Your Health vs. Their Profit: HBO Talks About The Billion Dollar Prescription Scam

HBO’s “Last Week Tonight”:  Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars a year, marketing to doctors.  Drugs are prescribed for unrelated symptoms.  Doctors are heavily incentivized to write more prescriptions.

As you read this article and watch the HBO video, consider:  have you ever gone to the optometrist and not been sold prescribed something?   How about that mantra of “it’s genetic, there is no cure”?

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If you are a long time reader of this site and have been rehabilitating your vision, you undoubtedly have gone through the sense of incredulity of the whole myopia scheme.  First you were skeptical of how rehab could possibly be real, then as you gained first hand positive experience you were left wondering how nobody talks about it.

Alex does often mention the fact that there is simply no money in curing myopia.  No money in medicine is like having a car without gas in it.  If all the studies and science is the car, the money is the gas.  Without money the medical school professors aren’t getting paid to teach.  Without money nobody can open an office to provide rehabilitation.  Without money there can be no advertising for sites and papers and magazines to talk about rehab.

But that’s not all.

People are also against rehab.  Not everyone, but give 10 people the option of a quick fix pill or years or effort, and most of them will opt for the pill.  It’s human nature.  And of course the “competition” will do anything to squash rehab talk.  The competition being the billion dollar lens industry, who stands to loose all and gain nothing from it.  Let’s not forget also all the practitioners who have been doing not much more than prescribing lenses for years and decades.  Would any of them want to admit to the possibility that they were wrong?  Of course not.  Nobody wants to be wrong, least of all professionally.

The clip below from “Last Week Tonight” takes a look at the billions of dollars that go into pushing prescriptions.  Look at this as the bigger picture, of health and medicine and prescriptions.  Optometry is but a footnote in commercialized medicine, though naturally the exact same premise applies.