Big Pharma is lower key, but still in control at Psychiatric Convention

As reported in the article, No Free Pens But Pharma Influence Still Felt at Psychiatric Meeting, Big Pharma is trying to be less noticeable, but is still in control of the psychiatric industry.

Are Flu Vaccines useless?

Interesting article examining the science behind flu vaccines: Does the Vaccine Matter?

As is the case with so many drugs, the science is just not there to back up the claims.

Antipsychotic Drugs Kill One in Twenty Elderly Patients

From the Guardian, May 26, 2008:

Elderly dementia patients prescribed antipsychotic drugs are at three times the risk of a serious health problem or dying within a month of treatment, compared to those not given the drugs, Canadian researchers said on Monday.

The medications have been used by doctors to treat aggression in people who are not psychotic or schizophrenic, but there are risks for elderly dementia patients prescribed the drugs, according to Dr. Paula Rochon of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, and colleagues.

"Of residents newly admitted to a nursing home, 17 percent are started on antipsychotic drugs within 100 days of their admission," often for short periods to control delirium, delusions or aggressive behavior, Rochon wrote.

"Antipsychotic drugs should be prescribed with caution even for short-term therapy," she concluded in the report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Three years ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required warnings on antipsychotic drugs notifying patients and doctors of the risks of heart problems or infections in elderly dementia patients.

Previous research has suggested the drugs cause dry mouth and difficulty swallowing, which can lead to pneumonia. Side effects such as dizziness can increase the risk of falls.
The seven-year study of more than 40,000 people age 65 or older -- half in nursing homes -- found 5.2 percent of the nursing homes residents died within a month of being given one of the newer class of so-called atypical antipsychotic drugs...

Atypical antipsychotic drugs, which the study said had been available for about a decade, include risperidone, marketed by Johnson & Johnson as Risperdal; olanzapine, made by Eli Lilly and Co under the brand name Zyprexa; and quetiapine, sold by AstraZeneca Plc under the brand name Seroquel.

Complete article here: The Guardian: Antipsychotics given for dementia pose risks-study

Incredible new antidepressant (satire)

Pharmaceutical maker, LillyGlaxoWyeth, has just announced the launch of their latest product, Placebozac.

Placebozac (also known my its chemical name "placebo") is an antidepressant that was proven in a recent study to be just as effective as fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone). You can read the results of the study by the University of Hull here: "Prozac Doesn't Work"

"The great advantage with Placebozac over the traditional antidepressants," said spokesperson Ima Fake, "is that it doesn't have the usual minor side-effects of psychiatric drugs such as suicide, violent behavior, depression, anxiety, bizarre dreams, emotional numbing, delusions, hallucinations, headaches, heart attacks, hostility, impotence, psychotic episode, paranoia, seizures, sexual dysfunction, homicidal ideation and all the rest. There is even a possibility that if people switch to Placebozac the number of school shootings may decrease. Although, as a member of the pharmaceutical industry, I will say right here and now that antidepressants have nothing whatsoever to do with school, postal or any other kind of shootings, however, our marketing department insisted I mention it."

The new drug will be available soon at only $200 for a bottle of 40, 10mg tablets. In the mean time you can get a sample at a reduced introductory price from your local candy store - just ask for "sugar pills".

Addictive Prescription Drugs

I just found out about a radio show that addresses the widespread, but little known problem of prescription drug addiction. The show is called Prescription Addiction Radio and you can hear the shows on the Listen to Past Shows page.

I listened on Sunday (Heroin-Cocaine-Morphine -Nothing New as Silence Continues.... Youth visit the Studio - Comments from Generation Rx) and was impressed.

The host has good data and his guests were three young adults who know about this problem. One guest works at a clinic that helps people get off prescription drugs and he related some horrors of prescription drug addiction.

It's amazing how uninformed doctors will give out dangerous, addictive drugs as if they were candy. One caller to the show had been on Methadone for six years. Six years of prescription drugs that resulted in addiction that he is still trying to get over. The amazing thing is that if you look up Methadone on the Internet you will find people extolling its virtues! It's sad to see what great PR huge amounts of money from drug companies can buy.

