Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 In fact, Kessler says television ads never should have been allowed by the FDA in the first place (the FDA legalized drug ads in late 1997, after Kessler left his position there). Today, the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world to allow drug ads on television.
So how do drug ads lie to viewers? Essentially, they show healthy-looking actors roleplaying a fairy tale. At the beginning of the ad, the actors' lives appear to be in total disarray while they're suffering from some symptom (such as migraine headaches, restless legs, high cholesterol or whatever). |
Bottom Line Health
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| Remember, drug ads that tell you to "ask your doctor" about a particular drug have a single purpose—to sell more drugs, not to improve your health.
Prescription drug ads have become a normal part of our cultural landscape, but the US and New Zealand (that has a population of less than 4 million) are the only two industrialized countries that allow them. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If you throw in an extra "C" you also get:
DRUG ADS FORM ADDICTION NATION
(The FDA legalized TV drug ads in 1998.)
Here are some more anagrams that use no extra letters:
DID NOT ADD SUGAR INFORMATION
(A fairly accurate description of the FDA's enforcement of food labeling laws.)
ODD GUN MAN AFRAID DISTORTION
(Antidepressant drugs turn teenagers into violent shooters.)
DOMINANT RAID, FRAUD ISN'T GOOD
(Alludes to the various armed raids the FDA has organized against vitamin shops.)
INDIGNANT AMID ODOROUS DRAFT
(Use your imagination... |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Today, the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world to allow drug ads on television.
So how do drug ads lie to viewers? Essentially, they show healthy-looking actors roleplaying a fairy tale. At the beginning of the ad, the actors' lives appear to be in total disarray while they're suffering from some symptom (such as migraine headaches, restless legs, high cholesterol or whatever). |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If we don't put limits on the influence and corruption of the drug companies by banning drug ads and demanding serious FDA reforms, the body count will only get worse. Consumers are finally waking up to this reality, and they're increasingly demanding "get tough" solutions that would require the FDA to protect the people instead of protecting Big Pharma profits. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 I believe we will one day see a golden age of health freedom, where drug ads are banned, supplements are set free and the act of helping patients heal (rather than merely treating their symptoms) will no longer be criminalized. Make no mistake: healing has been outlawed in the United States. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The FDA, always happy to serve the profit interests of Big Pharma, went right along with the ploy and legalized television and magazine drug ads in 1997. Since then, drug sales have skyrocketed, drug company profits have ballooned, and fictitious disease diagnoses have proliferated at an alarming rate.
Diseases such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder are completely fictitious, invented by a panel of psychiatrists with a simple vote. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Why vitamin D is never mentioned
There is a great reluctance in both conventional medicine and the mainstream media (which is largely funded by drug ads, after all) to admit that a nutrient has any importance whatsoever in the prevention of disease. Modern medicine likes to pretend that nutrition has absolutely no role in human health; that diseases are largely a matter of luck; and that only expensive pharmaceuticals (not nutrients) can prevent or treat any disease. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Look at any magazine, newspaper, or cable news program, and what do you see? drug ads. Those ads are paying the salaries of the very people who decide what's news and what isn't.
Drugs, drugs everywhere
Have you picked up a magazine lately? Have you picked up any of those news magazines on the newsstands? Have you picked up a medical journal? Did you notice that they're 50 percent drug ads? There's hardly any news in the news magazines at all. The news that you find is highly censored and edited. Much of the bad news about drugs is suppressed. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| So how do drug ads lie to viewers? Essentially, they show healthy-looking actors roleplaying a fairy tale. At the beginning of the ad, the actors' lives appear to be in total disarray while they're suffering from some symptom (such as migraine headaches, restless legs, high cholesterol or whatever). Then, after getting on the drug, the actor's life is magically transformed into a state of perfection: They're happy, everything is cheery, life is glorious, all their personal relationships are suddenly successful, and so on. |
| REPPED: Television drug ads engage in such blatant deceptions and exaggerations that even the medical journals are starting to condemn the practice. This week, the Annals of Family Medicine published an analysis of popular drug advertisements that concluded the ads essentially lie to the public about the benefits of pharmaceuticals while utterly ignoring alternative health strategies like dietary or lifestyle changes. |
| It is time to ban drug ads for good, and protect Americans from the fraudulent hype, propaganda and quackery of pharmaceutical medicine. The era of pretending that synthetic chemicals could cure disease is over. Let's bury it and move on to natural health solutions that really work. Diabetes is curable. So is cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, depression and Alzheimer's disease. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And the way to get more people healthier is to push more drug ads, to mandate more vaccinations and require more "mental health screening" of schoolchildren, just in case they might need ADHD drugs.
Sound insane? It is. And don't believe for a minute that modern medicine is based on anything resembling real science. The science was abandoned decades ago. All that's left today is an empty shell of a medical system that claims to treat patients but really just uses them as profit-generating machines to enrich some of the wealthiest corporations in the world: the drug companies. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Following the legalization of television drug ads in late 1997, the pharmaceutical business exploded and has only increased ever since.
So now the FDA primarily uses bureaucratic tactics instead of law enforcement tactics. Hence the new CAM Guidelines. It's the silent, non-violent way to accomplish the same thing as breaking down doors and raiding vitamin shops. If they can regulate natural medicine out of existence, even just one herb or vitamin at a time, they can eventually win their war without firing a single shot and attracting too much public attention. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The rest of the world has figured out that drug ads really aren't "public education campaigns" as the drug companies claim, and are, in fact, promotions. But here in the U.S., that simple, obvious fact somehow escapes the discerning observation skills of the Food and Drug Administration.
If we really want to protect the U.S. population from the fraudulent advertising, pharmaceutical quackery and disease mongering of the pharmaceutical industry, it's time to re-ban direct-to-consumer drug advertising. |
Melody Petersen
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 He remembers how he once listened to the drug ads on television, thinking that the list of side effects mentioned in each one was not worth worrying about. "Now I tell people it would be smart to stay away."
Medicines work and provide their benefits by interfering in some way with the chemical makeup of the body's cells. Scientists design drug molecules to have a certain desired biological effect, but every one has unplanned and unpredictable effects as well. A basic lesson of pharmacology is that there is a thin line between where a drug works as a medicine and where it becomes a poison. |
Charles Barber
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 According to Nielsen Media Research, drug ads increased dramatically in the weeks after the attacks. In October 2001 alone, Glaxo spent $16 million on advertising Paxil, almost twice what they spent the previous October.102 It worked. Medicaid recipients, for example, who lived within three miles of the World Trade Center filed 18 percent more antidepressant prescriptions in the three months after the attacks.103 Some ads for Paxil appeared after shows depicting the World Trade Center towers collapsing. |
| As omnipresent as drug ads on TV have become, expenditures on advertising make up only a very small portion of the marketing budget. Up to 90 percent of the marketing budgets go directly to manipulating the source—directly toward influencing the doctors themselves—in the form of drug samples, lecture fees, and "educational" grants.55 The industry spends an unholy $22 billion a year to market directly to doctors, which is the equivalent of about $25,000 per physician per year. |
Bottom Line Health
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| If you look at all of the data rather than listen to the drug ads, you will see that natural alternatives, such as improved diet and routine exercise, are often far more effective than drugs at achieving real health improvements, such as reducing heart disease and extending life.
Probably the most important test of a healthy diet's effect on heart disease is the Lyon Diet Heart Study conducted in Lyon, France. Heart attack patients were randomly counseled to eat a Mediterranean diet (high in unprocessed grains, fruits, vegetables and olive oil.. |
| Prescription drug ads have become a normal part of our cultural landscape, but the US and New Zealand (that has a population of less than 4 million) are the only two industrialized countries that allow them. The remaining industrialized countries feel that assessment of the scientific information about prescription drug treatment should be left to doctors, who should work in partnership with each patient to determine optimal medical care based on his/her individual situation.
Are Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs Right for You?
Jay S. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 By 1999, one market researcher estimates, the average American saw nine drug ads on television a day. Not only have ads grown in number, but they have also become increasingly specialized, as ad agencies discover new ways to get consumers to think of drugs as the solution to a wider and wider array of ailments. Companies now use "reminder ads," which may simply name a drug and the disease it treats in order to urge viewers who have already been diagnosed with a condition to try that particular brand. |
| Required information about drug interactions, side effects, and evidence for efficacy could be squeezed onto a single magazine page in very small type, but for TV or radio, spelling out safety issues could take a minute or more, making most drug ads for broadcast prohibitively expensive. Number three on the list was that people with allergy complaints tended to visit their doctors on average only once every three years. |
| Number two on the list of Davis and Castagnoli's barriers to getting the word out about Seldane was the FDA regulation that required all drug ads, including those on radio and television, to include a "brief summary" of side effects and safety issues. While it was called a brief summary, the agency's list of what had to be included made it anything but short. |
Richard Bartlett
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 When done in this way, though hard to grasp with left-brain monkey logic, "Nothing" really does work better, as the drug ads often claim.
Methods for Collapsing the Wave
Now, on the subject of consciousness collapsing the wave, I have to be honest with you in saying that there really is nothing to collapse. We're not really "doing" anything. We hold a focused intent in our minds and a larger force or power manifests through that intent. Engaging the conscious mind with a process of visualization is a great way to get it out of the way, so the real work of "doing nothing" can take over. |
Melody Petersen
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| These tacit promises made by the drug ads were not unlike those made by the promoters of any other consumer product.
"The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society but with his own within it," explained John Berger, the art critic, in a classic essay on advertising in 1972. "It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is. |
| There were eight pages of prescription drug ads in the twenty-four-page Parade magazine tucked inside the newspapers of three hundred American cities on Sunday, February 12, 2006, including Mason City, Iowa's Globe Gazette.
The ads in newspapers and magazines included lengthy warnings about the medicine's dangers to satisfy federal rules. But the marketers wrote these sections using complicated medical language that the common American could not understand. The warnings were often printed in type so small that many readers would need a magnifying glass. |
| Today's children are the first generation to grow up with omnipresent prescription drug ads. A child turning eighteen in 2006 was nine years old in 1997, when the FDA weakened its drug advertising restrictions and allowed the companies to run ads on television. As Jean Phillips had noticed in the students in Des Moines, the children had come to believe there was a pill for any trouble. They understood that illegal street drugs could kill them, but they saw prescription drugs in a different light. |
| After nine months of taking Rezulin, Jerry felt nothing like the smiling people he saw in the drug ads. He felt nauseated, as if he had the flu. When the malaise lingered and grew worse, he began to fear he had cancer. People told him his skin had a strange bright yellow tint.
On an early spring day in 1998 he was settling in to watch television when a disabling pain swept through him. "It was like someone hit me in the chest with a baseball bat," he said.
He thought he was having a heart attack. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 JAMA accepts millions of dollars in advertising from drug companies each year, and its pages are absolutely packed with drug ads. The American Medical Association, for its part, has long worked to discredit alternative medicine and has even been found guilty by U.S. federal courts of engaging in a conspiracy to destroy chiropractic medicine. The AMA, which is largely considered a joke by anyone familiar with natural health, is hardly a credible source for publishing scientific findings on nutrition. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 In short order, you'll be healthier than 90% of the population -- the same 90% that still listen to the advice of their doctor and believe everything they hear in televised drug ads, by the way. |
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