Commonly prescribed medicines can destroy lives

Experts have called for increased awareness about the issue of adverse drug reactions after hearing how everyday prescription medicines are destroying the lives of some patients.
Read article at medicalxpress.com

Can Psychiatry and its Prescription Drugs be Trusted

This Radio 4 programme BBC webpage entitled "Rewriting the Psychiatrist's Bible" is available to listen to online for another week. I am sure you would find it interesting and illuminating - and sinister...

Psychiatrists invent new psychiatric illnesses/conditions; drug companies invent or rediscover pharmaceutical drugs to treat these putative conditions. The pharmaceutical industry profits from the sales of this mind-altering medication; the medics who prescribe the stuff benefit financially from their ties with Big Pharma. - All is fine and dandy - except for the fall guys: the children and adults who trustingly take the psychotropic junk and suffer the multitude of adverse side-effects, one of which is usually massive weight gain and its attendant ill-health.

Avoid this junk.

Good nutrition is the best physician and the safest medicine.

All prescriptions charges in England should be scrapped, doctors argue.

Make all prescriptions free in England, doctors argue
article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"The British Medical Association is calling for all prescriptions in England to be free and the National Pharmacy Association, and a host of patient charities are also in support.

Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland have already abolished charges or are planning to.

A review of medical diagnoses which are exempt from charges is being carried out and chairman Prof Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, is due to report in the summer.

Currently only 11 per cent of people in England pay the £7.10 charge for a doctor's prescription and this will drop further from April 1st as cancer patients receiving treatment will each be exempt from fees for five years.

Gordon Brown has said exemptions will be extended to all people with long-term conditions, to be determined by the review, but doctors say this will leave only a tiny minority paying the fee which is 'nonsensical'.

The NHS earns around £450m a year from prescription charges out of a budget of around £100bn a year and this would be substantially reduced if all 15m people with long-term conditions were removed from charges, the BMA said.

Research has estimated that around 750,000 patients on low income, but who do not qualify for as exempt from charges, fail to have their medicines dispensed because of the cost."

To make all prescriptions free in England would certainly make the system simpler, and would undoubtedly be fairer, especially for people with long-term conditions, so I suppose I should support this idea. What troubles me about it is that it will, inevitably, lead to more people being prescribed drugs and to more people taking them, and it is my firm and sincere belief that prescribed drugs on the whole do far, far, far more harm (mostly unrecognised and certainly unacknowledged) than good.

Drug companies would only be paid by the NHS if their treatments improve a patient's health, under radical plans unveiled by the Conservatives.

Tories 'would only pay drug companies if treatments work'
Article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"The Conservatives are pledging to overhaul the system if elected. Mr Lansley said: "Instead of the NHS denying access to drugs because they say it's not cost effective - as NICE has done recently with four kidney cancer drugs - we should encourage the NHS to use new medicines which are clinically effective, and agree subsequently to pay the drugs companies according to the therapeutic benefit.

"In other words, drugs companies should only be paid according to the benefits that a drug brings to patients. NICE should be involved in this process, working with drug companies to set fair prices for new medicines - rather than refusing new treatments which it deems too expensive."

Mr Lansley says there are already small-scale examples of drugs companies agreeing to be paid on results. For example, he draws attention to a constituent of his who needed a drug to treat bone marrow cancer. Johnson & Johnson, the drug's manufacturer, agreed with the Department of Health to only be paid for the drug for patients where it has been successful.

The shadow Health Secretary said: "At the moment, everyone loses out - patients don't get new and potentially life saving drugs, the NHS can't innovate and meet the needs of patients, and drugs companies don't get the opportunity to introduce their new therapies…Every time a patient dies having been denied a new drug which should be available to them it is a tragedy."

He added: "The Government should act swiftly now to reform the system before any more people's lives are tragically cut short."

The Conservative proposals, to be set out in a speech by Mr Lansley to the CBI today, are likely to be welcomed by patient groups and drug companies."

I welcome that idea. Well done for that bright idea, Andrew Lansley! - That would be a start! - But since prescription drugs do far more harm than good, the drug companies should have to pay money to the NHS for all the adverse effects/harm the patients suffer as a result of taking Big Pharma's concoctions...

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions

See advice for pregnant mothers

Taking aspirin every day could help to prevent the painful bone-wasting disease osteoporosis, scientists believe.

An aspirin a day 'could help prevent osteoporosis'
Article in the Telegraph

Here is an extract, but it is probably best to read the whole article:

"The pain killer could offer a new treatment against the condition, also known as "brittle bone" disease.

