Panelists Who Issued Cholesterol Guidelines Have Hands In Till

[Guest guest]

Saturday, December 04, 2004 commentary:

http://www.drugracket.org/001372.html

 

Corruption exposed: drug companies gave grants, consulting fees to

panelists who issued new cholesterol guidelines that are driving demand

for statins

 

The new cholesterol lowering guidelines are proving to be a windfall for

statin drug manufacturers like Pfizer and Merck: most news articles and

medical advice concerning the new guidelines recommend drugs -- and drugs

only -- to reduce cholesterol level. As a result, the guidelines are

perhaps better described as profit generators for pharmaceutical

companies.

 

Today, we're finding out why: six out of nine panelists that issued the

new decision about cholesterol levels have received grants or consulting

payments from statin drug manufacturers. That's right: two thirds of the

panel members have financial ties to the very pharmaceutical companies

that are being financially helped by the new guidelines.

 

Not surprisingly, this little detail was left out of the report due to an

" oversight, " the report publisher says. As a result, the vast majority of

journalists and news publishers never even questioned the bias of the

report. It sounded scientific to them, so they published it as fact, even

while remaining ignorant to the fact that this advice came from a group of

people who are essentially on the payroll of these pharmaceutical

companies.

 

What ever happened to full disclosure? Doesn't the medical industry have a

responsibility to disclose precisely these sorts of financial ties between

panelists who write public health guidelines and the drug companies who

benefit from them? To any intelligent outside observer, this whole thing

smells like a drug racket. The panelists get paid " consulting fees " and

grant money, the guidelines are arbitrarily lowered to a level that

suddenly puts millions more Americans into the " high cholesterol " category

simply by changing the definition, the popular press runs headlines

screaming that millions of people should now suddenly be taking statin

drugs for life, and the drug companies receive a windfall in sales and

profits. Nice scam there, folks.

 

It's business as usual in the medical industry: underhanded deals, refusal

to disclose financial ties, and the willingness to do practically anything

to generate more profits. That's because everybody's on the payroll of

these companies: the doctors are getting " consulting fees " for doing

nothing other than signing a blank piece of paper, the researchers are

getting " grant money " to carry out research that almost always supports

the drug companies, and the mainstream media is receiving billions of

dollars in ad revenue as long as they keep pushing drugs to customers,

both in advertising and news content.

 

Everybody's in on it. The whole system is disgustingly incestuous.

 

The problem is that none of this has anything to do with real health.

Prescription drugs simply don't make people healthy. All they do is mask

symptoms. And these statin drugs have a bewildering array of dangerous

side effects such as sudden death, loss of sex drive, osteoporosis and

other hormonal imbalances. Statins are dangerous drugs that have no place

being taken daily like aspirin. And yet that's the push: to get everybody

taking statins, every single day, for the rest of their lives.

 

The real way to lower cholesterol is, of course, to change your eating

habits and take up an exercise program. Natural healing foods like garlic

also lower cholesterol, and superfoods like chlorella offer tremendous

help. There are also a great variety of nutritional supplements like red

yeast rice that treat this condition. But the best way to lower

cholesterol is to stop eating the foods that cause it in the first place:

hydrogenated oils are the primary cause, followed by saturated animals

fats (red meat). Better yet, if you take up an exercise habit and spend

just 30 - 45 minutes per day walking or performing some other form of

exercise, your cholesterol numbers will improve dramatically.

 

Prescription drugs are not needed to be healthy. The whole system of

promoting these drugs is, as we've seen above, an unprecedented con being

perpetrated on the American people. In fact, the system is downright

criminal. The FBI should be investigating and prosecuting the players of

this industry, using the RICO laws designed to bring down organized crime.

 

Until that happens, your best bet as a consumer is to avoid prescription

drugs entirely and find other ways -- like nutrition and physical exercise

-- to attain optimum health. And don't trust anything you hear from the

popular press about prescription drugs. In all the articles I've seen

about these new cholesterol guidelines so far, only one has mentioned the

financial ties between panel members and statin drug manufacturers.