President-elect Barack Obama should take note – health reform is about the little things just as much as it is sweeping changes to the system.

Information gathered from a batch of more than 8,500 meetings held around the country in December will be compiled and used to help design the healthcare proposal that has been in the news as of late. Obama’s transition team plans to post some of the material at change.gov.

One particular meeting took place late December 2008, between newly appointed secretary of health and human services, the former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and more than two dozen seniors During this meeting, seniors told Daschle that they placed more importance on certain things such as waiting times to see their doctor, the increasing cost of prescription drugs, and the narrow range of Medicare coverage for certain medical procedures, equipment, and treatments.

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Fibromyalgia is a devastating disease that causes chronic pain and other symptoms for those who are affected – but it’s a disease with no known cause and no standard treatment. Many people haven’t even heard of the condition, but if that’s the case it’s not because the drug industry isn’t trying hard enough.

Drug Companies’ Hundreds of Millions Help Raise Awareness of Fibromyalgia

Last year, drug industry giants Pfizer and Eli Lilly spent hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to “raise awareness” of fibromyalgia. The companies donated more than six million dollars to non-profit organizations for educational campaigns and medical conferences, too.

That’s more than the companies donated for Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. And only donations made for cancer, depression, and AIDS were higher than the donations made to further the cause of fibromyalgia.

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Off-label prescribing—the practice of prescribing medication for a condition for which it is not indicated or approved—is very common in America, particularly in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. In 2001, an estimated 21% of prescriptions for the 160 of the most commonly-used drugs were off-label.  And 75% of those off-label prescriptions were written for conditions for which there is absolutely no scientific evidence to prove they work!

The law doesn’t prevent this practice, although it does prevent pharmaceutical companies from promoting off-label prescribing. Often, there’s no real harm in off-labeling, but equally so, there’s even more often no scientific proof that those off-label drugs are doing you any good. The only evidence is what’s called anecdotal – evidence that has been noted by doctors, but there has been no scientific study carried out to provide hard proof.

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Prescription medications are expensive, and many doctors seem to become “prescription-happy.” These doctors’ first response to a patient complaint is usually to prescribe something new if something doesn’t work the first time. Even if you’re just taking one or two medications, you could be paying more than you need if you are taking brand name drugs, instead of generics.

According to a recent study, led by Dr. Aaron Kesselheim of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, this is particularly true when it comes to medications prescribed for the treatment of heart and cardiovascular conditions. According to the researchers, there is no evidence to suggest that brand name drugs work any better than their generic counterparts.

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