http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaAndHealth/BigBucksBigPharma

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Big Tobacco and Big Pharma: same tactics, different chemicals

Have you ever thought about the similarities between pharmaceutical and tobacco companies? They're striking. Both sell products that kill people when used as directed. The statistics are readily available for pharmaceuticals, which kill around 100,000 Americans each year according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Big Tobacco, which makes tobacco products that are partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer in the United States each year. These are the facts from industry. Industry critics (such as myself) would argue that those numbers are actually much higher.

But let's look at other similarities. Aside from marketing products that actually kill people when used as directed, both industries are engaged in the blatant distortion of scientific evidence in order to mislead regulators and the public.

With Big Tobacco we saw the suppression of studies that said nicotine was addictive, or of studies linking the inhalation of tobacco smoke to lung cancer. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see even worse distortions of clinical studies. We see studies that are designed to minimize the appearance of negative risks associated with these drugs, such as heart attacks, stroke, mental disorders, suicide attempts, and violent behavior. Even after studies are completed, the results are highly distorted as well. Drug companies pick and choose which studies they want to publish. They may do twelve different studies on a particular drug, and if six of them say the drug is safe and effective, while the other six studies say the drug is dangerous and useless from a medicinal point of view, they pick the six they want and bury the others. They forward the six they want to the FDA. The FDA looks at those six and says, "This sure is scientific!", and they approve that drug application. I'm not making this up.

In the late 1990's, drug advertising appeared on television. That is, of course, another similarity between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma: they both use direct-to-consumer advertising to create demand for their products. For many years, tobacco companies sponsored sporting events; in fact, they still attempt to sponsor many sporting events. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see heavy magazine and television advertising, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent lobbying doctors, buying them gifts, trips (to Hawaii, believe it or not), air tickets, and stays in luxurious resorts. All doctors have to do is show up, sign in, and act like they're attending a continuing medical education course. They then can leave for the entire day, and go on the beach, go fishing, go surfing, and do whatever they want. It's an all-expenses-paid vacation.

Some people say, "No, that's ridiculous. That doesn't happen." I've actually been in Hawaii, talking to doctors who were attending such an event. I saw the entire room of about four hundred MD’s, and these people just signed in, then they left to go surfing with me! So I know how the system works, I've seen it firsthand. All the doctors out there who might be listening to this, you know how it works too. A lot of these continuing medical education courses are really just a joke.

Doctors pushed cigarettes for decades

Another interesting similarity between cigarettes and prescription drugs is that doctors have a history of supporting them both very strongly. You might say, "Wait a minute, doctors don't support smoking and cigarettes." Sure they do, if you just go back far enough. In the seventies and eighties, they began to figure out that smoking is bad for you. Before that, however, doctors could actually be found as spokespersons for cigarettes. They said that cigarettes made you healthy.

You can find, in archives of old magazines like Time, that some doctors are even in advertisements stating, "Smoking, it's good for your smile". They also said smoking helps you concentrate, and that it's good for your nervous system. They made many ridiculous claims about cigarettes. We tend to forget about that today, but doctors were paid to be spokespersons for tobacco companies, and this went on for decades.

Today, of course, old school doctors are strongly in support of prescription drugs. But new doctors, the smart doctors, whom I hope you're visiting, are questioning the safety of prescription drugs. They are looking outside of conventional medicine for solutions, in terms of disease prevention and even the simple treatment of symptoms. These new doctors are noticing that people get healthier when they get off of prescription drugs. Alternatively, they use prescription drugs only as a  [ send green star]

http://www.newstarget.com/008291.html

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Health Last Updated: Jun 28th, 2006 - 00:49:36

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_944.shtml

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15362955/site/newsweek/?GT1=8618

This link provides article on the dangers and fallacies of plastic surgery, which is being hyped as a miraculous science that can fix whatever ails us.

This hype, plus the high profits that it generates, makes for a very dangerous combination. Read one womans experience with it.... and why she gave it up.  