Research has shown that the drug can help increase bone density in mice. It could prevent the premature death of bone forming cells in the animals.

Aspirin also blocked the effects of other cells which act destructively on the bones."

If you wish to avoid taking aspirin, you can also reduce your risk of osteoporosis by avoiding salt and salty food and by avoiding dieting.

See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/sodium_foods.html and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/conditions.html

Another warning of the harm done by prescribed medications, e.g. Zestril

Dr James LeFanu: Second Opinion

Extract from the article in the Sunday Telegraph:

"Suddenly feeling unwell? It's probably your medicine, writes James LeFanu

The news this week that drugs used in the treatment of Parkinson's can turn people of impeccable character into pathological gamblers is a reminder that medication is the likely culprit for any novel or unusual symptom.

Surprisingly, this most reliable rule of thumb is often overlooked by doctors, as a lady from New South Wales discovered when prescribed Zestril for raised blood pressure. After six months she began to have "extremely debilitating" episodes of nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. A gut specialist did all the usual tests and, finding nothing wrong, recommended the fashionable high-fibre diet.

Another six months elapsed with a further dozen or so episodes till she woke one morning with a terrifying swelling of the lips and tongue - diagnosed as the allergic condition angio oedema, which she was advised was caused by house dust mites. She says this "did not ring true", and on further investigation she found that both the tongue swelling and bowel symptoms were known side-effects of Zestril. Besides the gut specialist she had consulted four other doctors "but not one had made the connection"."

One wonders which is worse - the serious/harmful/dangerous side-effects of prescribed drugs, or the medical profession's scandalously widespread ignorance about them!...)o:

Note: Prescription drugs and doctors' lack of knowledge/understanding about their adverse side-effects are major causes of morbid obesity and all the many illnesses associated with obesity.

Lose weight and improve your health in many ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

British doctors are concerned over rights of nurses to prescribe drugs

Concern over rights of nurses to prescribe drugs - Guardian

Extract:

"Medical practitioners today expressed 'serious concerns' over the rights of nurses to prescribe complex medicines after new figures showed a big increase in the practice.

The number of prescriptions issued by independent nurse prescribers has risen by 49% since new rules allowing nurses to prescribe complex medicines to patients were introduced last year, according a report in Pulse, the newspaper for GPs.

The figures have prompted a row among medical practitioners over whether nurses and pharmacists should have the right to prescribe a wide range of drugs in a bid to speed up patient treatment.

Professor Hugh McGavock, visiting professor of prescribing science at the University of Ulster and a former member of the Committee on Safety of Medicines, told Pulse he had "serious concerns" about the rule change.

He said: "Nurses' knowledge of diagnosis is pathetically poor. It takes medical students five years to be competent to make a differential diagnosis. Only a country with not enough doctors would go down this cheapy line.""

Hollow laughter here...)o: - Could there be any health professionals worse at diagnosis and at prescribing than NHS doctors? - Not in my experience! - Their reckless and inappropriate prescribing of powerful drugs when they have wholly inadequate knowledge of the adverse side-effects of the drugs beggars belief! If that were not the case, I would not be a steroid victim, and nor would the scores of other steroid victims in this country.

Remember, friends, whenever, in any country, doctors go on strike, the death rate goes down...(o: (Check it out on the internet.) - There's a lesson for us all.

Plus we have a pathetic system of regulating drugs. - http://www.mhra.gov.uk/ - This is the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency - surely a euphemistic title if ever there was one!

It is an executive agency of the Department of Health and the MHRA website makes the grandiose claim that: "We enhance and safeguard the health of the public by ensuring that medicines and medical devices work, and are acceptably safe." - Well they make a lamentable job of this!

There are no warnings for patients that they should eat no salt or food containing salt when taking certain drugs, most importantly many quite commonly prescribed steroids, HRT, other drugs containing oestrogen, amitriptyline and many other anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, and some other drugs, because these drugs can and often do cause sodium and water retention and therefore, potentially, morbid obesity and a host of other serious health problems.

If the MHRA were doing its job properly they would have long ago curbed the recklessly excessive over-prescribing of these drugs, many of which have been being prescribed for over 50 years, and implemented a mandatory monitoring of patients taking these drugs, in order to prevent morbid obesity, etc developing. - As it is, because of their failure to do their job properly, there are many thousands of obese and morbidly obese people in this country as a direct result of taking drugs prescribed by NHS doctors.

I'd trust a pharmacist ahead of a doctor for knowing about drugs, and I'd trust a prescribing nurse ahead of a doctor for taking the trouble to look up a drug to check the side-effects.

Doctors have got a good PR machine, but it's not matched by their performance...)o: