This is the first installment in a series of articles about achieving & maintaining health that I will update from time to time. Sorry about the length of this post, folks.
I have become interested in improving my health in recent years. There is a lot of misinformation being pushed upon the public by government organizations, multinational corporations, and many others. Here's an example: for years
the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has been trying to stop American citizens from legally buying their prescription drugs from Canada. Of course this is to protect the profits of the drug companies, as you can read from the above link. This stiffles the free market & is morally wrong, in my humble opinion. Many of you have heard about the over 6,000 lawsuits that have been filed against Merck, the maker of Vioxx.
Internal documents have been discovered that prove that Merck knew of the dangers of Vioxx, but
hid that information from the public.
All prescriptions drugs have negative side effects. Some of those side effects are
quite horrible. There are safer alternatives to prescription drugs.
Did you know, if you have diarrhea, you can drink a cup of chamomile tea & the diarrhea will go away within a short time? Chamomile is also good for menstrual cramps, stress, anziety, indegestion and insomnia. Chamomile can also be used as a mouthwash for minor mouth and gum infections. Chamomile (
Matricaria rectuita or
M. chamomilla) is an herb. There are many herbs, vitamins and minerals that are safer alternatives to many dangerous prescription drugs.
I found the following 2 articles in the March/April 2006 issue of
Well Being Journal magazine. Here is a link to the first article, "
Drug Sellers Bypass Doctors." The second article is called, "Drug Companies Deceive Doctors." Here it is now for your examination:
Drug Companies Deceive Doctors
By Shane Ellison, M.Sc.Following doctor's orders is often synonymous with danger---but it doesn't have to be that way. Every year, FDA-approved drugs kill twice as many people as the
total number of U.S. deaths from the Vietnam War
(1). As the public becomes better aware of this situation, drug-related death rates will decline. Such death by medicine exists because deceit and greed, not science, are often precursors to the body of information that informs a doctor's prescribing habits. As an ex-drug chemist, I witnessed this firsthand.
This deceit comes in many forms. Medical ghostwriting and checkbook science are the most prominent. This is a situation that will change when awareness is greater on the part of the buying public, and that is one reason for this cautionary article.
Many doctors rely on peer-reviewed medical journals to learn about prescription drugs. These journals include the
Lancet, British Medical Jornal, New England Journal of Medicine and
Journal of the American Medical Association. Doctors may assume that these professional journals offer the hard science behind any given drug. This assumption is wrong. There are times that medical journals can't be trusted, thanks to medical ghostwriting. Journal publishers will ultimately benefit by reorienting their priorities to ensure honesty and ofjectivity.
Medical ghostwriting is the drug company practice of hiring Ph.D.'s to write drug reports that extol benefits and hide negative side effects. Drug company agents then recruit doctors to put their names on the completed reports as authors. These reports are then published in the medical journals
(2). The carrot for this deceitful practice is money and prestige: Ghostwriters can receive up to $20,000 per report, and the doctors receive prestige from having been published. Clearly, more honesty is called for on the part of those doctors. Patients relying on this information get bad drugs disguised as good medicine. Instead, they need to use common sense and embrace lifestyle and nutrition habits that are in their own best interest.
As deplorable as medical ghostwriting sounds, it is more common than you might think. Dr. David Healy, of the University of Wales, notes that 50% of journal drug reviews are written by ghostwriters
(3).
Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor of the
New England Jornal of Medicine, insists that he cannot find drug review authors who do not have financial ties to drug companies. Interestingly, the journal relaxed their conflict-of-interest rules in 2002
(4).
The editor of the
British Journal of Medicine has acknowledged that medical ghostwriting has become a serious problem for his publication: "We are being hoodwinked by the drug companies. The articles come in with doctors' names on them and we often find some of them have little or no idea about what they have written."
(5)Consider the testimony from the deputy editor of the
Jornal of the American Medical Association: "This [ghostwriting of journal articles] is all about bypassing science. Medicine is becoming a sort of Cloud Cuckoo Land, where doctors don't know what papers they can trust in their journals, and the public doesn't know what to believe."
(6)Other weapons of mass deception exist, such as checkbook science. As defined by Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D/., checkbook science is research intended not to expand knowledge or to benefit humanity, but instead to sell drugs. It has touched the very soul of university research, the scientific method, and the patients who serve as human subjects
(7).
Drug companies use checkbook science to sponsor their own drug research via the halls of academia and government institutions. They use money to design their own studies, interpret the results, and stuff negative data under the drug-rug. The drug-rug is a behemoth rug. It has to be. A myriad of negative drug data exists, and many people have died from hidden adverse drug effects. But as more people become aware of it, this deceptive practice and its outcomes will necessarily end.
Like medical ghostwriting, checkbook science is more common than you might think. A third of academic professors have personal financial ties to drug makers
(8). In a maneuver called the "Stealth Merger" by the
LA Times, top scientists at the National Institutes of Health also collect paychecks and stock options from the drug industry
(9). This has been going on for over 20 years
(10). Amending U.S. law, the Bayh-Dole Act, passed in 1980, allows for these flagrant conflicts of interest.
The truth ultimately buries calculated deceits. The line at the pharmaceutical trough should get shorter as this scandal becomes public. However, drug makers seem to believe they have an insurance policy for this---direct-to-consumer advertising. The oft-repeated "ask your doctor" is an advertising gimmick planned so that the "herd mentality" instinctively embraces drugs, drugs and more drugs. Again, growing public awareness of the situation will generate the impetus to look for healthy alternatives to scientifically unsubstantiated drugs created with a greed and deceit factor.
Understanding the medical ghostwriting and checkbook science behind drug manufacturing and marketing explains why so many medical doctors could have been hypnotized into prescribing potentially dangerous drugs---they are only shown the "positive" results. It also explains why modern medicine is so deadly and lucrative---the dangers, the risks have been silenced with the pen and money.
Drug companies and their stock holders and managers do not seem to take responsibility for the wanton prescription drug deceit. Drug related deaths are simply shrugged off and attributed to sickness or aging.
If the deceit continues, such prescription drugs as leviathan will silently kill more people than all the Napalm dropped on Vietnamese villages. One would hope that public awareness of this deceit will bring understanding to all those who might have prescribed or used dangerous drugs.
Shane Ellison holds a Master's degree in organic chemistry and has firsthand experience in drug design. Having abandoned his career as a medical chemist, he is dedicated to stopping prescription drug hype. He is an internationally recognized authority on therapeutic nutrition and author of Health Myths Exposed and The Hidden Truth About Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs. His books and free offers can be found at www.healthmyths.net.
This article is courtesy of Health Myths Exposed, Box 31723 Dept. 802, Santa Fe, NM 87595-1729. Phone: 505-310-2454. Contact: service@healthmyths.net
REFERENCES(1) Approximately 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. FDA-approved drugs kill 106,000-125,000 people per year when used as prescribed.
(2) Source: CBC's Marketplace. Aired March 25, 2003. Researcher: Colman Jones.
(3) Antony Barnett. Revealed: how drug firms "hoodwink" medical journals. Pharmaceutical giants hire ghostwriters to produce articles-then put doctors' names on them.
The Observer. Sunday, Dec. 7, 2003.
(4) Tufts eNews. Relaxing the Rules. Does the
New England Journal of Medicine's decision to relax its conflict of interest policy strenghen or weaken the prestigious publication? Boston (06.19.02).
(5) Revealed: how drug firms 'hoodwink' medical journals(6) Shannon Brownlee. Doctors Without Borders. Why you can't trust medical journals anymore. Washington Monthly. April 2004.
(7) Zuckerman, D. Hype in health reporting: "checkbook science" buys distortion of medical news.
International Journal of Health Services. 2003;33(2).
(8) Bekelman, J.E., Li, Y., and Gross, C.P. Scope and impact of financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research.
Journal of the American Medical Association. 289:454-465.
(9) Willman, D. Stealth merger: drug companies and government medical research.
Los Angeles Times. 2003 Dec. 7; A1, A32-3.
(10) Doctors Without Borders
Why you can't trust medical journals anymore.
I blame it all on you!! Yeah you!
How will you do on the test? Take it and find out.
November 2009January 2010
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