PILL-POPPING NOW A NATIONAL EPIDEMIC

With doctors issuing 165 million drug prescriptions a year - nine for
every citizen - specialists fear that growing demand for new
medications will overwhelm Medicare.

Public demand for new treatments, marketing by drug companies and
doctors' enthusiasm for drugs claiming fewer side-effects are causing
the national drugs bill to surge by almost 10 per cent a year.

Doctors say Australians are taking prescription drugs earlier in their
lives and remaining on such treatments for longer because of their
reduced side-effects.

For the first time, the cost of publicly funded drug treatment last
year equaled the amount GPs received from Medicare for seeing patients.

Latest figures show the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme cost taxpayers
$2.8 billion in the year to June 1998, equivalent to this year's
Federal Budget surplus.

Analysis by the Herald shows early management of heart disease is
partly responsible for the overspending, with a 25 per cent increase
in scripts for cholesterol-lowering drugs, while scripts for
anti-hypertensives increased by 8 per cent.

And doctors say antacids, asthma drugs, painkillers and
anti-depressants are all being widely prescribed either to excess or
for the wrong reasons.

"There's a move to prescribing higher cost, more sophisticated
treatments earlier on," the chief executive of the National
Prescribing Service, Ms Lynn Weekes, said. "That's been promoted by
the pharmaceutical industry and society's expectations."

A move towards preventive medication, such as the "statin" group of
cholesterol-reducing drugs, could save lives and keep people out of
hospital. But Ms Weekes said pharmaceutical companies were promoting
preventive drugs "because it's a bigger market than medication for
chronic illness".

The use of the new generation of anti-depressants, including Prozac,
and anti-diabetes drugs grew more than 10 per cent each. But most of
the cost blowout is a result of newer, high-priced drugs rather than
the volume of prescriptions. The total number of PBS-subsidised
scripts rose by less than 1 per cent to 125.1 million, and there were
another 40 million scripts that received no subsidy.

Professor David Henry, the professor of clinical pharmacology at the
University of Newcastle, said doctors were "infatuated" with the new
classes of drugs.

"Doctors tend to pay more attention to the pharmacology of drugs than
to the benefit. They get more interested in how drugs work than how
well they work."

The use of the antacid Losec, which, at $141 million a year, costs the
Government more than any other single drug brand, is possibly "double
what it should be", Dr Henry said.

"For a fairly trivial condition it can cost $1,000 per year per
patient," Dr Henry said.

"As far as they're concerned, they're getting it virtually free. You
could ruin the PBS budget with one drug."

The consultant cardiologist at Westmead Hospital, Dr David Richards,
said the surge in the use of anti-cholesterol medication was probably
justified.

"There is excellent evidence that good control of cholesterol reduces
vascular risk generally and the risk of heart attack in
particular."

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady