Popular MS drugs don’t prevent disability, research finds

via: NaturalNews
Friday, July 27, 2012
By: J. D. Heyes

[NaturalNews] How does a drug manage to become so popular with the medical community, yet turn out to be ineffective at achieving the treatment objectives it was prescribed to achieve? How do such drugs get past clinical trials if they don’t do what they’re supposed to do?

Those are good questions to keep in mind as you consider recent reports regarding interferon beta, the most widely prescribed medicine for treating multiple sclerosis (MS). A new study has found this most common and popular of MS drugs has little or no effect on halting a patient’s progression towards disability, The New York Times and other media reported.

The drug does seem to help reduce the development of brain lesions while limiting the frequency of relapses. But other than that, it appears to be pretty worthless; up to now, few other studies have examined the long-term, overall effect of interferon beta that would demonstrate how effective it is at preventing the beginning of the non-reversible disability.

MS, you may or may not know, is a chronic, often debilitating autoimmune disease that very often attacks the central nervous system (CNS), which includes the brain and spinal cord, as well as the optic nerves.

“Symptoms may be mild, such as numbness in the limbs, or severe, such as paralysis or loss of vision. The progress, severity, and specific symptoms of MS are unpredictable and vary from one person to another,” says a description of the disease on the Web site of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

The primary reason for using the drug is now – what?

The current study examining the long-term preventative effects of interferon beta, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, was conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia. A team led by Afsaneh Shirani, M.D., utilized data collected from 868 MS patients who were being treated with interferon beta. They were compared with 1,788 patients who never took the medication.

Using what was described as a well-validated scale, the researchers said they found those who took the drug no less likely to suffer long-term disability than those who took none.

“A key feature of MS is clinical progression of the disease over time manifested by the accumulation of disability. Interferon beta drugs are the most widely prescribed disease-modifying drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of relapsing-onset MS, the most common MS disease course,” said background information in the JAMA article.

So, essentially, the drug is worthless for the most important of uses for MS patients.

Continue Reading At: NaturalNews.com

Hey, Mr. Obama: Big P[HARM]A Prescription drugs kill 6200% more Americans than homicidal shootings

via: NaturalNews
Thursday, July 26, 2012
by: Mike Adams

[NaturalNews] In the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado Batman movie theater shooting, President Obama chimed in on the gun control debate yesterday, saying, “Every day, the number of young people we lose to violence is about the same as the number of people we lost in that movie theater. For every Columbine or Virginia Tech, there are dozens gunned down on the streets of Chicago or Atlanta…” (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/25/obama-calls-measures-…)
What he didn’t say, however, is that every day 290 people are killed by FDA-approved prescription drugs, and that’s the conservative number published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

As no one seems to believe these numbers are real, I’ll quote the source: The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Vol 284, No 4, July 26th 2000, authored by Dr Barbara Starfield, MD, MPH, of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.

That study, which is twelve years old — and drug deaths have risen considerably since then — documents 106,000 deaths per year from the “adverse effects” of FDA-approved prescription medications.

To reach this number from outbreaks of violent shootings, you’d have to see an Aurora Colorado Batman movie massacre take place every HOUR of every day, 365 days a year.

If a massacre of people using slugs of lead is bad, why is a massacre of people using deadly chemicals perfectly acceptable?

A medical massacre that dwarfs the number of deaths from shootings

No one in Washington talks about prescription drug deaths. There are no sobbing victims shown on the evening news. This “chemical massacre” happens quietly, behind closed doors. Yet to achieve this level of mass death in the world of plane crashes, for example, you’d have to see a jumbo jet airliner crashing into the ground once a day, every day of the year.

But that’s only the beginning of the mass death caused by modern medicine, where greed-driven doctors are routinely bribed by the drug giants (http://www.naturalnews.com/036510_doctors_bribes_drug_companies.html) and thereby make the “Joker” James Holmes look like a boy scout by comparison. As NaturalNews previously revealed, just one company — GlaxoSmithKline — had a bribery network of 49,000 doctors who received financial kickbacks to prescribe more Glaxo pharmaceuticals to patients.

According to the report Death by Medicine, by Drs. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, the medical establishment kills 783,936 people in the United States every year. (http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/mar2004_awsi_death_02.htm)

Those deaths include:

• 106,000 Americans killed from drug side effects
• 115,000 Americans killed from bedsores
• 98,000 Americans killed from medical error
• 88,000 Americans killed from infections
• 32,000 Americans killed from surgery
• 37,000 Americans killed from unnecessary procedures

… and so on. See the source link, above, for the rest of the numbers.

The bottom line total comes to 783,936 deaths every year from “conventional” medicine (drugs and surgery medicine).

You are 6200% more likely to be killed by your doctor than by a shooter

According to the CDC’s numbers from 2007, the total number of homicide shooting deaths in the United States each year is roughly 12,600 (Xu, Jiaquan; Kenneth D. Kochanek, Sherry L. Murphy, Betzaida Tejada-Vera (2010-05-20). “Deaths: Final Data for 2007″ (PDF). National Vital Statistics Reports (CDC) 58(19): 11. Retrieved 2011-04-07.)