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Medicine has a monopoly hold on disease care. This global empire will not let go willingly of the reigns of power and control. Those who oppose Big Pharma are attacked, legally or in public via the media which Big Pharma also controls.

The long war between the low cost or free and public natural health industry which is still raging... This war has been going on since the time of the Greeks and Romans.

Your life and the struggle for the absolute control of your life is one place where the front lines of this global war are located.

The bombs and missiles on one side take the form of drugs, surgery and radiation, plus high profits that only monopolies provide. If this country values the free enterprise system so much, why grant monopoly powers to Big Pharma, and then protect them from all lawsuits as well?

On the other side of this global war and the struggle for freedom and choices are all of the free or low cost natural health modalities, and there are hundreds of them. Yes, there are also a few high cost modalities, but they do not have a locked up monopoly power and exclusivity. These modalities work, but you do not hear about them due to Big Pharma.

Which side will you go to? Which side are you making a living with? Which side do you support? Which side do you pay your hard earned dollars to? Which side are you learning more about? Which side are you paying attention to? Which side do you believe in?

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His consultancy involved the purloining of invaluable fluid samples from a government laboratory and sending them to Pfizer’s scientists, and endorsing the company’s Alzheimer’s drug Aricept (donepezil).

Dr Pearson Sunderland III, a federal research scientist at the US National Institute of Mental Health, has pleaded guilty to the charges, and says he will return the money.

For his fee, he shipped 538 spinal fluid samples, gathered by the Institute, to Pfizer. The money, which he never disclosed, even when endorsing Pfizer products in professional journals, was supposedly for lecture fees.

(Source: British Medical Journal, 2006; 333: 1237).

http://www.healthy.net/scr/news.asp?Id=8867

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good stuff.  www.newstarget.com  is one of my favourite websites.

I really hope people get behind the opposition to Teen Screen.  This is another mechanism whereby they are pushing the interests of the Big Pharma to the detriment of the health of the people.

One of the newest so-called diseases of the American Psychiatric Association is 'authority defiance disorder'.  lol. That makes every teenager in the history of humanity 'metally ill'.

Dianne

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Drug companies have new top salesmen: doctors. According to a mid-July 2005 report by the Wall Street Journal, hiring a doctor to speak about drug therapies to other doctors has proven to be a "highly effective" way for the pharmaceutical industry to market its drugs. "An internal study done by Merck & Co. several years ago calculated the 'return on investment' from doctor-led discussion groups was almost double the return on meetings led by the company's own sales force," the Journal reported. [1]

"According to the document, doctors who attended a lecture by another doctor wrote an additional $623.55 worth of prescriptions for the painkiller Vioxx over a 12-month period compared with doctors who didn't attend. Doctors who participated in the more intimate discussions wrote an additional $717.53 worth of prescriptions for Vioxx, which Merck pulled from the market last year over concerns about cardiovascular side effects. That compared to an increase of only $165.87 in Vioxx prescriptions by doctors who attended a meeting with a salesperson."

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Madison Ave. Plays Growing
Role in Drug Research

By MELODY PETERSEN

Dentists leafing through The Journal of the American Dental Association last May found a study concluding that a new drug called Bextra offered relief from one of their patients' worst nightmares - the acute pain that follows dental surgery.

Federal regulators had rejected that conclusion only six months before, leaving Bextra's marketers, Pharmacia and Pfizer, hard pressed to sell it as an advance over Celebrex, their earlier entry in a crowded market for pain drugs.

The new study helped light a fire under Bextra. Its sales soared 60 percent over the three months that followed, according to industry data. But the research was not conducted by academics. Instead, the lead investigators were from Scirex, a little-known research firm owned partly by Omnicom, one of the world's biggest advertising companies.

Madison Avenue - whose television ads have helped turn prescription medicines like Viagra, Allegra and Vioxx into billion-dollar products - is expanding its role in the drug business, wading into the science of drug development.

The three largest advertising companies - Omnicom, Interpublic and WPP - have spent tens of millions of dollars to buy or invest in companies like Scirex that perform clinical trials of experimental drugs. One advertising executive calls it "getting closer to the test tube."

Ad agency executives say they do nothing to distort the research process. But critics worry that science is being sacrificed for the sake of promotion. "You cannot separate their advertising and marketing from the science anymore," said Dr. Arnold S. Relman, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School and a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. "Ad agencies are not in the business of doing science."

In interviews, advertising executives say their intention is to work side by side with scientists, directing research toward drugs the marketers think could be big sellers. Their companies, they say, can help design - or as in Bextra's case even conduct - studies aimed at showing that the drugs have the qualities patients most desire.

Armed with the results, ad agencies try to sway doctors' prescribing habits. Some agencies own companies that ghostwrite articles for medical journals. They also create the continuing-education courses that doctors take to maintain their licenses. As new drugs are about to go on sale, these marketers recruit doctors to speak to peers about the drugs' benefits, often at expensive dinners the physicians are paid a fee to attend.

"We provide services that go from the beginning of drug development all the way to the launch of your products," said Joe Torre, chairman and chief executive of Torre Lazur-McCann Healthcare WorldWide, an Interpublic unit that is among the biggest health care marketing companies.

Only a few years ago, drug research and education were the province of universities. But with pharmaceutical companies counting on instant blockbuster sales of their new drugs, executives found the university system too slow. And ad agencies - having built a multibillion-dollar business selling drugs to consumers - pushed deeper and deeper into the process.

Federal law prohibits the promotion of drugs before they have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, or the promotion of them for unapproved uses. But published research and medical education are exempt from those rules, and doctors are free to prescribe approved drugs for any purpose.

The critics say that marketers are exploiting the loopholes, to begin building markets for expensive new medicines long before they win government approval and, later, to prompt physicians to prescribe drugs for conditions the medications are not approved to treat.

"Doctors are led to prescribe drugs that may not be necessarily worth the money, may not be better than a generic that's already on the market and that their patients don't need," Dr. Relman said. "It's clearly contributing to the rising costs of prescription drugs and health care."

Moreover, critics worry that the success of drug makers and marketers in spurring big sales shortly after a drug's approval means that millions of patients may take a drug before all of its side effects are known. Just last week, Pharmacia sent letters to thousands of doctors warning that Bextra can cause a life-threatening skin rash.

Advertising executives note that scientific trials are tightly regulated and that most medical journal articles get careful review. Doctors, they say, are hungry for information about new drugs.

The implication that we are going to accentuate the good things and may bury the bad things - there would be nothing in it for us to do that," said Lloyd J. Baroody, managing director of Target Research Associates, a research firm in New Providence, N.J., that Torre Lazur acquired in March. "I can't imagine why anyone in my company would want to break the law or go against F.D.A. regulations."

Even before ad agencies became involved in research, experts had found repeated cases in which the drug industry shaded the truth in its zeal to produce blockbusters. In a May 2000 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, cited numerous cases in which, he said, drug companies manipulated results of clinical trials by controlling a study's design or choosing to make public only positive data. "It introduces another bias into the whole clinical drug trial picture," Dr. Bodenheimer said, "so that the American public and the physicians in the United States are not going to know, really, the true facts about the drugs."

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But three doctors who reviewed the Scirex studies for The Times said the research was not persuasive. All three said that one of Scirex's conclusions was insignificant: that one dose of Bextra worked longer than a single dose of a medicine containing oxycodone and acetaminophen, a combination often sold under the brand name Percocet. Patients rarely receive just one dose of that combination drug, the doctors said, because it wears off in four to six hours.

One of the doctors, Eric J. Topol, chairman of the Cleveland Clinic's department of cardiovascular medicine, called the studies "a contrived comparison" and said he found it "quite disquieting" that Scirex was partly owned by an ad agency.

"If this is where clinical research is headed, that would be a terrible negative trajectory," he said.

Dr. Topol - who drew attention last year with a finding that Celebrex and its competitor, Vioxx, appeared to raise the risk of heart attacks - said the Bextra studies did not include enough patients to justify drawing a broad conclusion. The average age of patients in the study, 23, did not represent the population likely to take the drug, he added.

Yet through publication in the leading dental journal, the research helped Bextra's marketers shift attention away from the F.D.A.'s negative findings. Because of confidentiality rules, the F.D.A. cannot release any information about the earlier pain studies that failed to sway regulators.

"Even though the study lacked some important proof, the real problem is that in the dental literature, this will be read," Dr. Topol said. "And dentists, who have to deal with trying to prevent or modulate pain, will be impressed."

Judy Glova, a spokeswoman for Pharmacia, said the drug company stood behind the design and conclusions of the Scirex studies. Pharmacia was not trying to bypass the regulatory process, she said, adding that the company is in discussions with regulators to have Bextra approved for acute pain.

Scirex executives did not return repeated phone calls.

Editors at The Journal of the American Dental Association said the Scirex article was reviewed by at least three scientists. One reviewer, Dr. Paul A. Moore, an associate editor of the journal, said the study was "carefully designed and rigorously performed."

But Dr. Moore said he would have recommended that the journal reject the paper had he known that Bextra was not approved for acute pain.

The Bextra episode is just one example of the changing face of drug research. In the early 1990's, about 75 percent of the drug industry's clinical research dollars went to universities, according to a study by CenterWatch, a company that tracks clinical trials. By 2000, just 34 percent went to academic institutions, while the rest went to investigators working under the direction of either a private research firm like Scirex or a pharmaceutical company.

Omnicom says it has no control over Scirex. "We have nothing to do with the design of clinical studies," said Pat Sloan, an Omnicom spokeswoman.

Yet when the ad agency paid $20 million for part-ownership of Scirex in 1999, a top Omnicom executive, Thomas L. Harrison, said he expected Scirex's research to produce positive results for drug company clients - results that would help speed new-drug applications, or N.D.A.'s, to the F.D.A.

"Our goal," he said, "is to help ensure that all clinical studies and each patient accrued into a study can be assessed to support the N.D.A. submission."

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Competitors like GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil, and Pfizer, which makes Zoloft, have each spent tens of millions of dollars for television and print ads promoting their antidepressants. But Forest, a current darling of Wall Street, does not spend its money on consumer advertising.

Instead, it relies on WPP's Intramed and other companies to organize expensive dinners for physicians where research studies, many paid for by Forest, are discussed.

Just days after the F.D.A. approved Lexapro in August, Intramed and Forest invited Dr. Richard J. Brown, a Manhattan psychiatrist, and about 20 of his peers to dinner at Daniel, one of Manhattan's most expensive restaurants. Besides dining on tournedos of beef and cabernet sauvignon, each doctor was paid $500 for attending.

The industry's ethics rules say that any free meal for doctors must be at a restaurant considered modest by local standards. As for the $500, the federal government warned drug companies in guidelines proposed last month not to give gifts or cash to doctors in an attempt to influence their prescribing - a practice it said would be illegal.

Mr. Beitler, the WPP executive, said the dinner and the $500 checks were appropriate because the doctors had been hired as consultants for the night to sit on Forest's advisory board. He said Daniel was not a restaurant his agency normally used. Intramed executives, he said, had scheduled the dinner at another restaurant that closed three days before the Lexapro meeting.

Dr. Brown, who is retired, said he did no consulting that night, or at other dinners he attended that were organized by Intramed and other drug marketing companies on behalf of their pharmaceutical clients.

"I think it's disgusting," said Dr. Brown, who organized a protest outside a similar dinner that Forest held at the Four Seasons last year. "This is my profession, and I hate to see this happening."

Two weeks after the dinner at Daniel, analysts at J. P. Morgan called Forest's introduction of Lexapro "an instant success." Based on the number of prescriptions written in Lexapro's first weeks on the market, the analysts said that Forest appeared on its way to one of the best new product launches in the industry's history.

"This market does respond to promotion," Kenneth E. Goodman, Forest's president, said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts on Oct. 15. Forest invested so much in promotion that Lexapro was the subject of 63 percent of all industry-sponsored meetings that primary care doctors reported attending in an October survey by ImpactRx, a consulting firm.

Indeed, the drug industry relies far more heavily on behind-the-scenes promotion than on consumer advertising. Last year, just $2.8 billion of the $11.8 billion the drug industry spent on marketing was aimed at consumers; the rest paid for everything from dinner meetings with doctors to sales calls and medical education, according to Verispan, a health-care information company.

For Forest and its ad agency partners, selling doctors on Lexapro is crucial.

Lexapro is not an entirely new drug, but rather a chemically refined version of Celexa, an antidepressant that accounts for 70 percent of the company's sales. Wall Street is counting on Forest to persuade doctors to switch Celexa users to Lexapro, because the older drug will lose its patent protection in 2004. Once the patent expires, Celexa sales will plummet, as generic companies begin offering low-priced versions of the drug.

But Forest can point to just one study concluding that Lexapro offers patients an advantage over Celexa - a study that the company paid to have published, and has promoted at dinners like one Dr. Brown attended at a Manhattan steakhouse, just two weeks after the meal at Daniel.

The paper, by Dr. Jack M. Gorman, until recently a professor at Columbia University and now on the faculty of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, pooled the results of three studies and concluded that Lexapro "may have a faster onset" than Celexa. Dr. Gorman's paper was published in CNS Spectrums, a medical journal he edits.

Forest said that it paid Medworks Media, a small medical marketing company that publishes the journal, to print Dr. Gorman's article in a special supplement.

Other researchers find the data less convincing. The Medical Letter, a nonprofit newsletter respected for its independence from the pharmaceutical industry, reviewed the same clinical trials as Dr. Gorman and concluded in September that Lexapro had not been shown to be better than any other antidepressant, including Celexa.

Dr. Gorman said that Forest paid him as a consultant - as drug companies do hundreds of other doctors - but did not pay him for the Lexapro article. In published research, he has acknowledged serving as a consultant or receiving payments from a dozen other drug makers.

Last month, Forest and Intramed turned their attention to fourth-year medical students who will begin writing prescriptions next year.

On Oct. 18, Forest paid to fly one student from each medical school in the country to New York for a two-day conference at Columbia. The students were treated to two nights at the Plaza Hotel, three meals a day and tickets to a Broadway show. Intramed coordinated the event, shuttling students from place to place and helping conference speakers with their presentations.

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Dr. Gorman, who helped organize the conference for Columbia, gave a brief presentation on his Lexapro study during a speech about antidepressants. He said the conference's purpose was to get medical students interested in psychiatric research and in residency positions at Columbia, not to promote Forest's drugs. Forest had simply donated money for the conference, he said.

The University of Rochester did not send a representative because some students expressed concern about the drug industry sponsorship. In a letter to Columbia, Lenard I. Lesser, a Rochester medical student, said that Forest would not have paid for the conference unless it expected a financial return.

"This is setting a bad precedent," Mr. Lesser said. "It is all about establishing relationships that will be profitable."

The tide does not appear to favor Mr. Lesser's stance. In Washington, the F.D.A.'s new chief counsel, Daniel E. Troy, who fought restrictions on drug promotion as a private lawyer, is leading a review of regulations that could relax existing limits on behind-the-scenes marketing of drugs.

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The results of the study came as no surprise to Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. "This study confirms the obvious: The purpose of dtc ads is to sell drugs irrespective of whether the viewer needs the drug or whether there's be better safer cheaper alternative, which includes no drug at all," he said.

