for me. Thus, health is understood, the billing of remedies and treatments has become the main objective, not the well-being of citizens.

The best of the cheapest

Multinationals have many strategies and tactics to increase their profits. In pharmacies, in addition to removing from the market many who have become cheap because of old age, the least efficient but most expensive are promoted for each disease. The communication of François Pesty in Bobigny “Efficience des médicaments de l’hypertenencia” is explanatory in this sentido.Antes to reach his critical point of view, Pesty, who has
been the head of sales in the field of medicines for hypertension, has shown that the most proven efficacy remedies are the cheapest and least prescribed by doctors, while the most expensive are the most consumed... This means billions of dollars for the public health system. But once the marketing system was put in place, who and how to get doctors and patients to change their behavior?Young doctor
Etienne Foisset exposed the importance that visitors who see every morning in the doctor's offices have in deciding on medicines. He summarized his doctoral thesis “Etude de l’impact de la tour medicale sur la qualité des prescriptions des medecins generalistes bretons”. Doctors who know French should read it, they have it on Inernet for free.Foisset, with
more than a hundred doctors studied, has come to the conclusions: the doctors who spend more minutes receiving visitors give less minutes with each patient, are the ones who read the free medical press (paid for by the advertising of the multinationals), the independent medical press paid for the least read, and are the ones who prescribe more drugs and, in addition, the most expensive on average. It was as true as it was strange.

Dr. Knock was right.

The title of the Bobigny Conference suggests that “Surmedicalisation, surdiagnostique, surtraitements” health manipulation goes far beyond consuming too many medicines and too expensive.

Like the prevention of prostate and breast cancer, paranoia has spread to possible hypercholesterolemia and many other examples show that the key to the pharmacoindustry lies in the opening of the disease market.

Suppressed the line between the sick and the healthy, as Dr. Knock, invented by Jules Romains (in the theater Knock ou le Triomphe de la médecine) said in 1923, nobody is healthy, a healthy man is the one who has not yet realized that he is sick.

The disease has spread to the risk of contracting the disease, again extending to those who approach the risk of becoming ill for treatment. If you need to change the limits on your blood tests, change and you're there, ask your doctor what's happened to your cholesterol or blood pressure in recent years.

Disease mongering is a technique that has been explained by the philosopher Elena Pasca, who encourages a fundamental blog such as Pharmacritique. The functions of sexuality have been medicalized. Naughty children or children who move because of the professor's excess stupidity are diagnosed as hyperactive and medicalized: The epidemic of hyperactivity that began in the United States in recent years is spreading in the Basque Country.

In the case of cholesterol... this journalist says that in Euskal Herria everyone looks seriously at the remains of the two famous cholesterol, the doctors in the area were astonished. Cholesterol is, like many other characteristics, the one that the doctor should analyze with the other components of the person, never individually. By not doing so, many people who do not need it are taking a cholesterol medication, which is not very interesting compared to the damage it can cause. In addition to a huge loss of money for society.

Good use of public money

Jean Claude Salomon, one of the leaders of the Bobigny conference, clearly stated: “We should not fall into the trap of those who want to impose economic cuts. When we denounce that public money is overspent on diagnostics, drugs and treatments, we are not asking for them to be lowered, but for the money to be used well.”

Excessive medicalization is insufficient. Neoliberalism is producing in health the same tendency to increase social gaps and inequalities, including the strengthening of privatization. Some are offered increasingly sophisticated medicines, but at the same time many citizens, mainly the poorest and the oldest, are left aside without basic care. Poverty affects both the quality of life of people and the hope for survival, and there are many statistical studies that show that this happens before our eyes.

The neoliberal logic of dedicating public money to private benefits is also manifested in the fact that treatments that are increasingly expensive for some and at the same time less doctors, visits less and less minutes, less and less money for personalized care. All the money goes into expensive diagnostics, expensive treatments, expensive drugs, even though its effectiveness has not been proven. This is one of the most important victories won by the multinationals.

I agree to recognize you... or die.

One of the last speakers at the Bobigny conference was Nicole Delepine. Pediatrician and oncologist, among others, have published “The Caching Face of Drugs” and “Le Cancer, a Fleau Qui Raporte” (Cancer, High Performance Business). Delight heats and heats.

The Hippocrates Oath (“First, do no harm”) is that today’s oath has become an assistant doctor. Under acculturation strategies, we've forgotten who's over three years old. Therapies used until 1990 have been discarded, but also effective ones. Medicine is for sale. It is listed on the stock market. In addition, in France, social security will lose its monopoly in 2017.

Both the physician and the patient are faced with the protocols established by the multinationals. In recent years, many of the new therapies for cancer, but also for many immaculate diseases, are not sufficiently proven, have great risks, the pharmacoindustry has managed to make them pass by forcing the controls and tests that existed before to market the drugs.

After all, Delepin- said, many of the patients who come to their hands the health system offers a terrible dilemma, or consents to be the human rabbit of the treatment I have given, or abandon it, the factual euthanasia.

The reader may complain that “the article must end so black.” Not without reason. There is a good truth: there are critical doctors who denounce this situation. In the light of this, we will also make this data known. As they were said on Bobigny's Internet, we'll summarize them on the Web.