Many painful, crippling adverse effects from taking Levaquin or other Fluoroquinolone antibiotics

Johnson and Johnson has to pay damages to a victim. See Pharmalot.com item. - Be sure to read the Comments from other victims beneath the report. Doctors know too little about the dangers of the drugs they prescribe. Too many lives are being destroyed by pharmaceutical drugs.

Don't become part of the statistics. Avoid prescription drugs if you can.

Irresponsible prescribing of diazepam/Valium is again on the rise in UK

The Sunday Telegraph reports that prescriptions for diazepam aka Valium are rising dramatically. The benzodiazepine family of drugs, which includes Valium, are extremely addictive yet were heavily over-prescribed in the 1970s, and have destroyed the lives of millions of people, mainly women. Were it not for Esther Rantzen and her investigative television programme “That’s Life” this horrifying damage to innocent people would have continued to escalate, as the drug companies assured their medical dupes that the dreadful symptoms their patients were suffering were not caused by the drugs, but by the putative underlying illness. See the article in The Independent of 31 October 2009 where we read that:

"In 1980, an item on Esther Rantzen’s BBC TV programme “That’s Life” detailing the difficulty some people had withrawing from Valium, provoked the biggest response in the programme’s history, exposing a problem on a huge scale that had gone unnoticed by doctors. GPs had until then assumed, when patients complained of symptoms of withdrawal, that this was the anxiety returning - and prescribed more drugs. “That’s life” was later celebrated as the TV programme that changed the course of medicine.

In 1988, doctors were warned by the Committee on Safety of Medicines that prescriptions for the benzodiazepines should be limited to a maximum of four weeks . The warning was re-iterated by Sir Liam Donaldson, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer in 2004."

That irresponsible GPs are adding to the already huge numbers of innocent victims of these harmful drugs is hard to credit. Their freedom to prescribe these drugs should be curbed by Law and there should be severe sanctions against any further flouting of the guidelines about it.

In my informed opinion, prescription drugs cause most of the avoidable illness and disability in the UK and in the USA.

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

UK Government declines to help Vioxx victims in their legal fight with drug company, Merck.

Read this Timesonline report.

I have written many times about the problems with the painkiller, Vioxx. If you click on the Vioxx tag in the Labels list that is at the end of this post, you will find my previous posts about it.

A drug-free way to reduce chronic pain that many people have found helpful is to avoid or cut down on salt and salty food. If you suffer from pain and would prefer not to take drugs, you may like to give it a try.

Chantix Tops New Report On Serious Side Effects

The number of serious problems and deaths linked to medications reported to the FDA set a record in the first three months of this year, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices reports. The FDA received nearly 21,000 reports of serious drug reactions, including over 4,800 deaths, according to ISMP’s an analysis of federal data dating to 2004. Yearly totals went back to the 1990s. Two drugs accounted for a disproportionately large share of the latest reports. One was heparin, the tainted blood thinner from China that caused an international safety scandal. The other was Chantix, a new kind of anti-smoking drug from Pfizer, which refuted the findings. The drug accounted for more reported serious injuries than any other prescription drug for a second quarter, a total of 1001 new cases, including 50 additional deaths. Earlier this year, the FDA warned that Chantix may be linked to psychiatric problems, including suicidal behavior and vivid dreams, and the government banned it for pilots.
Read article at pharmalot.com