Probably not going to change your mind, but possibly the mind of someone reading this who's on the fence.

On the one hand, yes, for-profit healthcare can be incentived to come up with unnecessary treatments, or with over prescribing medications that have their time and place. That's how the opium epidemic came to be, and that's why ozempic is trendy among those who don't really need it.

On the other hand, healthcare isn't for-profit everywhere in the world, and neither is research. Especially the latter is often publicly funded. With publicly funded services, the most efficient way to go about health care is to only do necessary treatments and to try and get people off treatment once they don't need it anymore.

Yes, we have more medications now than ever before. But that's because research is progressive. We're learning more and more about illnesses and how to best treat or even cure them. That's why life expectancy is on the rise pretty much everywhere where the general public has access to shelter, food, and affordable healthcare.

The fact that research is progressive is also why you're seeing more illnesses, especially mental ones, pop up. Some decades ago, we simply didn't have diagnostic criteria for mental illnesses that we do now. So, for example, autism just wasn't called autism. Autistic people were just described as odd, crazy, rude, unsociable, lazy etc. For that reason, it makes sense to see a correlation between the number of illnesses and the number of medications, but that doesn't mean the meds are causing the illnesses. If anything, it's the other way around: recognizing more illnesses makes for the need for more medications.

Every medication was created for a purpose and has years and years of science and studies behind it. If we just prescribed random shit that doesn't help, why would we bother with that?

However, that doesn't mean there's no over prescribing going on and that there's no, for lack of a better term, evil plots by big pharma. The opium epidemic was willingly created by pharmaceutical companies for the sake of profit. That doesn't mean that morphine etc. where just developed for that evil plot. It's a legit necessary painkiller in many cases.

So to sum up: the meds are all necessary, even if they're sometimes over prescribed for profit in some places.

For me if I have a headache I don't take a drug for it because its unessential to make the headache go away. If I have a bad reaction to a drug I read the leaflet to see what I should do. Big pharma being a thing is because people pay good money and being a publicly traded company is the fastest way to grow and scale. But doing that causes the business to lose autonomy over their decision making, which is what leads to the scenes in America were people pay £1000 for insulin despite it being cheap to make. And alot of that money goes into research and development of new drugs for illnesses and diseases that people suffer from along side the people who have hundreds of thousands in the stock market who enrich themselves from the profits.