Scandal of many deaths from Diabetes drug, Mediator, approved and subsidised by French health service for 33 years

Scandal of many deaths from Diabetes drug, Mediator, approved and subsidised by French health service for 33 years. "President Nicolas Sarkozy has promised "the most complete transparency" on how a drug which is now suspected to have killed up to 2,000 people was officially approved, and subsidised, for 33 years by the French health service." - Read article in The Independent.

This is what Dr Rath's website has to say about the matter: " Despite repeated warnings from scientists around the world, a deadly pharmaceutical drug, Mediator, was prescribed to 5 million French people. Successive French health ministers ignored scientific advice that the drug – produced by the French pharmaceutical giant, Servier, a company well known for its cult of secrecy and close relations with French politicians – was at best useless, and at worst highly dangerous. In all, the drug is now suspected to have killed 2,000 people. Notably, therefore, it has emerged that French President Nicolas Sarkozy – who, in 2004, coerced the marriage between French pharmaceutical dwarf Sanofi and Swiss/German drug giant Aventis/Hoechst – previously worked for Servier as a lawyer."

Here is the back story.
Read article at pharmalot.com

Avoid pharmaceutical drugs if you possibly can. Remember you cannot trust the pharmaceutical industry: it is mired in false claims and in corruption.

JB Priestley: Radio 4 "Great Lives"

If you are interested in JB Priestley then I highly recommend this programme to you, which you can listen to using the iPlayer or catch the programme repeat on Fri 14 Jan 2011 at 23:00.
"Barry Cryer nods to his Yorkshire roots in choosing JB Priestley, the Bradford born author of The Good Companions and An Inspector Calls."

It was heart-warming to listen to Barry Cryer's affectionate recollections of his meetings with the great man, whom he so greatly admired. And "Martin Wainwright, northern editor of the Guardian, presenter of last year's radio documentary about the Postscripts, also brings to life a prolific writer nearly killed in World War One." Martin Wainwright is a superb broadcaster and it is a joy to listen to him speaking about this writer he holds in such high regard.

A five star programme in my opinion.

Drug-induced osteomalacia

Saw this PubMed info about drug-induced osteomalacia.

Drug company financial inducements corrupt doctors and damage the reputations of medical schools

Read about how drug companies corrupt doctors and medical schools with inducements in cash or in freebies to get them to give talks/lectures promoting their company's drugs. And read the Comments beneath the article.

The appallingly poor treatment, including being left to starve, of thousands of elderly dementia patients in UK hospitals

See this report in the Telegraph. - Doesn't it shock you and make you feel ashamed of the NHS? Why isn't something done about it? We will all be old one day unless we die before our time. Is this the way you would be happy to be treated if you ever suffer the misfortune of developing dementia and going into one of these uncaring hospitals? Why don't staff who are maltreating patients in these ways get identified and punished? - Why are they allowed to get away with it, since this clearly encourages them to continue in the same cruel way?

Study: Ineffective, harmful antipsychotic drugs are being prescribed more and more, without good reason

Study finds that ineffective, harmful antipsychotic drugs are being prescribed more and more, without good reason, as reported here. Increasingly these powerful drugs, with their many ghastly adverse side-effects, have been prescribed 'off-label', even to children! (Off-label drugs are those prescribed by doctors for purposes not approved by the FDA.) This damnable pharmaceutical junk causes terrible physical, emotional and mental suffering and it destroys lives!

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, is chairman of the department of psychiatry at Columbia University, and was not involved in the study. But he tells us the reason for this off-label prescribing: “Off-label prescribing is an important component of practice,” Lieberman says. “The reason is that it really takes a lot of money for a drug company to jump through all the hoops to get an FDA indication. There may be good evidence that a drug is effective in a given condition, but the company doesn’t see enough of a market there to get it approved.”

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, straight from the mouth of a psychiatrist: all that prescribing of drugs that cause such great suffering to innocent patients, including children, is in order that drug companies cover the costs of jumping through "all the hoops" to get FDA approval!

But the most important hoop should be that a drug is safe. And the next most important hoop is that a drug is effective - that it 'does what it says on the tin'.

Periodically, these evil drug companies and their complicit stooges, the medically qualified prescribers of these toxic drugs, get some sort of punishment following court cases, and usually it is that the companies have to pay money - fines and/or damages. Sadly, the money they have to pay is insignificant in comparison to the huge profits they have raked in from selling the drugs, and so the punishment for their wrongdoing does not deter them from repetition of the wrongdoing.

The CEOs of the companies should be punished personally, with the full rigour of the Law. A long spell in prison is more likely to deter them from continuing to harm people for company profits. - OR - and here is a radical suggestion! - since they favour off-label prescribing for conditions not covered by their licence to use the drug - why not inflict the drug on them while they are in the prison? - I have a firm belief that by themselves suffering the adverse side-effects, they would be completely cured of encouraging off-label drug use again, provided it were to be made clear to them that they would receive the same punishment again if they re-offended.