Anyway, I recommend you listen to the show. If you aren't in an area where it is broadcast you can listen to it on the net.

Another Shooter = Another Guy on Antidepressants

The evidence is overwhelming. How many more people have to die before these drugs are banned?

More on Drug Companies Hiding Negative Findings

This from the New York Times: Researchers Find a Bias Toward Upbeat Findings on Antidepressants

The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs’ true effectiveness, a new analysis has found.

Some of us have known this for a long time but it is good to see it finally validated by "authority". Perhaps some lives will now be saved by people deciding not to take these drugs. What would be even better is if some legal action were taken against these drug companies for the damage they have done to people over the years because of the lies they've told.

Pharmaceutical Companies Are Hiding Negative Studies of Antidepressants

A report just published in the New England Journal of Medicine says that nearly a third of antidepressant drug studies are never published in the medical literature and nearly all these unpublished studies happen to show that the drug being tested did not work.

The researchers say it in the most polite and unaccusative way, but the obvious interpretation is that if a drug study comes up negative then the drug companies hide it.

The report found that the few negative studies that were published were rewritten to present the study as if it were successful. In the words of the researchers, "Not only were positive results more likely to be published, but studies that were not positive, in our opinion, were often published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome."

As I said the researchers were very polite, but not me. As far as I'm concerned Big Pharma is hiding the negative results because they think it will hurt their profits. They don't care that their drugs harm people, they only care if something harms their profits.

Read about the study here: Data on Antidepressants Often Shelved

News Host Experiences The Truth about Drugs

CNN News Headlines host, Glenn Beck, experienced first hand the truth about drugs when he went to an emergency room in great pain.

What was expected to be an outpatient procedure put Beck in the hospital for five days, with doctors offering a medicine cabinet's worth of drugs to ease his pain. The drugs made him hallucinate and briefly suicidal, Beck said. "By Saturday night if they had come into my room with a handgun and said, `OK, we can give you some more medication or take this gun and blow your head off' ... I would have honestly taken the handgun at that point and ended it." (read the article)

The suicide inducing effects of certain medical drugs has been well documented, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise, but unfortunately few people know that some drugs, especially psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants, cause a condition called "suicidal ideation," a state in which the person on the drug fixates on thoughts of suicide and may actually commit suicide.

Pharmaceutical companies are forced to publish the side effects of their drugs, so next time you see an ad for a drug in a magazine or newspaper go find the list of side-effects. If you look hard enough and use a magnifying glass, you'll see them. Of course, at that point you have to wade through the carefully worded medical-speak that is used to hide the horrendous side effects these drugs have.

For more information check this page: Side Effects of Psychiatric Drugs

Vitamins are useless and dangerous???

The Reader's Digest magazine has once more proven itself to be the ally of its advertisers. If you look at a copy of Reader's Digest you'll notice that the majority of ads are for drugs, so it comes as no surprise that in the latest edition of this mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry the main article is called "Vitamin Hoax". Yes, the message of the article is that not only are vitamins useless but they are even dangerous.

If you are a person who reads without much evaluation of the information you will be frightened off taking any vitamins or other supplements. For example, vitamin E is toxic and vitamin C is completely useless at helping with a cold. So get out the NyQuil and drug yourself into oblivion while making a nice profit for the drug companies.

If, however, you are a person who pays attention to what you read and you evaluate the information, you will notice a couple of things:

On vitamin E the article doesn't say what sort of vitamin E the tests were done with. This is a huge omission. If you take lots of Alpha-Tocopherol (which is what most vitamin E supplements are) they sure it could be toxic, but it isn't vitamin E. Vitamin E is made up of many tocopherols and the correct sort to take is the vitamin E containing "mixed-tocopherols". So right away we see that the study was a bogus study because it didn't study vitamin E but instead one small part of it. Sort of like studying a tire and making pronouncements about cars.