This means that your risk of being killed by your doctor is 62 times higher than the risk of being killed by a shooter. Put another way, that’s a 6200% higher risk.

It seems that before we even think about the issue of gun control, we need a national debate on DOCTOR control.

After all, when doctors inadvertently kill people by prescribing deadly chemotherapy cocktails or deadly prescription drugs, they don’t even get arrested for it! But they do get financial kickbacks, exotic vacations paid by drug companies, free travel, free meals and other perks of being a Big Pharma whore. Plus, they’re free to go on killing other people, over and over again. While doctors obviously don’t intend to kill people, they nonetheless keep doing so as long as they get their bribes, kickbacks and perks. (http://www.naturalnews.com/036417_Glaxo_Merck_fraud.html)

If Obama really wanted to protect Americans from being killed, he’d call for restrictions on the prescribing of deadly pharmaceuticals. But don’t hold your breath on that one, because when it comes to actually protecting the American people from medical massacres, or GMOs, or toxic fluoride in the water supply, the real Joker is Obama himself.

Read More At: NaturalNews.com

Why Your Doctor’s Advice May Be Fatally Flawed

via: Mercola
by: Dr. Mercola
July 13, 2012

Curious about the prevalence and extent of scientific misconduct, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research investigated the reasons why research studies were retracted, and from whereⁱ.

The highest number of incidents of misconduct occurred in the drug literature, as compared to general biomedical literature. Nearly 75 percent of the retracted drug studies were attributed to scientific misconduct, which includes:

• Data falsification or fabrication
• Questionable veracity
• Unethical author conduct
• Plagiarism

This is a significant rise when compared to a 1998 review—cited in the featured NewsWise article—in which 37 percent of scientific retractions between 1966 and 1997 were due to scientific misconduct. Even more shocking: According to data from Thomson Reuters, the numbers of scientific retractions have climbed more than 15-fold since 2001ⁱⁱ!

The most unfortunate thing about this is that these are the types of studies many health care professionals rely on to make treatment recommendations. Large numbers of patients can be affected when false findings are published, as the average lag time between publication of the study and the issuing of a retraction is 39 months. And that’s if it’s ever caught at all.

Just How Scientific is “Science-Based Medicine” Really?

I am a big believer in the scientific method, provided it’s applied appropriately that is. And that’s the key issue here. In order to qualify in the first place, the research must be unbiased, unprejudiced and free from any significant conflicts of interest. Sadly, this is not the case with most of modern medicine—especially not when it comes to drug research, as evidenced by the featured findings.

It’s quite shocking that nearly three-quarters of all retracted drug studies are due to pure falsification of data. Especially when you consider that even well-researched drugs can still have significant side effects.

Just imagine the potential for tragedy when a drug is based largely on pure fantasy!

Vioxx is perhaps one of the better examples of what can happen when a drug is manufactured and sold under false pretenses. It killed more than 60,000 people in just a few years time, before it was removed from the market. In the case of Vioxx, there are lingering questions about the soundness of the research backing the drug in the first place. Back in 2008, Dr. Joseph S. Ross of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine came across ghostwritten research studies for Vioxx while reviewing documents related to lawsuits filed against Merck.

According to an April 16, 2008 article on MedHeadlinesⁱⁱⁱ:

“In about 96 journal publications, Ross and his colleagues discovered internal Merck documents and e-mail messages pertaining to clinical study reports and review articles, some of which were developed by the company’s marketing department, not its scientific department. In others, there is little evidence that the authors recruited for the report made substantial contribution to the research itself. … Some of the authors listed in the Merck study reports of concern… question the true nature of ghostwriting. One neurologist originally listed as “External author?” and then listed as Dr. Leon J. Thal, of the University of California, San Diego in the final draft, died a year ago in an airplane crash.”

An editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)^iv that year by Drs. Psaty and Kronmal also questioned whether Merck might have deliberately manipulated dozens of academic documents published in the medical literature, in order to promote Vioxx under false pretenses.

Avandia is another potent example. This diabetes medication hit the market in 1999 and quickly became a blockbuster drug. By 2006 its annual revenue was $3.2 billion. A year later, a damning study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) linked Avandia to a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack and a 64 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death than patients treated with other methods.

Between 1999 and 2007, Avandia is estimated to have caused over 80,000 unnecessary heart attacks^v, although the actual numbers of people harmed or killed by the drug is still largely unknown. The most recent analysis by the Cleveland Clinic in 2010^vi, which used data from 56 clinical Avandia trials, calculated that for every 37 to 52 patients who take Avandia for five years, one additional heart attack can be expected as a result of the drug. As a result, the authors of this meta-analysis estimate the number of deaths caused by Avandia to be around 48,000, between 1999 and 2009.

This is a steep price, to say the least, for a disease that does not require drugs to begin with. Avandia is a poster child for the lethal paradigm of faux science as GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of Avandia, hid damaging information about the drug for over 10 years^vii, as it would adversely affect sales!

