Do you take generic drugs? You might have been told by your doctor or pharmacist that a generic drug is just the same as a brand name drug only less expensive. You may have been lead to believe that choosing a generic medication was no different than buying generic toothpaste or cotton swabs. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Generic drugs can be very harmful to your health.

Especially if those drugs have been obtained overseas.

How many times have you been to the pharmacy to pick up a new medication only to be told, "Your insurance will cover this for a $5.00 co-pay, but if you want the name brand, it will cost you $85.00"?

About 10-15 years ago, insurance companies changed a physician's ability to write "DAW" (Dispense as Written) on a prescription by simply refusing to cover the name brand if it was available in generic form. This increased profits for the insurance companies who, in turn, forced you to gamble with your health with questionable generic medications.

Ranbaxy - Indian Generic Drug Manufacturer - Sued for Fraud

It is estimated that more than 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients prepared for use in the United States have come from overseas. Finished pills and capsules also come from overseas where the FDA is unable to safely regulate them. This means even if the active ingredient, the drug itself, comes from America, it could still be placed in an unregulated gel-cap that comes from another country.

The danger of taking any generic medication from a foreign distributor is the incredible negligence with which some of these manufacturers practice. Ranbaxy, a well-known Indian generic drug manufacturer, has recently been fined $500M dollars for drug fraud.

This company manufactures generic Lipitor, Accutane, anti-retroviral drugs, antibiotics, and diabetes medications, just to name a few. Each of these drugs have been known to cause terrible side effects, break down more quickly than their branded counterparts or simply not work at all. This means you could be taking an antibiotic for a particularly nasty strain of flu or even nightmare bacteria and the medication might be no more effective than a sugar pill!

Unlike strictly-regulated FDA-approved drug manufacturers like GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, Ranbaxy made a calculated and purposeful decision to game the system and gamble with your health. In order to push their drugs onto the market faster, they often skipped crucial steps in their testing procedures, filling in and falsifying data whenever necessary.

They also often smuggled brand-name drugs into the country where they would use them as stand-ins for their own bioequivalence studies. They were given the stamp of approval by the FDA and allowed to carry on dispensing dangerous generic drugs to pharmacies and clinics all over the world. Chances are, you've taken one or are taking one right now.

Since it is simply not possible to provide the type of oversight, testing, and approval that FDA does with manufacturers in the United States, Ranbaxy and facilities like it literally get away with murder for years and sometimes decades before they are found out and closed down.

"The reality is that we simply don't know what we're dealing with," says Dr. Roger Bate, an international pharmaceutical expert. "No one has actually gone into these sites to expose what's going on."

This is not just a case of a company cutting corners of being lax about their practices. It is outright fraud in which the company knowingly manufactured and distributed sub-standard generic drugs while doing whatever they could to deceive regulators.

When Ranbaxy opened several corporate facilities in the United States, they recruited pharmaceutical veterans to work for them. One of these veterans was Dr. Kathy Spreen, a 15-year veteran of Wyeth and AstraZeneca. After questions arose about Ranbaxy's generic version of Accutane, she asked their Global Manufacturing Director to send documentation showing the antibiotic gel was created using good manufacturing practices.

When he offered to send her a falsified yet authentic-looking certificate, she was appalled. There was absolutely no attempt to hide that fact that this was a fraudulent document created on a company computer. He somehow expected her to accept the document and pass it off as the genuine article, going along with "the game".

"There was a total lack of understanding," she says, "of what it meant to be ethical and what it meant to actually protect the patient."

Even though Ranbaxy's version of the drug, Accutane was found to degrade far in advance of its expiration date and despite that fact that in 2012, an entire batch of generic Lipitor was recalled due to the finding of glass shards in the pills, Ranbaxy still stayed in business!

They were granted the right to produce new drugs within months of the misconduct even though the company manipulated nearly ever aspect of its manufacturing process. They were finally shut down in late 2012 and plead guilty of US drug fraud in May of 2013. Despite this, these generic drugs may still be on your pharmacist's shelf.

To see if you or any member of your family is currently taking a Ranbaxy drug, refer to this list of Ranbaxy products.

Doctors are Trained to Prescribe

Many conventional doctors prescribe medication unnecessarily and it can be easy to demonize the practice and think that all allopathic doctors are intentionally trying to harm their patients. I don't believe this is the case. Most conventional physicians I know (and since I'm an osteopath, I definitely put myself in this category) come into medicine to heal the sick. They wanted to make lives better for others.

Unfortunately, by the time they were finished with medical school, they were filled with training, protocol, and procedures that went directly against their original healing intention. Doctors are not trained in school to get to the root cause of disease and offer preventative tips, they are trained to prescribe.

Take a cardiologist friend of mine, for example. She's been practicing for 25 years and in a recent conversation with her I discovered that she places virtually everyone on generic Lipitor. Even the patients with perfectly normal lipids such as a total cholesterol of 170-180 and triglycerides of 70, etc.

I asked her why she did this and she simply said, "Because they are free at Meijer". Meijer is a large grocery chain out here in the Midwest and it has a policy of giving away prescriptions of 30-40 of the most popular generics as a loss-leader to get folks in the door. Guess who makes their generic products? Ranbaxy!

Concerned for her patients as well as her license, I explained what I had learned about the dangers of unregulated drugs from overseas and she was shocked. She had no idea. Why is she placing folks with perfectly normal lipids and no sign of heart disease on medication?

