The legal drugs that could kill you

[Guest guest]

This was posted by a member of Stopped Our Statins.

The legal drugs that could kill you

By JEROME BURNE

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/healthmain.html?in_article\

_id=404849 & in_page_id=1774

Last updated at 16:32pm on 12th September 2006

 

More of us than ever are succumbing to chronic disease, and the figures make

grim reading.

 

One in six of us is set to develop diabetes, and expected to die prematurely,

the most likely cause being heart disease, stroke or cancer.

 

By the age of 50, one in three of us will be officially obese and a quarter

of us will spend the last 30 years of our lives with the pain of arthritis.

 

At the moment, what happens to all these people hit by chronic disease?

 

In a word, drugs - perhaps two or three to start with, then a dozen or more

towards the end.

 

Many more of us will be put on drugs for less serious conditions such as high

blood pressure or raised cholesterol, with the promise that they will reduce

our chances of joining the ranks of the chronically ill.

 

But is this really the best way to deal with the rising tide of poor health?

So many of us view doctors as a kind of one-stop pill dispensary that we

rarely consider how limited this way of thinking is.

 

In fact, we have a prescription addiction and we really need to kick the

habit, because the truth of what drugs are really doing for us makes worrying

reading.

 

In the UK, 10,000 people are killed every year by adverse drug reactions

(ADRs) which happen when the prescription drug supposed to be curing you kills

or

harms you instead.

 

That is more than the number who die from cervical cancer, taking illegal

drugs, cancer of the mouth and passive smoking combined.

 

It's actually more dangerous to visit your doctor than it is to drive your

car - in 2004, traffic accidents were responsible for some 3,221 deaths.

 

Yet a further 40,000 people each year are made sick enough by drugs they are

taking to be admitted to hospital.

 

Yet while most things that could harm us are a focus of campaigns and

charities who work tirelessly to limit the damage, nothing comparable is

happening to

cut our use of the drugs that harm us.

 

So why is so little being done to warn us of the dangers? We have both the

pharmaceutical industry and the health authorities to blame.

 

It seems we are in the grip of an extensive and deliberate cover-up by drug

companies, who appear to hide the negative side of their products and buy our

loyalty through paying those we believe in, including our GPs.

 

Stated as baldly as that, these claims may sound wildly exaggerated. But

let's look at the facts.

 

Sixty per cent of seminars and courses our GPs attend are funded by drug

companies.

 

In the UK the pharmaceutical industry spends £3.3 billion a year on research,

financing about 90 per cent of all clinical drug trials. That could hardly be

called independent research.

 

A report in the Nineties found that out of all 56 studies conducted by drug

companies into painkillers, not a single one was unfavourable to the company

that sponsored the trial.

 

A Parliamentary health committee hearing was told by one consultant

cardiologist that he was offered bribes by a pharmaceutical company not to

publish

unfavourable research results.

 

Some drug companies can spend up to £10,000 a year targeting an individual

doctor with drug reps or salespeople who provide information about latest

developments.

 

And as an article in The Lancet suggests, it's not clear that doctors are

immune to the drug companies' persuasiveness.

 

Within just six months of the Cox-2 drugs like Vioxx being marketed for

conditions such as arthritis, they'd become the preferred form of pain relief

for

55 per cent of doctors. This was due not to what the patient needed but was

based on " physician preference " .

 

In 2005, the UK's Parliamentary health committee investigation, the

little-publicised but very telling report, The Influence Of The Pharmaceutical

Industry, concluded:

 

" (the industry) buys influence over doctors, charities, patient groups,

journalists and politicians, whose regulation is sometimes weak or ambiguous " .

 

Full Spectrum Dominance is a term used by the American military which

involves being ready " to defeat any adversary and control any situation across

the

range of military operations " .

 

But it's actually not a bad description of the strategy employed by the

pharmaceutical industry throughout the process, from creating drugs to testing

and

selling them.

 

Even worse, the very organisations we put our trust in, such as the Medicines

and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), part of the Department of

Health, seems far too intimate with the drug companies to regulate them

effectively.

 

Many reading this will be shocked. After all, when you are ill or worried

about being ill, you want to be able to trust your doctor, and indeed

authorities

such as the MHRA and the Government, and believe that the treatment they

recommend is designed only to make you better.

 

This is just the culture surrounding the drugs, what about the actual

products themselves?

 

There is plenty of evidence that many of today's bestselling medicines are

money-making devices rather than effective, safe, affordable and practical

remedies.

 

To begin with, the drugs for chronic disease almost never do anything about

the underlying cause. They're designed to treat symptoms, raised blood

pressure, the pain in your joints. And, in the end, they don't do the job.

 

It's important to understand we're not talking about medicines used in

emergencies here.

 

No one would want to be without antibiotics for meningitis for instance — but

those used for the prevention and treatment of the chronic conditions that

now plague us — arthritis, depression, diabetes, heart disease.

 

Suppose your doctor discovered that your blood-sugar level is getting

dangerously high and that you have Type 2 diabetes. You will very likely be

given a

drug called metformin, which will bring down your blood-sugar level.

 

Once it's done its job, however, metformin will obviously not get to the root

of why you've got blood-sugar problems in the first place.

 

Another problem with instantly reaching for the prescription pad is that many

of the most widely-used drugs turn out to have dangerous and debilitating

side-effects.

 

And these side-effects are made even more damaging by the drug companies'

practice of downplaying and concealing them.

 

The story of what happened to the painkiller Vioxx provides a valuable lens

through which to look at just how the drug industry, governmental agencies and

the medical profession behave.

 

The drug, which was taken by 80 million worldwide was very high profile, and

sold to us as a 'super aspirin' with none of the gut problems associated with

the previous generation of painkillers.

 

It then emerged that Vioxx had potentially dangerous side-effects, boosting

the risk of blood clots and doubling the risk of heart attacks, and it was

withdrawn in 2004.

 

It rapidly emerged that behind the scenes, alarm bells had been ringing for

years about the drug's link with these problems.

 

In 1998, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania had sent the results

of a trial showing the possibility of a link with heart disease to Merck,

makers of Vioxx.

 

In 2001, a big analysis of trials involving 18,000 patients getting Vioxx

found that compared with an old form of pain relief it caused between four and

fives times as many heart attacks.

 

There are now an estimated 10,000 court cases outstanding against Merck

brought by patients in the U.S. who claim to have been damaged by the drug and

not

properly warned about the risks.

 

One expert estimates that 140,000 Americans were killed or now suffer from

vascular problems as a result of the drug, and the cost of legal actions to

Merck has been put at from $5-$50billion.

 

There are 400 people from the UK who are also now trying to sue Merck.

 

Of course, it could just be that this was an unfortunate accident, the sort

that happens in the best-run industries.

 

Planes crash, buildings go up in smoke, but in general we are confident that

systems are in place to keep such preventable disasters to an absolute

minimum.

 

One of the reasons for our confidence is that in the wake of such disasters,

there is an inquiry to find out what went wrong.

 

Unfortunately, this kind of inquiry never happens in the wake of drug

disasters because regulators have all too often looked the other way — another

problem with the industry.

 

After Vioxx was withdrawn, for instance, the MHRA took no apparent action.

 

The report, The Influence Of The Pharmaceutical Industry, concluded that the

way drugs are monitored after they are launched was " inadequate " , that medical

institutions were " indifferent " , and that the MHRA knew little about " the

overall impact of drug-related illnesses in the community " .

 

It called for changes, one being that the MRHA should actively be on the

lookout for problems with side-effects and that there there should be a public

inquiry whenever a drug is withdrawn.

 

But the Government has chosen not to take action on any of these. But why

not?

 

It is perhaps significant that not only is the MHRA almost entirely funded by

the drug companies, to the tune of £65 million, but it wasn't until the

beginning of 2005 that MHRA members were banned from having shares and financial

links with drug companies.

 

The sense that drug companies' interests were the agency's first priority and

patients' a distant second was reinforced by Richard Brook, director of the

mental health charity Mind and the first patient's representative to sit on an

MHRA review committee.

 

He declared himself " horrified " in October 2004 to find that the agency had

kept quiet about the possible dangers of higher doses of certain drugs for at

least a decade.

 

When he resigned, he declared that the MHRA was either guilty of " extreme

negligence or worse, dishonesty " .

 

Documents obtained recently by another journalist via the UK's Freedom of

Information Act showed that the industry privately drew up its own detailed

blueprint of how the MHRA should be run, proposing to " build on the excellent

working relationship between the industry and the regulator " .

 

It is, surely, an arrangement that is a little too cosy? The fact that people

are being damaged unnecessarily by drugs that are being prescribed to

millions is bad enough.

 

But the myth that these drugs are all firmly science-based has led to

another, possibly even more harmful long-term effect on our health.

 

It has meant that any non-drug treatments that do tackle the underlying

problem and don't inevitably have side-effects are not researched properly, and

end

up regarded by mainstream doctors as unscientific and ineffective.

 

Yet it is clear that food and supplements directly affect many of the same

biochemical pathways in the body that drugs target, but with far fewer

side-effects.

omega-3 fats lower production of the same inflammatory chemicals that Vioxx

does without damaging the heart.

For instance,

 

Statins work by reducing the amount of cholesterol in the blood. But how well

do they work when compared to a change in diet?

 

A study published in 2002 found that after four years, those on the

Mediterranean diet had a 70 per cent lower incidence of heart disease, three

times

better than the usual risk reduction in similar patients given statins.

 

There are many other examples of the way nutrition targets the same pathways

as drugs, only more safely, and cheaply. Given the way the truth about drugs

is often spun or concealed, handling chronic disease with various non-drug

methods makes a lot of sense.

 

Arthritis pills gave me a heart attack

 

Frederick Myers, 68, from Norfolk is married to Angela, 59. Three years ago

the retired IT technician, suffered a heart attack after taking Vioxx for

several years. He is now pursuing damages from manufacturer, Merck, through the

American courts. He says:

 

Before I started taking Vioxx, in early 2000, I was a relatively fit

62-year-old, who just happened to have rheumatoid arthritis.

 

Today I still have RA but in addition to that I have gone through the trauma

of a major heart attack and have been left with an ongoing heart condition. I

take stacks of pills every day.

 

Perhaps worst of all I have to live with the knowledge that the people who

run the drug company Merck knew it was dangerous and kept selling it. To say it

makes me angry is an understatement.

 

I had been living with my rheumatoid arthritis for about six years before my

GP told me about this new drug called Vioxx. I was thrilled because it offered

pain relief with no side-effects. I started taking it and after about three

months the arthritis improved.

 

For nearly three years everything was fine. My yearly check-ups showed I had

normal levels of cholesterol and blood pressure. But out of the blue, and

against all medical expectations, in December 2003 I suffered a major heart

attack.

 

The consultant cardiologist looked at my medical records and said he was

surprised that it had happened to me. A few weeks later I recommended Vioxx to

my

friend Alex, who checked it out on the internet.

 

He rang with me the news that Vioxx had been implicated in heart problems. I

then contacted a British law firm.

 

As the case rumbles on through the courts, back in real world I am suffering

the consequences of taking Vioxx. I get out of breath very quickly and that

affects every area of my life. I can't even play football with the

grandchildren.

 

I understand that drugs have side-effects but it is the duty of the drug

company to tell us about them and let us make up our own mind. If I'd been given

the knowledge I wouldn't have taken Vioxx. You can live with RA but you can't

live without a heart that works.

 

A spokesman for Merck said: " Merck & Co. Inc. acted responsibly and

appropriately as we developed and marketed Vioxx. When questions arose about the

safety

of Vioxx we took steps to investigate and address these issues head on. "

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

> Instead of boring you with everything you've already read about this

post I just have to say: My hubby has high cholesterol for a few years

now. Before the dr put him on anything he let him try to change his

way of living, which he did. He cut way back on fat and began to

vigorously exercise for 1 hour a day and he was taking fish oil and

adding ground flax to his oatmeal every morning. His cholesterol just

wouldn't come down. Then they put him on cholesterol lowering drugs

which helped just a little but then added another one and WOW it came

down about 40 points! At this point we'll take the chance with the

drugs rather than him have a heart attack at age 60 like his father

(that would only be 5 years away). Yes the drug companies have MAJOR

influence on doctors but they have SAVED plenty of lives too. BTW we

see a homeopathic practioner way more than we ever go to our family

doctor.

 

 

>

>

>

[Guest guest]

I just want to share with you my own experience. I have high cholesterol

and the statin medicines would make me hurt all over, so they aren't an

option for me. I went researching on the web and found an article by Linus

Pauling where he described why we have high cholesterol, which is that it

deposits to heal the weakened arteries that we have and that Vitamin C,

L-Lysine and L-Proline will help heal your arteries thus lowering your

cholesterol. I went on to take a product with this combination and was

again checked in three months and my bad cholesterol was down 50 points! I

don't know of any statin medication that can promise you better results than

that.

 

Ilene

-

" Debbie Mosier " <DCPMOSIER426

 

Thursday, September 14, 2006 7:34 PM

Re: The legal drugs that could kill

you

 

 

>

>> Instead of boring you with everything you've already read about this

> post I just have to say: My hubby has high cholesterol for a few years

> now. Before the dr put him on anything he let him try to change his

> way of living, which he did. He cut way back on fat and began to

> vigorously exercise for 1 hour a day and he was taking fish oil and

> adding ground flax to his oatmeal every morning. His cholesterol just

> wouldn't come down. Then they put him on cholesterol lowering drugs

> which helped just a little but then added another one and WOW it came

> down about 40 points! At this point we'll take the chance with the

> drugs rather than him have a heart attack at age 60 like his father

> (that would only be 5 years away). Yes the drug companies have MAJOR

> influence on doctors but they have SAVED plenty of lives too. BTW we

> see a homeopathic practioner way more than we ever go to our family

> doctor.

>

>

>>

>>

>>

>

>

>

" Do not let either the medical authorities or the politicians mislead you.

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