Just because a painkiller is available over the counter (otc) it doesn't mean it's harmless, especially if it's paracetamol/acetaminophen/Calpol/Tylenol/

Just because a painkiller is available aver the counter (otc) it doesn't mean it's harmless, especially if it's paracetamol/acetaminophen/Calpol/Tylenol/Panadol. See this abcnews article. And see this Google search page.This drug is particularly dangerous to children. See Philly.com Report. For children especially it can cause asthma, liver damage and even sudden death. - That's apart from starting them on the path of painkiller dependence and painkiller addiction.

It is better to deal with the cause of the pain, rather than trying to eliminate the symptom. Pain is not caused by paracetamol deficiency.

Merck and the Vioxx saga

"The Vioxx saga continues. Nearly eight years after Merck withdrew the controversial painkiller over links to heart attacks and strokes, a new paper indicates the drugmaker hid evidence that Vioxx tripled the risk of cardiovascular death for more than three years before taking the pill off the market in 2004. During the same period, the paper in the American Heart Journal notes, Merck had regularly insisted such an increased did not exist."
Read article at pharmalot.com

On Inside Health on Radio 4 this week: some people are being misdiagnosed as having exercise-induced asthma

On Inside Health this week: some people are being misdiagnosed as having exercise-induced asthma. So if you or someone you know has had this diagnosis, and especially if you are an athlete, more especially if medication has been prescribed, and even more especially if that is steroid medication, then I suggest you visit this BBC webpage. Rather than exercise-induced asthma, the problem may be vocal cord dysfunction, and this problem does not respond to inhalers. I suggest you also have a look at my recent blogpost about asthma.

Dr Mercola today explains about the drug industry's widespread corruption of scientific research

Dr Mercola today explains the widespread corruption of science: that drug companies invent data, fabricate research, falsify results,cover up adverse effects...

The Wind from the East

When I was a child, if we ever had a day out at the seaside it was on the East Coast. The east wind was the stuff of legend: a lazy wind - lazy because it didn't go round you; it went through you. A very cold wind. I used to think of it as coming straight from Russia. I think of it today because July 11th was the birthday of one of my great-aunts, and she once took me to stay for a week in Bridlington.

 

She liked us to go for a walk each day along the promenade to get the fresh sea air and to 'blow away the cobwebs'. On our walk one day we saw a boatman selling tickets to go on a trip on his boat. A notice-board proclaimed the cost of the trip and carried the promise, BACK FOR TEA! - "We could be back for tea without going on the trip," she laughed, but we went on the boat trip all the same.

Roche Must Pay $18 Million to Two Former Accutane Users

Roche Holding AG must pay a total of $18 million in damages to two former users of its Accutane acne drug who blamed the medicine for their bowel disease, a New Jersey jury ruled.
Read article at bloomberg.com

Pfizer involved in deception over new arthritis painkiller drug Celebrex

"A research director for Pfizer was positively buoyant after reading that an important medical conference had just featured a study claiming that the new arthritis drug Celebrex was safer on the stomach than more established drugs. “They swallowed our story, hook, line and sinker,” he wrote in an e-mail to a colleague. The truth was that Celebrex was no better at protecting the stomach from serious complications than other drugs. It appeared that way only because Pfizer and its partner, Pharmacia, presented the results from the first six months of a yearlong study rather than the whole thing."
Read article in the New York Times (USA)

Really I don't think arthritis painkilling drugs are worth the candle. They've done a great deal of harm over the years. See my posts about Vioxx, for example.

You can reduce the pain of osteoarthritis by the simple expedient of seriously cutting down on salt and salty food. This dietary measure also lowers high blood pressure, reduces your risk of heart attack, stroke, depression, fractures, some cancers and many other degenerative illnesses, as well as reducing excess weight caused by fluid retention and helping with breathing problems. - What's not to like? - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

GSK whistleblowers handsomely rewarded for their evidence which helped in the US prosecution of Glaxo for drug mispromotion and fraud

The Telegraph reports that four former GlaxoSmithKline employees will share up to £159 million for their part in the successful prosecution of the drug company. Unfortunately Glaxo's crimes and misdemeanours are regarded with amazing leniency in Britain, as evidenced by the award of a knighthood earlier this year to Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline. Drug company profits trump patient safety and corporate ethics.

Do you really think that GSK, the drug company, is interested in helping people to be healthy?

Do you really think that drug companies are interested in helping you to be healthy? - Surely not? - Are you not aware that they repeatedly appear in both the civil and the criminal courts as defendants in cases of fraud, bribery, corruption and the like? - That their only real interest is in profits and their only motivation is greed? - Check it out:

 

See last Monday's article on the BBC News Website, in which we read that "GlaxoSmithKline is to pay $3bn (£1.9bn) in the largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history. The drug giant is to plead guilty to promoting two drugs for unapproved uses and failing to report safety data about a diabetes drug to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The settlement will cover criminal fines as well as civil settlements with the federal and state governments.
The case concerns 10 drugs, including Paxil, Wellbutrin, Avandia and Advair."

Did you know that the many well-honed skills of GSK include bribing doctors to prescribe antidepressant drugs off-label for children, knowing that these drugs can and do result in grave harm to children, including death? And did you know that Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours List? - Beggars belief, doesn't it? - It's not as if the fraudulent practices of this firm have only come to light recently. They have been reported and in the public domain for years. Why was the head of this huge criminal business recommended for a knighthood?

I've mentioned Andrew Witty previously in one of my blogposts. - See HERE. Would you feel safe taking drugs made and marketed by this company? -  Well I wouldn't.

An old school-friend rang me today and reminded me of a choral part-song we used to sing as girls

Katharine had been to a concert recently and the song had been on the programme. After our plucking at the strings of memory, I felt a desire to see the sheet music of the song again and have a little sing. - What a pleasure therefore to find it available on this website, www.vsmusicsupplies.com, and furthermore to find, on ringing up, that it is a real human being with a warm friendly voice who answers the phone, not a recorded message, not a daunting menu, not a call-centre slave. - Ruth will be dispatching my music on Monday...(o:

The Blue Bird (by Charles Villiers Stanford)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNdeCzrdnpE

Could any voices sound lovelier than these?

What's the best way to prevent asthma, and by extension, prevent deaths from asthma?

Well it was reported in the Telegraph this week that doctors, by way of Dr Dinesh Saralaya, who runs a specialist clinic in Bradford, are saying that 1,000 Asthma deaths a year could be prevented if patients, even those with only mild asthma, would regularly use "their ‘preventer’ inhaler - which contains a low-dose steroid" rather than relying "solely on the ‘reliever’ inhaler when undergoing an attack. " The evidence for this claim appears to be "a poll of 333 people with severe asthma, conducted by Ipsos MORI and funded by drugs firm Novartis". Personally, I would never give much credence to research funded by companies with a financial interest in the results, and in particular to research funded by drug companies hoping to increase the sales and use of their drugs and consequently their company profits. - Would you?

But I have even stronger reasons to regard this report with scepticism. The newspaper report is illustrated with a photo of a child using an inhaler, so I'll consider in particular child sufferers from asthma. - Now I am not a doctor and I have no medical qualifications whatsoever, so if you are wanting a medical opinion you would be better looking elsewhere than on my blog. But like you I do have a brain and I can read. My personal opinion is that the best way to prevent asthma, and to prevent deaths from asthma, is to protect children from a high intake of salt/sodium. My opinion is based on the following research evidence:

In this Telegraph article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2137775/Too-much-television-is-an-asthma-risk.html, about research in Rome, Italy, led by Dr Giuseppe Corbo, despite its misleading title, the crucial finding is, "The study of 20,000 six and seven-year-olds, published in the medical journal Epidemiology, confirmed a strong link with asthma and obesity, but found that salt was the biggest risk. Those with the highest intake of salt were two and a half times more likely to develop asthma." (My emphasis.) I'll bet your brain comes to the same conclusion as mine does, doesn't it? - Protecting children from a high salt diet is the simplest, safest and most effective way to reduce their risk of developing asthma and also from any necessity to take steroid meds as treatment for asthma. (I'm not a big fan of steroid meds, especially if they can be avoided.)

This article, too, supports the wisdom of a low salt intake for children. "According to a new study published by the American Dietetic Association, high-salt foods and snacks are linked to lung changes that trigger asthma symptoms.," and that researchers in Greece found, using questionnaires, "Kids who ate high-salt foods more than three times a week saw their risk of asthma symptoms go up almost five times."

Another drug-free and very important measure to protect children from developing asthma is to avoid dosing children with paracetamol/acetaminophen (aka Tylenol and Calpol). A wealth of statistical data on this webpage http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/health/evidence-mounts-linking-acetaminophen-and-asthma.html?_r=1 suggests a link between acetaminophen and childhood asthma. Also have a read of this article from the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/3233550/Delaying-baby-vaccine-could-cut-asthma.html for another simple measure that "could halve the likelihood of a child developing asthma by the age of seven."

As well as reducing the suffering of many thousands, even of millions, of people, these simple measures could also save about £1 billion a year - nearly one per cent of the NHS entire NHS budget - that is spent on asthma. - What it would not do, of course, is boost the profits of the drug company, Novartis...

I've been watching BBC2's The Men Who Made Us Fat

I watched Part 1 of The Men Who Made Us Fat on BBC2 last week. I must say it's a refreshing change to have some evidence-supported information about important causes of the dramatic rise in the incidence and severity of obesity and obesity-related ill-health instead of the usual incorrect propaganda.

In Part 1 it was explained how sugar is a major contributor to obesity and how since the second world war the USA's food industry has been ladling sugar, sugar and more sugar, into its processed junk food products, be they sweet or savoury. And another even more-dangerously obesogenic sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is also added to their food junk and their ghastly soft drinks. This corn product use is massively profitable for America's corn farmers and massively damaging to the health and weight of American citizens. - Especially when it is coupled with the ill-conceived (blame Ancel Keys) misinformation that low-fat food is a good way to lose weight (it isn't and it doesn't work) and that low fat intake is good for our health (it isn't).

So those of us who were paying attention learned that although America purports to be a democracy and proclaims, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people," these days it's more like, "Government of the people, by the farm industry's political stooges, for the farm industry's profits, and to Hell with the well-being of the 'American people'".

On Thursday night I watched Part 2, in which it was explained that not content with changing America's food to obesogenic mass-manufactured highly-addictive crap, Big Business perverted civilised eating to a fast feeding process, with fast food outlets serving food fast to customers, who ate it fast (it didn't take too much chewing), sloshing it down with over-sweetened soft drinks, having queued for 'counter-service', so much speedier than table service. And furthermore, they increased portion sizes to ludicrous levels. - I found the gargantuan size of the drinks especially horrifying! 

Well America's citizens are now mostly pretty huge - well huge, certainly, but not so pretty... And they are so big that they almost look like another species. - And what does the food industry suggest as a remedy for this gross obesity problem caused in large part by the food industry itself? - Well, blame it on the victims of course! Like rapists used to do. - The victims need to eat less fat and take more exercise! (NOT)

But it is not lack of exercise that causes obesity, so taking more exercise does not and will not reduce obesity. Obesity causes inactivity, not the other way round, as I explain in my Mensa article. And as Professor Terry Wilkin of the Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry. explained in Thursday's programme. 

Professor Wilkin led a pioneering study into childhood weight gain and found that children do not gain weight because of inactivity and do not lose weight by taking exercise. The study had been commissioned by the government of the time, but the findings were unwelcome, so they were buried and funding stopped, and successive governments, few among them scientists, chose to heed the falsehoods of the food industry, i.e. cut down on fat, especially saturated fat, and take more exercise! - Oh dear! - Do you think it's too much like America's plight? - Government of the people, by Big Business interests, for the profits of the Food Industry and its mates? - What do you reckon? - We've got the Dept of Health being advised about how to tackle obesity by the food and drinks businesses who promote obesity. - Looks like we're gonna be getting more and more obese with all this crap food and crap advice, doesn't it?

And when are they going to get on to SALT? and anti-depressants? and other prescription drugs that cause weight gain?