Journalist Katherine Eban's investigation over more than ten years has uncovered one of the most shocking medical scandals imaginable, which affects millions of patients across the world.

In this podcast, she discusses the shocking reality of what happens or perhaps more accurately what doesn’t happen, when generic drugs that we import, are manufactured in countries with poor regulations.

When a drug is first approved, it is released with its own brand name, but once the drug’s patent expires, then other manufacturers are allowed to make cheaper generic versions of the same medication.

Now most patients and indeed many doctors think these generic drugs are the same as the brand name ones - but they are not. Current regulations only require the medications to be "bioequivalent" and they also allowed to have very different absorption rates, so may work very differently to the brand name pharmaceuticals, which has huge implications for patients.

But although that is worrying enough, many of the world’s generic drugs are made in India and China - where as Katherine explains - there is little regulation and they can be made very cheaply. In what was India’s largest pharmaceutical company – Ranbaxy - 200 of its generic drugs were revealed to have been filed with the US drug regulator, the FDA, with inadequate, falsified or completely missing data. And furthermore in other companies, an FDA investigator found in over 80 plants in India and China he visited, 80% had falsified data.

These generic drugs are sold into every country, so may well end up on the shelves of your local pharmacy, so what can we do as patients and doctors to protect ourselves?

On her website, Katherine gives some tips for consumers in A Guide To Investigating Your Own Drugs.

Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma by Katherine Eban is published by Juggernaut.

The host of this award nominated podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

Norwegian GP Dr Torkil Færø argues wearable devices that measure our heart rate and other health metrics, if used in the right way can be transformative in keeping us healthy and helping prevent disease in the future.

In his book, The Pulse Cure, he explains why he thinks far more attention should be paid to a key metric which turns out to give a surprisingly accurate snapshot of our level of stress and overall health - and that is our heart rate variability or HRV for short.

Torkil explains what it is and simple steps we can all take to improve our heart rate variability. Remarkably, it turns out that drops in our HRV may predict future illness and a higher heart rate variability has even been correlated with a better performing immune system.

The Pulse Cure - The Revolutionary Way to Balance Stress, Optimise Health and Live Longer by Torkil Færø is published by Quercus.

The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

Whistleblower Dr Carl Elliott's life changed for ever, when he tried to alert his university about the running of a drug trial which had resulted in the suicide of a patient. A patient whose mother felt should never have been enrolled in a trial in the first place.

Carl’s battle came at a huge personal and emotional cost and at the end of years of campaigning and lobbying, little had really changed.

His disillusioning experience as a whistleblower has driven him to meet others who have had similar experiences. And it seems few escape with their careers and personal lives intact. In a new book: The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the The Price of Saying No, published by WW. Norton and Company, Carl reveals his own personal painful story and that of other medical whistleblowers too.

The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/