For those who talk of the side effects of alternate medicine.

August 1, 2005

Please read the latest investigation in UK about the adverse side effects of

prescription drugs;

Excerpts from the article;

"Allopathic medicine is founded on the belief that drugs are, all in all, a good

thing; but we are now in a society awash with medications, and we have ushered

in a killer. In a report in July 2004, the department of pharmacology and

therapeutics at Liverpool University suggested ADRs account for 5,700 deaths a

year on admission to hospital. If adverse reactions after admission were added,

this could suggest a total of 10,000 deaths, while deaths from ADRs among those

not admitted to hospital could be as many again. To put this in perspective,

3,221 people were killed on Britain's roads in 2004, and six times as many were

killed by a legally prescribed drug, according to this study's conservative

reckoning.

It has always been accepted that medicines can have dangerous side effects —

hence the so-called "risk-benefit" trade-off. Even drugs in long and common use

can cause ill in a susceptible few. And, with an industry under economic

pressure to produce new drugs, these are prescribed without knowledge of their

long-term side effects. It may take years for unwanted consequences to be known.

They could even show up a generation later, as was the case with the synthetic

oestrogen DES (diethylstilbestrol), prescribed to prevent miscarriage from

around 1950 until 1975 in the UK, when it was found to cause a rare form of

vaginal cancer in one in 1,000 girls exposed to it in the womb.

Most of us take pills at times, and we need clear information as to possible

side effects. Yet packet inserts are skimped, small-print affairs, while in

medical schools there is a paucity of teaching of clinical pharmacology and

therapeutics. Much of doctors' knowledge comes from advertisements, sales reps'

spiel, industry-sponsored seminars, and a medical press seeded with ghosted

articles that emphasise the positive."

Regards,

Jagannath.

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