On Vitamin C the article once more doesn't say what sort of vitamin C. Was it plain ascorbic acid? Did it include bioflavanoids? But what is even more telling is that the tests were done with 200 mg of Vitamin C per day. Wow - 200 mg? That's like going to a burning 3 story building, throwing a glass of water on it and saying that water is useless for putting out fires. Every place I've every looked to see how much Vitamin C to take if you get a cold, it says you take 1000 mg per hour until you get the runs, then you take 1000 mg less than that each day until the cold goes away.

So, if you have the misfortune to be stuck somewhere for a long period and the only reading matter is the Reader's Digest, be warned!

You are not alone. So SPEAK UP!

According to a recent survey by Consumer Reports National Research Center the majority of Americans know about the problems with the corrupt relationship between the FDA and the Pharmaceutical Industry.

Consumer Advocate Mike Adams gives details of the survey in his article, Americans fed up with drug industry influence, FDA corruption, reveals remarkable Consumer Reports survey.

In case you didn't know, right now:

• The FDA does NOT have the power to require warning labels on drugs with known safety problems. The Food and Drug Administration must negotiate safety warning labels with a drug maker. Isn't it nice to know that your health and life are points of negotiation.
• Pharmaceutical companies PAY THE FDA to review and approve their drugs.
• Pharmaceutical companies can bury negative drug trials, and the FDA has in fact been caught conspiring with drug companies to keep negative drug data secret from the public.
• Currently, doctors who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in "consulting fees" from drug companies are not only allowed to vote on the recommendations for FDA approval of their drugs, there is not even any FDA requirement to disclose such conflicts of interest.
• And more! Read about it in Mike Adams' article.
  

Once you realize that the survey showed that the majority of Americans are outraged over this corruption then perhaps you won't be shy about raising your voice and demanding reforms.

History Repeating Itself - The Medical Industry Makes a Profit while People Die

I just read this fascinating piece that covers the history of the relationship between the American Medical Association and Big Tobacco: Doctors, American Medical Association hawked cigarettes as healthy for consumers. You may not believe this but for 30 years the medical establishment defended Big Tobacco and for another 30 various medical "experts" continued to pretend that cigarettes didn't damage your health.

It is frightening to realize that for decades "experts" and "authorities" on health promoted something that kills people slowly and painfully. The first study linking cigarettes to cancer came out in 1930 and it wasn't until 1964 that the Surgeon General published a report on the dangers of cigarettes, that's 34 years. Following this Big Tobacco continued to pay doctors to defend them and it wasn't until the late 1990's that court cases and whistleblowers finally made it impossible for anyone to claim that cigarettes were not linked to all sorts of diseases.

It is a sad commentary on the educational system that this sort of criminality can be repeated and the majority of the population has no clue. From 1930 to the late 1990's it was Big Tobacco that was pouring millions into the PR machine and into the pockets of doctors to hide the truth about the dangers of cigarettes. Now we have Big Pharma doing exactly the same thing to hide the fact that their hugely profitable drugs are killing and damaging people.

How many more decades and how many more deaths before the truth is finally acknowledged and the criminals are brought to justice?

Pharmaceutical Reps Manipulating Doctors

So you think doctors make informed decisions about the drugs they prescribe? Think again:

Read more about Gwen Olsen and her book Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher

Another Expose on the Dangers of Psychiatric Drugs

The latest edition of Whistleblower Magazine carries an investigative report on the link between psychiatric drugs and the horrific stories of violence, killing and suicide we read about so often: MANIA: The shocking link between psychiatric drugs, suicide, violence and mass murder.

Just the description of the article contains a long list of examples of horrific crimes committed by people on psychiatric drugs. If I worked for a drug company or was an FDA official who had approved such drugs then the execution of the former head of China's FDA (Chinese applaud ex-official's execution) would make me seriously think about changing my profession or perhaps moving to a country with no extradition.

Taking Advantage of Parents

There is nothing worse for the parents of a baby or young child than having something wrong with the kid and no way to communicate to find out what is the real trouble. I know it was a relief for me when my daughter learned to talk: If she started crying I could ask her what was wrong and get an answer I could do something about.