Here is an interesting blog about Ethics, Medicine, and Pharm.

Here's an interesting blog about Ethics, Medicine, and Pharm. It is written by a medical doctor, Howard Brody, M.D., Ph.D., who is an academic and an ethicist. Commendably, he is not ambiguous in his criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry and of their payments to greedy doctors who, for payment, compromise their integrity by lending their names and reputations to recommend drugs and medical devices unworthy of recommendation.

While at my computer desk the other evening...

The other evening I was sitting at my computer desk, holding a printed sheet to which I was referring, when the piece of paper slid from my hand, ending up on the floor under the desk, next to the wall. In the way that one does, I bent down, still sitting at the desk, stretching, stretching, stretching my arm - too far, unfortunately, and I slipped from my chair, landing painfully and awkwardly on my hands and knees on the floor. - That was fun! - As a steroid victim I have painfully thin skin and painfully delicate, swollen veins, and to get up I needed to put extra pressure on my poor painful knees and to supplement this with pressure exerted by my even more painful, delicate hands, one pushing down on the seat of the chair and one pushing down on the top of the desk, if I remember correctly. - But it was much too painful to do this...)o: - And it was also much too painful not to do it...)o: - I couldn't stay crouched like that all night, damaging the delicate skin and veins more and more.

There was a soft cushion on the floor on which I tend to place my swollen, painful feet and I struggled to pull it toward my knees so that I could put my knees on it and thereby reduce the pressure on them. Then with determination I forced myself to get up from the floor, disregarding the agony for my knees and hands. - I was exhausted. But what a relief to be up!

One good thing though was that there was no-one with me grabbing hold of my desperately painful arm, determined to 'help' me by pulling at it!!! - Ooh no, please! - Don't grab someone's arm! You stop them from being able to use that arm/hand to help themselves. - Check with them first - ask them - if they would like you to pull their arm, and don't be offended if they say no! - I think you will find that they would be delighted to accept your kind offer of help - but by you offering your arm for them to grasp and pull on to help themselves up. - Offer your strong arm; don't grab and squeeze their delicate one. - Well done! Thank you for your help!

Very low carbohydrate intake may improve your memory

See this article.

Chantix, Prescription Drugs and Acts of Violence

"For years, there were contentious debates about links between certain prescription meds, notably antidepressants, and suicidal behavior. Now, the focus is turning to violent behavior directed toward others. And a new study is linking 31 widely prescribed drugs - most notably, the Chantix anti-smoking pill - with 1,527 serious acts of violence, such as physical abuse, physical assault and homicide."
Read article at pharmalot.com

US Drinking Water contains hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen

Read AFP news report at yahoo.com

Slippery Statistics: there's something fishy about them!

I've been listening to Radio 4's More or Less programme first broadcast on Dec 31st 2010. If you go to this BBC webpage you too can listen to it using iPlayer. "Tim Harford and the More or Less team explore 2010 in numbers. Contributors include Ben Goldcare, Robert Peston, the National Statistician and the Swedish statistical guru Hans Rosling." - That should be Goldacre, btw, not Goldcare. It's a rare BBC typo...(o:

Anyway the programme includes Gordon Brown, when Prime Minister, being less than honest with statistics while speaking in the House of Commons. You will also hear of the wealth of misleading immigration figures that the British public was fed for years. And Robert Peston explains again about the crisis with the banks and their cash reserves. But the most important item in the programme in my opinion is the complaint by medical doctor and columnist, Ben Goldacre, that 74% of results of drug trials on Reboxetine, a so-called antidepressant drug manufactured by Pfizer, were not published in academic journals and were kept from doctors and patients. - Since the drug is "ineffective and worse than useless", but the actual published data claimed the opposite, Dr Goldacre describes this as "the greatest scandal of modern medicine."

You may, along with me, and along with Dr Goldacre, wonder why drug companies are allowed knowingly to mislead with fraudulent claims about their pharmaceutical junk, and why the medical journals are similarly allowed to skew the evidence by withholding trial results that show the drugs do more harm than good, and why nobody goes to prison for this fraud and for the harm that ensues to patients because of this fraud and for robbing the NHS purse and the British tax-payers by charging them for toxic trash. - The answer, as I'm sure you have worked out for yourself, is that Big Pharma's tainted profits make their way into the pockets of the venal.

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, follow the money: venal politicians, slick lawyers, publishers, share-dealers, drug reps, shady doctors, shady members of drug regulation panels, etc. Which of them join in the dance of of the dodgy drugs, and rake in their shares of the ill-gotten gains?