Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Require the open publication of all drug studies. Currently, drug companies hide the studies they don't want you to see, and they only publicize the (fraudulent) studies that produce the results they like. We need to change this and shine some light on the results of ALL clinical trials to let doctors, patients and everyone else examine the science for themselves. (The pharmaceutical industry argues venomously against this. They think drug studies should be kept secret.)
5) End conflicts of interest at the FDA. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 Compared to drug research, the potential for industry manipulation in GM crop studies is considerably higher.
• drug studies generally follow standardized procedures dictated by regulators. The Ag biotech industry largely uses its own testing parameters.
• drug studies are published in peer-reviewed journals, while most GM studies submitted to regulators are not published and are kept secret from the public.
• Regulators are often biotech proponents, willing to accept shoddy research.
• Most importantly, drugs can show serious side effects and still be approved (GM food can't). |
Hyla Cass, M.D.
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 General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that in early drug studies for establishing drug doses, 78 percent of the subjects were men. No wonder so many women cannot tolerate standard doses of top-selling drugs!
Thanks to such crusaders as Jay S. Cohen, M.D., the public and the medical community are becoming aware of this issue. Dr. Cohen's book, Over Dose: The Case Against the Drug Companies (Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), received a glowing review in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In it, Dr. |
Bottom Line Health
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| Shelley Salpeter, a clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University, and his colleagues launched a broad review, or meta-analysis, examining the results of 19 asthma drug studies that involved nearly 34,000 patients.
They found that people who used long-acting beta-agonists had a 2.6 times greater risk of asthma-related hospitalization, a 1.8 times greater risk of life-threatening complications and a 3-5 times greater risk of death compared with those taking a placebo. |
| Women have been underrepresented in clinical drug studies, which long assumed that they respond to drugs in the same way that men do. But, in fact, women experience more adverse drug events than men do.
Steps: Understand the need for a drug. Ask a doctor or pharmacist about side effects and potential interactions with other drugs and be sure to understand correct dosage amounts and the timing of doses.
Rosaly Correa-de-Araujo, MD, PhD, MSc, director, women's health and gender-based research, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). www.ahrq.gov. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Because we've learned by observing Merck's behavior with Vioxx that the company is capable of suppressing or spinning negative information about its drug studies. And that makes a reasonable person question the credibility of any positive drug studies associated with Merck
In other words, if this Nastech PYY Nasal Spray turns out to have nothing but positive, glowing studies showing tremendous weight loss, a thoughtful, rational person would obviously wonder, "Did Merck suppress the negative studies on this product as well?" That's certainly the question I would have. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| They think drug studies should be kept secret.)
5) End conflicts of interest at the FDA. Require, by law, that anyone who works for the FDA, advises the FDA or participates in FDA decision processes has no financial ties whatsoever to drug companies or medical device makers. No consulting fees, bribes, stock options or incentives. The people who make decisions about the safety of the drugs approved in this country should have no financial ties to the companies impacted by their decisions. It's common sense.
Pretty simple, huh? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If Feynman were alive today and observing the so-called "science" backing conventional medicine, he'd probably laugh out loud at the utter lack of scientific merit found in the drug studies published in so-called "scientific journals."
The Church of Medical Truth
While defenders of conventional medicine don't have membership in the club of genuine science, they are card-carrying members of another organization: The Church of Medical Truth (similar to the Ministry of Truth from 1984). In this Church, the beliefs of members (doctors, FDA bureaucrats, media reporters, etc. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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 Gary Naglie, a geriatrician in Canada, recently reviewed the entire corpus of drug studies of ChEIs and found only four of ninety studies in which quality of life was even assessed directly. No positive results were found. However, it is becoming clear that some psychosocial interventions improve quality of life, for example, exercise programs and training community-based care coordinators.6 Again, it must be emphasized that humans are adapted to receive care from one another and not exclusively from pills alone. Our treatment regimens should reflect this reality. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Notice that with drug studies, researchers routinely exclude those who did not comply with taking the drug. They don't test a drug on 1000 people, but count the results on 2000 people, half of which never took the drug. They only track results based on those who actually took the drugs. It's common sense.
Desperate to discredit vitamins
But when profits are at stake, and there's an industry-wide propaganda campaign to push onto the public, common sense gets thrown out the window. |
Andreas Moritz
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 There is a whole list of drug studies on children either still running or recently concluded. The research is sponsored by government agencies such as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and huge pharmaceutical companies such as Glaxo, Pfizer, Squibb and Genentech. One of the studies, "The Effect of Anti-HIV Treatment on Body Characteristics of HIV-infected Children" seeks to identify the causes of "Wasting and Lipodystrophy [fat redistribution]" by using drugs known to cause wasting and lipodystrophy. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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| While I was at Johns Hopkins in the 1980s, one of the first drug studies I ever conducted in Alzheimer's disease was with Nicorette chewing gum, an early smoking-cessation product that includes nicotine as its active ingredient. However, it was difficult to get patients to chew enough gum (which tasted terrible) and to be sure that they got adequate levels of nicotine in this way. The study was not a huge success, but some pharmaceutical companies did take our nicotinic research seriously and sought to adapt their own approaches. |
Lynne Mctaggart
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 In some drug studies, it is arrived at by dividing the number of people who have had a positive effect from the drug by the total number of participants in the trial. The overall effect size of the PEAR database was 0.2 per hour.20 Usually an effect size between 0.0 to 0.3 is considered small, a 0.3 to 0.6 effect size is medium and anything above that is considered large. The PEAR effect sizes are considered small and the overall REG studies, small to medium. However, these effect sizes are far larger than those of many drugs deemed to be highly successful in medicine. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| The FDA should be hammering drug companies with stringent safety requirements, skeptical thinking about drug benefits claims and huge fines for those companies that get caught conducting fraudulent science or burying the results of drug studies they don't want the public to see. To be really effective, the FDA needs:
1) Complete independence from Big Pharma. This means the agency must run on public funds only and receive no money from the industry it claims to regulate.
2) A new set of scary teeth. |
Andreas Moritz
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| Not unlike those women involved in involuntary ultrasound studies, soldiers have become guinea pigs in massive drug studies. How else could the pharmaceutical industry legally test poisons on human subjects?
Vaccination of soldiers is mandatory. Those who refuse the shots face court martial and prison time, or at the very least, a dishonorable discharge from the armed forces. Common side effects of the over one million vaccinations so far injected in our soldiers have included joint pain, extreme fatigue, and memory loss. The mandatory anthrax vaccine has even worse effects. |
Hyla Cass
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| General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that in early drug studies for establishing drug doses, 78 percent of the subjects were men. No wonder so many women cannot tolerate standard doses of top-selling drugs!
Thanks to such crusaders as Jay S. Cohen, M.D., the public and the medical community are becoming aware of this issue. Dr. Cohen's book, Over Dose: The Case Against the Drug Companies (Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), received a glowing review in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In it, Dr. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
| And that makes a reasonable person question the credibility of any positive drug studies associated with Merck
In other words, if this Nastech PYY Nasal Spray turns out to have nothing but positive, glowing studies showing tremendous weight loss, a thoughtful, rational person would obviously wonder, "Did Merck suppress the negative studies on this product as well?" That's certainly the question I would have.
So this association with Merck damages the credibility of what could potentially be a very good product. |
Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D.
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 In drug studies subjects never know whether they are receiving real medicine or look-alike sham pills. It's possible to do the
*?? Acupuncture
Several well-controlled trials of acupuncture suggest that it provides statistically significant relief of pain and stiffness and restores physical function. We may not understand exactly how it works, but as an adjunct to other treatments, acupuncture appears worthwhile.
If the practitioner is skilled in the art and science of acupuncture, side effects appear to be minimal. |
Dr. Timothy Scott
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 In the next two chapters I will discuss "ghostwriting" and explain how drug studies are conducted. Unfortunately, you are going to learn that the Effexor ad has not been the only effort to deceive. You will shortly become aware of how much of the antidepressant drug research is truly fraudulent.
6
"Most studies are now sponsored, designed and analyzed, in addition to being efficiently written, by pharmaceutical companies. |
| Truth should never be decided by a vote, by massive multi-million dollar advertising campaigns or by antidepressant drug studies designed and paid for by drug manufacturers. Truth should be decided by an honest, objective assessment of the evidence and by logic. It is not enough to say "I'm right" or "I'm right, and peer-reviewed research found in medical journals proves it." You need to have exact references to the facts which are used to support arguments and conclusions. This book contains over 1,800 references to some of the best of the scientific research. |
| If you ask, "Why would the FDA allow the drug companies to design their own drug studies and then accept these studies?" I have no easy answer. But I think you are getting a clearer understanding of why I felt compelled to write this book.
The Fifth Surprise
The last surprise I will mention is that despite all the drug companies' manipulation of their own clinical trials, they still could not prove antidepressants are effective. In fact, in 4 of the 47 studies the placebos helped those with depression as much or more than did the antidepressants to which they were being compared. |
| Lilly claims it is a superior antidepressant, but Kaiser now has a group of pharmacists who are critically reading the drug studies. In the case of Cymbalta, they found its claim of superiority was based on administering higher doses to study subjects than what is recommended on the label, one of the tricks discussed in the "Tricks of the Trade" chapter.7) A similar board might also be established by an association of state Medicaid programs, since they also pay for prescription drugs. |
Kelly Patricia O'Meara
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 This warning becomes even more, well, depressing when one considers that potential clinical trial participants for drug studies are excluded early in the screening process if they are, or have been, suicidal—further suggesting that it is the mind-altering drugs that cause the increased suicidal thoughts, not the alleged psychiatric diagnosis of depression.
Peter Breggin, M.D. |
Dr. Timothy Scott
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| The mind drug story remarkably parallels the estrogen (HRT) story, though there are at least three significant differences:
(1) The degree to which mind drug studies are manipulated and even fraudulent is far greater than what occurred with HRT studies.
(2) The degree to which FDA standards need to be raised is greater in the area of mind drug research since "depression," "anxiety" and "confusion" are more difficult to measure than heart attacks, strokes and cancer. |
Katharine Greider
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 One 1996 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine reviewed company-supported drug studies published between 1980 and 1989 in peer-reviewed journals or symposia proceedings and found that nearly all of them—98 percent—favored the company's drug.
[chapter 5] GETTING TO YOU
Drugmakers' efforts to influence doctors'behavior are ultimately aimed at influencing ours. And more than ever before, these companies are bringing their pitch straight into Americans' everyday lives, advertising on radio, in popular magazines, and especially on TV. |
Robert Whitaker
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 As faculty, Borison and Diamond were supposed to get approval from the medical school to do drug studies. Payments for commercial trials were supposed to be sent directly to the school. But starting in 1989, Borison and Diamond cut the college out of the loop and told the drug firms to send their money directly to them. They opened an office across the street from the medical school and turned it into a full-time research mill, which they called Clinical Therapeutics. |
| In his new position, he also perceived that NIMH research was skewed toward drug studies. There was, he said, a "clubby" relationship between the academics who sat on the NIMH grant-review committees and the pharmaceutical industry.23 He envisioned Soteria as an experiment to test a simple premise: Would treating acutely psychotic people in a humanistic way, one that emphasized empathy and caring and avoided the use of neuroleptics, be as effective as the drug treatment provided in hospitals? |
Earl L. Mindell, RPh, PhD with Virginia Hopkins, MA
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| Clinical trials: drug studies on humans, versus rodents or in a test tube.
CNS: Central nervous system; refers to the nerves of the brain and spinal cord, which is to say those nerves that regulate almost everything in the body. Dermatitis: Skin rash.
Dys as a prefix: Dysfunction, difficult, painful. Dyspepsia: Indigestion, heartburn, bloating. Dyspnea: Difficult breathing. Dysuria: Painful urination.
Edema: Water retention, bloating, swelling due to water retention.
Electrolyte: In the human body, this usually refers to the minerals calcium, potassium, and sodium. |
| Another factor making drug studies less than meaningful is that few drugs are studied for more than three months, making long-term side effects unpredictable.
The Public Citizen Health Research Group, which publishes the book and newsletter, Worst Pills, Best Pills, suggests avoiding any drug that hasn't been on the market for at least five years. Before that time, you are, in effect, a guinea pig for the FDA and the drug company. And even then, as our tragic experience with fen-phen has shown us, five years may not be enough. |
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