Again and again we are confronted with indisputable evidence that the drug paradigm is about money, not health, and certainly not dependable scientific inquiry.

Since that 2007 NEJM study, data from various trials, studies and meta-analyses have consistently confirmed the dangers of Avandia, and based on the evidence amassed over the past three years, the European Medicines Agency is now recommending the withdrawal of rosiglitazone-containing diabetic drugs due to the increased risk of ischaemic heart disease. NEJM also hit the nail on its head with the statement that,

“[T]he case of rosiglitazone underscores the need for a robust evidence base to demonstrate the safety of medicines administered long-term.”

Unfortunately, a committee of independent experts recommended that Avandia remain on the US market, despite its risks, and an FDA oversight board voted 8 to 7 to accept the advice.

It’s important to understand that our current medical system has been masterfully orchestrated by the drug companies to create a system that gives the perception of science when really it is a heavily manipulated process designed to manipulate and deceive you into using expensive and potentially toxic drugs that benefit the drug companies more than it benefits your health. Across the board, drugmakers do an excellent job of publicizing the findings they want you to know, while keeping very quiet about the rest.

It’s important to realize that all research is NOT published. And it should come as no surprise that drug studies funded by a pharmaceutical company that reaches a negative conclusion will rarely ever see the light of day… What this means is that even if you scour the medical literature to determine what the consensus is on any given medical topic, what you’ll find is an overwhelming preponderance of data in favor of the drug approach that in no way, shape or form reflects the reality of the scientific investigation that went into that specific drug.

How Drug Companies Manipulate Research Evidence to Fool You

The pharmaceutical industry as a whole has become the poster-child for fraud, deception, and manipulation of science for profit. Nearly 20 percent of the top 100 Corporate Criminals listed for the 1990s were in fact drug companies!

In an online series called Transparency and Medicine featured on the web site The Conversation^viii, Jon Jureidini discusses how science-based medicine is clouded by marketing departments that control and distort information in the medical literature. Jureidini is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Adelaide (Australia), who got an inside look at this murky mess while examining drug company internal documents as an expert witness in a case against a pharmaceutical company. The voluminous amounts of documents he was given access to showed “serious misrepresentation” of both the effectiveness and safety of certain drugs, with published articles making the research appear positive, while negative secondary outcomes were deleted.

When you consider that this is the type of research data that then ends up being used to make treatment decisions for years to come by many expert review panels, is it any wonder the United States has the most expensive health care in the world, while STILL experiencing a decline in life expectancy and other health indexes? The whole idea that modern medicine is science-based has become laughable, as the evidence tells a whole different story…

Continue Reading At: Mercola.com 

Financial Incentives: Radiation Exposure ‘Soaring’ As Medical Imaging Tests Overused

via: NaturalSociety
by: Anthony Gucciardi
June 14, 2012

Just after it was released that CT scan radiation actually triples the risk of brain tumor development in children, new research is now ousting the fact that average radiation exposure from such medical imaging tests has skyrocketed over the past decade. And the result of this admittedly ‘excessive radiation’ is an increased risk of not only cancer, but other significant health conditions.

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) published the findings of the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which reveals just how serious the issue of radiation exposure is. Researchers write not only how the rates in which patients are scanned by the radiation-emitting machines are much higher, but there is also some concern over how many patients receive repeat scanning — ultimately leading to higher and higher doses of radiation. For those suffering from chronic issues that need consistent ‘monitoring’ from such devices, this could mean heavy radiation levels on a highly routine basis.

High radiation that is undoubtedly spiking cancer rates, as doctors are openly admitting – the same radiation that has been coming from Fukushima in amounts far exceeding original estimations and causing an ‘unknown’ number of cancer deaths. Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at UCSF, explains just how dangerous radiation exposure is when it comes to the development of cancer:

“The studies are pretty clear – high exposure to radiation causes cancer.”

Such is the case even for the common dental x-ray – the seemingly harmless imaging technique that is actually associated with a two-fold or higher increased risk of developing brain cancer. This particular research was very effective in measuring the true severity of repeat scans. While patients who received the bitewing x-rays (showing upper and lower back teeth) less than once per year were only 1.1 to 1.6 times more likely to develop brain cancer, more frequent runs proved to come with a hefty price. Those receiving frequent panorex dental x-rays (an x-ray showing all of the teeth) upped their risk by 2.7 or 3.0 times — much greater than those receiving bitewing tests less frequently. What’s more, the risk increased to 4.9 times if the patient was below the age of 10.

So why the increase in medical imaging tests? The study boldly set out to examine the incentives for the spike, even examining financial factors that could play a role. Even more boldly, they reached the conclusion that financial interests were indeed one main driving factor. A sad truth considering the fact that these financial incentives are contributing to the epidemic of cancer — particularly among young children. Smith-Bindman reports:

“One of the thoughts for the change in the rise of imaging is a change in the incentives… It suggests that financial factors may play a role, but there are other factors as well.”

Source: NaturalSociety.com