Because she was trained to.

This is called polypharmacy. Many of the patients I see take anywhere between 5 and 10 medications each day, many of which interact badly with each other.

The Dangerous Side Effects of Generic Drugs

When you go to your local pharmacy to pick up a medication your doctor has prescribed for you, you expect it's safe. You may talk with the pharmacist about possible side effects or interactions but you expect it to work the way your doctor described.

If you get a prescription that has been distributed from an overseas marketer like Ranbaxy, you could be doing serious harm to your health. Though generic medications are required to contain the exact same amount of active ingredient as the generic, the filler and binder ingredients could be quite different. It's usually the fillers and preservatives patients have a negative reaction to.

Other problems with generic medications:

• They do nothing

Oftentimes, generic medications such as generic Lipitor, generic antibiotics, and antiretroviral medications may be of absolutely no benefit to your health because they contain little to no active ingredients. This means, you may be using a medication that does nothing to lower your cholesterol or kill off a dangerous bacterial infection. In certain critical situations, this could be the difference between life and death.

• They break down/expire too quickly

Generic Accutane (an antibiotic acne cream) was shown to break down way before the expiration date. Expired antibiotics, whether topical or oral, are very dangerous to take. They can increase in potency to toxic levels, leading to kidney damage and kidney failure.

• Foreign objects

Generic Lipitor from Ranbaxy was recalled in November of 2012 due to shards of glass being found in the pills.

• Filler side effects

When generic drugs are shipped from overseas, there is no telling what type of binders, fillers or coloring agents are being used or if they are in any way regulated. Allergic reactions, anaphylaxis, headaches, muscle weakness, gastrointestinal problems, mood swings, irritability, and chronic fatigue are just a few of the possible side effects to these additives.

Avoid the Side Effects of Generic Medications

If you take any type of generic medication, I would strongly advise talking with your pharmacist about where the medication came from. If you are experiencing any unusual side effects, talk with your doctor immediately.

To avoid the side effects of generic medications:

• Ask Your Doctor to "Dispense as Written"

Most doctors will prescribe generic medication by default. It's important you ask that he prescribe a branded medication to avoid negative side effects. Most likely, depending on your insurance company, your doctor will have to pre-authorize your medication and tell them it means your health that you have a brand name.

If cost is prohibitive for you, there are several pharmacy assistance programs to cut costs. Try looking into Partners for Prescription Assistance, RX Assistance, or Needy Meds.

• Make Dietary and Lifestyle Changes

Many chronic conditions like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes can be managed through dietary and lifestyle changes. Highly-processed foods contain dangerous additives, synthetic sweeteners, fillers, binding agents, and trans fats that lead to the development of chronic disease.

I advise all of my patients to slowly transition from a junk-food diet to a whole-food diet. This means eating more organic vegetables, fruits, beans, legumes, meat, poultry, and wild-caught fish. I also highly advise using spices to treat certain conditions naturally. For example, garlic and cayenne can lower high cholesterol levels while cinnamon has been shown to be effective for getting diabetic blood sugar stabilized.

Lifestyle changes are just as important as dietary changes when it comes to improving your health without the need for medications. I advise all my patients to quit smoking, lose weight the healthy way, and get regular exercise.

• Use Whole-Food Supplements

For many conditions that can be treated with prescription medications, there's a whole-food supplement that can provide similar results without the side effects.

Diamond Nutritional's Foundation Vitamins

Even if you eat a very well-balanced diet, you may still have some nutritional gaps. This is why I recommend Diamond Nutritional's Foundation Vitamins. This healing formula contains a health-promoting blend of vitamins and minerals your body needs to function at its best.

Diamond Nutritional's Vitamin D3 5,000 IU

Vitamin D deficiency is the number one vitamin deficiency in the United States and Canada. It has been linked to the development of autoimmune disease, mental health problems, cognitive dysfunction, and even melanoma skin cancer.

Conventional medicine suggests that vitamin D supplementation should be 400 IU or less. However, though my decades of experience working with patients suffering from chronic disease, I've discovered this is not nearly enough.

This is why I created Diamond Nutritional's Vitamin D3 5,000 IU. This formula contains vitamin D derived from whole-food sources that are instantly bioavailable to your body for easy absorption and quality immune system support.

Diamond Nutritional's Cholesterol Support Formula

Statin drugs are dangerous for your health, whether they are generic or not. This is why I made it a priority to create a cholesterol support formula that addresses your health needs without the alarming side effects. Diamond Nutritional's Cholesterol Support Formula offers a proprietary blend of nutrients including artichoke leaf extract, which has been scientifically-proven to lower blood serum cholesterol levels.

Diamond Nutritional's Diacose

For my diabetic patients, I recommend Diamond Nutritional's Diacose. It's an all-natural diabetic support supplement designed to lower your blood glucose levels and improve the way your body uses insulin. It contains essential nutrients including gymnema sylvestre, which clinical studies have shown can effectively treat both type 2 diabetes but type 1 as well by causing a regeneration of beta cells within the pancreas.

With your effort and the help of your doctors, it is often possible to taper off many maintenance medications and eliminate your need for them. The healthier your diet, lifestyle, and overall outlook on life, the less you'll have to rely on any type of prescription drug.