Prescription medications come with costs. It's easy to recognize the copays and out-of-pocket financial costs. What about nutritional costs? Secondary diagnosis costs? (That means the drugs, themselves, can cause other symptoms that then get diagnosed as other conditions for which more medication is prescribed. Iatrogenesis, or "harm by medicine", is what that is. And it is a very real cost.) Lifestyle costs and personal empowerment costs?

This class is all about iatrogenesis, or "diseases of the drugs"--other problems that drugs used to manage chronic diseases can cause. In this episode, we'll be looking at the top 100 drugs in both volumes (numbers of prescriptions filled) and Sales (numbers of dollars spent) to understand trends in managing allergies, asthma, COPD, and respiratory infections.