But for parents with kids still too young to talk the situation can be horrible. They are desperate and are searching for help. So I find it abhorrent to learn of a psychiatrist taking advantage of such parents and recommending extremely powerful psychiatric drugs for babies and toddlers based on NO TESTS. The drugs aren't even approved for use on children, never mind babies. What are these drugs going to do to a forming brain and nervous system? What happens in 10 years when we find that these drugs have caused irreparable harm to these kids?

This sickening abuse of parents and young children is exposed in this article from the Boston Globe: Misguided standards of care. Not surprisingly this psychiatrist gets lots of funding (millions) from the pharmaceutical industry.

Education doubling as Advertising

When drug companies take over the education of doctors is it any wonder that doctors prescribe drugs without knowing the side-effects? When GlaxoSmithKline writes the course then it promotes its own diabetes drug Avandia (which has been found to cause heart disease) and hardly mentions a safer drug from a competitor.

In an article in the New York Times, a professor at Tufts Medical School exposes "Education that doubles as advertising for drug companies": Diagnosis: Conflict of Interest. It's an eye-opening read.

Pharmaceutical Company Recruitment Schemes and Teen Suicide

A researcher has discovered that most child suicides in Florida were by children on psychotropic drug such as anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. Would it surprise you to learn that there are FDA warnings on such drugs that specifically mention that these drugs can cause suicide?

Really we shouldn't be surprised that the warnings say the drugs cause kids to kill themselves and sure enough the statistics show that most child suicides are by children on these drugs.

The researcher analyzed every autopsy and toxicology report on every child suicide in the state of Florida from 2000 to 2004. "The majority," he says, "had already received psychiatric drug treatment even with the FDA warnings that say these drugs can cause mania, suicide, psychosis, worsening depression and even homicidal thoughts."

Right now the big pharmaceutical companies are busy (as one executive said on the Bloomberg Business Channel) "booming their share of the pediatric market." They use such recruiting schemes as TeenScreen and having "authorities" in the psychiatric industry promote the idea that toddlers need to be on anti-psychotic medication. The end result for the "market share" (or perhaps we should use the older word "children") is death, labeling for life and all the other adverse physical and mental side-effects caused by these drugs.

Read this two part article and then take some action:
Lawmakers Want to End Big Pharma Recruitment Schemes - Part 1
Lawmakers Want to End Big Pharma Recruitment Schemes - Part 2

More on TeenScreen:
The Making of Mental Patients - Inside TeenScreen
TeenScreen - What is it?

Sign the petition:
Stop TeenScreen's Unscientific and Experimental "Mental Health Screening" of American School Children
Then contact your elected representative and ask him or her to support bill H.R. 2387: To prohibit the use of Federal funds for any universal or mandatory mental health screening program.

When is it correct to prescribe Psychiatric Drugs?

We hear various opinions about psychiatric drugs. Some say they are over-prescribed, some say they are correctly prescribed. Tom Cruise got into hot water with the pharmaceutical industry for saying they should never be prescribed.

Rather than answer the question I'll leave it to a psychiatrist, Douglas C. Smith, M.D., who has a very clear opinion and gives a very convincing argument to back up that opinion: When should psychiatric drugs be prescribed?

Here's something to make the FDA and Drug Companies Think Twice

In the US, if a drug, approved by the FDA, is later found to kill people or have horrendous side-effects (such as thalydamide, fen-phen, vioxx, paxil, etc.) then it is withdrawn and maybe the drug company has a law suit in which they have to pay out a few millions, which is nothing compared to the billions they make from such drugs. But that's usually the end of it and life and profit making goes on: FDA staffers and directors later get lucrative jobs with major pharmaceutical corporations or affiliated entities (such as PR firms) and the drug companies continue making billions by selling dangerous drugs to an unsuspecting public.

Things in China are a little different: China's ex-food and drug chief sentenced to death. He took bribes and approved drugs that killed people. Is that so very different from our own FDA? They approve drugs that kill people and one could view lucrative jobs in drug companies or related entities to be a form of bribery. I'm not a particularly blood thirsty person and I don't agree with the death penalty, but perhaps we should take notice of what happened in China and get a bit tougher on the people responsible for approving harmful drugs.