The non-profit Commercial Alert, hosted at www.CommercialAlert.org, was founded to oppose direct-to-consumer advertisements such as the ones studied at the University of California, and Ruskin said he hoped this study would be another "nail in the coffin" for this style of pharmaceutical marketing.

"DTC ads ought to be illegal and (Commercial Alert is) trying to make them illegal," he said. "We hope that our members of congress get up the courage to do what is right and ban it."

http://www.newstarget.com/021579.html

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"Prescription for Disaster" 

This is one heck of a video, regarding the FDA. Send it to your friends and family. I can't explain it, so just give it at least the first 5 minutes and see what I mean!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2502546838698762400&q=Prescription+For+Disaster

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As a UK resident I am staggered that medicines are marketed directly to potential consumers through TV and magazine media in the US.  This just encourages some members of the public to believe they suffer the conditions outlined, as advertising is so clever in manipulating viewers weakneeses and insecurities. 

Feel awkward in public situations?  Pop a pill

Suffer indigestion through eating too quick?  Take a pill

Constipated?  Pop a pill.

Don't get me wrong, in the UK we have TV ads for 'over the counter' treatments for minor conditions like constipation, indigestion etc. but not for prescription medicines.  There is still a belief here that if a conditon is bothering you enough you will get up and go and discuss it with your GP, who should consider the appropriate treatment, considering the possible side-effects (as he is aware of hem), and any other prescriptions the patient is taking.

I still don't think its the ideal situation even over here, I still think that drug companies have far too much power to push 'medicines' inappropriately - we currently have had news coverage of the Seroxat scandal - it was prescribed here to young people despite the known effects in USA.

I don't personally feel that the automatic answer to any medical situation is necessarily to look first for chemical intervention from the medical profession, but I understand this is not the normal attitude of millions.  I believe in searching for the cure within myself before seeing doctors.  If I had a lot of indigestion I would address my eating habits, similarly with constpiation.  These conditions may be caused by bad eating, or could even be side-effects of other medicines. 

It is a horrendous situation at present with so many dependant on drugs that are slowly killing them - or creating a need for another drug, it's just a self sustaining industry.

We need to take ownership, and responsibility, for our bodies, and not just take things because we are told they are good for us.

Love and bessings to all

Karen

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Hi,

I do please trust it is okay for me to post the following in here. 

Its a new story - out today (4th March 07) and it sounds vitally important that everyone should be aware of this, and no doubt some may wish to start a petition etc.

Seeing as how its a lengthy article, I am merely posting a link to where the article is posted in full in Nick J`s Network Messaging Group.

FDA Rules Override Warnings About Drug

Thanks & wishing everyone a safe & happy day.

 [report anonymous abuse]

"On June, 2002, the Update newsletter, published by the Tennessee Department of Mental Health, reported that 170 Nashville students had completed a TeenScreen survey. The Update said the survey was funded by grants from AdvoCare and Eli Lilly—a pharmaceutical company.

The great news for Pharma was that 96 of the 170 students who took the survey ended up speaking to a therapist which, no doubt, resulted in the recruitment of 96 new pill-popping teens.

Tax dollars spent on drugs

Unbeknownst to many, taxpayers are already paying an enormous price as a result of marketing schemes designed to get students hooked on anti-psychotic drugs. A list of drugs that must be prescribed for kids is already set up, modeled after a list used in Texas since 1995 called the "TMAP." The list contains the most expensive drugs on the market.

In 2002, national sales of antipsychotics reached $6.4 billion, making them the fourth-highest-selling class of drugs, according to IMS Health, a company that tracks drug sales.

By 2004, sales had jumped by over $2 billion with antipsychotics sales totaling $8.8 billion—$2.4 billion of which was paid for by state Medicaid funds, according to the May/June 2005 edition of Mother Jones magazine.

Here’s how this part of the scheme works: The drug companies bribe state officials and donate money in the form of "educational grants" to the states to approve and implement these TMAP drug programs and then, in return, state Medicaid programs fund the cost of the drugs with tax dollars.

For instance, in Texas, Pfizer awarded $232,000 in grants to the Texas department of mental health to "educate" mental health providers about TMAP and, in return, the Texas Medicaid program spent $233 million tax dollars on Pfizer drugs like Zoloft.

Johnson & Johnson (Janssen Pharmaceutica) gave grants of $224,000 to Texas and Medicaid spent $272 million on the J & J antipsychotic drug Risperdal.

Eli Lilly awarded $109,000 in grants to "educate" state mental health providers and, as a result, Texas Medicaid spent $328 million for Lilly’s antipsychotic drug Zyprexa.

The TMAP was approved in Texas in 1995, and by February 9, 2001, an article in the Dallas Morning News, titled "State Spending More on Mental Illness Drugs" reported: "Texas now spends more money on medication to treat mental illness for low-income residents than on any other type of prescription drug." "

http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20050617.htm

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http://www.cafeoflifepikespeak.com/Videos/Licensed%20To%20Pill.swf

For the answer, click the link above...

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The Perils of Painkillers

Tylenol Toxicity – and its Alternatives

By Zoltan P. Rona, MD, M.Sc.

So, you think Tylenol is safe. Most of us have always assumed that Tylenol (acetaminophen) is the safest painkiller on the market.  After all, it is the number one drug used in the world. While it is usually effective for mild to moderate pain, its safety is somewhat of a myth.

Acetaminophen, the generic name for Tylenol, can be found in over 200 different OTC and prescription medications. It is commonly mixed into migraine, arthritis, cough, sinus and cold remedies.  

According to the U.S. FDA, acetaminophen is considered the most common cause of liver failure, accounting for at least half of the cases in the U.S. yearly.

More:

http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/the_perils_of_painkillers

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all for your insightful knowledge of an absolutely barbaric situation.  If you do about 10 minutes of research on amazon.com starting with the books: "Racketeering In Medicine," "The Hundred Year Lie," ad 'Selling Sickness," as well as the books recommended earlier, you will have ample evidence of this entire thread's TRUTH. 

If we all simply BOYCOTT use of "bad medicine," meaning all forms of conventional treatment and/or testing either backed by industry or UNTESTED (more than 70% of all "medical procedures" today are untested, without clinical evidence), perhaps the paradigm will shift?  A radical thought...but a necessary one I believe.

Consumer demand always drives the market - step away, really far away is my opinion.

Blissed be, Annie 

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I've been taking tylenol p.m. for some time now. I didn't know that it's bad for the liver. I didn't really think about it. I've been taking it for about 2 months.

  Can any of my fellow members give me an alternative way to help me sleep. I have insomnia sometimes. Thanks so much for any and all information. Natural sleep remedy ideas would be much appreciated. Happy Spring everyone! Maggie D.

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Yet I can't find one.

Well I'll start one and if we run across the older one, if there is one, we'll move the two together then.

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so much! That is a very important point. So is there such a thing as a Holistic Vet I'm wondering or should we just avoid Vets altogether and search for natural foods and aids online?

What do our members think?

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"You cannot currently send a star to Alf because you have done so within the last week."

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I am so happy to hear you are healing naturally!

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I found this on another forum I frequent and thought it was quite fitting here...

The Pharmaceutical Industry
Deceives the General Public

The pharmaceutical industry continues to control our society. Pharmaceutical interests control medical research, and have entire health professions dependent. To maintain and secure their position of power, the pharmaceutical companies manipulate the legislation and the media. In large-scale advertising campaigns trough all media, the pharmaceutical PR and propaganda department creates a smoke screen concealing the true interests of the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharmaceutical companies try to portray themselves in the light of Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and other pioneers in medicine. They claim to be interested in the eradication of diseases in order to serve humanity. The truth, however, is the exact opposite: the pharmaceutical industry is interested in keeping diseases alive as a basis for an expanding pharmaceutical drug market. The goals of the Codex Cartel deliberately obstruct the eradication of diseases. Thus, the pharmaceutical industry does not act in the tradition of the saviourhood of humanity, but in the tradition of the IG Farben, a group of organized criminals willing to sacrifice countless human lives in order to maintain their profits.

In other deceptive advertisements the pharmaceutical industry claims that the eradication of infectious diseases is their merit. Fact is, however, that the most important treatments of infectious diseases, as well as penicillin and other antibiotics, were discovered at publicly financed universities. The only credit the pharmaceutical industry deserves is that they immediately tried to use these discoveries for their own profit. Millions of people and taxpayers were defrauded: they not only paid for the research at public universities, but on top of that, they had to pay for the drugs developed with public funds but marketed by pharmaceutical companies.

In other deceptive PR campaigns, the pharmaceutical companies claim that with their help, life expectancy has doubled throughout this century. However, the fact is that every medical textbook documents that this progress is the result of better hygiene and has nothing to do with antibiotics and other pharmaceutical drugs. What a lie, considering the fact that the pharmaceutical cartel is trying to ban health information for vitamins, fully aware of the fact that by doing so, they shorten the life expectancy of millions of people by decades.

A further deception of the public is the campaign for cholesterol-lowering drugs. Millions of hibernating animals have cholesterol levels of 400 mg to 600 mg per deciliter, yet they don't get heart attacks because they stabilize their artery walls with sufficient vitamins wich they produce in their own bodies, or take up in the diet. The connection between cholesterol and heart disease obviously is another illusion maintained by the manufacturers of cholesterol-lowering drugs.

The only thing we know for sure about cholesterol-lowering drugs is that all of them can cause cancer. In January 1996, the Journal of the American Medical Association alerted the medical community and the general public about the fact that cholesterol-lowering drugs have caused cancer in dosages close to those currently swallowed by millions of people worldwide. The pharmaceutical companies are not impressed by these facts. In large-scale TV spots and advertising campaigns they continue to sell these cancer time bombs as if they were lollipops or chewing gum.

On June 23rd, 1997, Fortune magazine, one of the major Wall Street weeklies, carried an article about the health care system. It contained an interview with an investment consultant for pharmaceutical companies who claimed that “everyone loses if eradication therapy catches on.” With “everyone” he, of course, does not mean you or millions of patients. This consultant simply stated what everyone on Wall Street knows: the research and therapeutic decisions within the pharmaceutical companies are guided by the financial interests of the shareholders.

The profits of the pharmaceutical companies during the past 25 years were on average 500% percent above the average of all industry branches. In other words the business with ongoing diseases is the most lucrative business in the world, and millions of people pay the bill, directly and indirectly. The exploding health care costs, paid for by the people and the patients, are nothing but the insatiable greed of the pharmaceutical companies.

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We must never forget how the FDA and their international counterparts define "health fraud."

The world's FDA's function as trade associations for pharmaceutical companies. They are paid millions of dollars in fees from the pharmaceutical companies to put Rx drugs through0 their less than scientific "approval process." Furthermore, there is a revolving door between the drug companies and the FDA as many leave the FDA to go to work for the drug companies.

The FDA's defines "health fraud" to encompass any health claim made about any non patentable natural substance, regardless of how true it is, if it cuts into the sale of Rx drugs. They also consider health fraud to include any non mainstream, alternative medical approach (any approach not involving the use of patented prescription or OTC drugs that have been through their so called "approval" process).

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Congratulations and good for you!!! That is truly wonderful news Sorry if it is a little late.

I only wish my family members with caner and such would take my advice and see someone who actaully knew what they were talking about!!!

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Great topic, Donna! I am reminded of what Al Gore said in "An Inconvenient Truth" when he points out the deniers in the 50's who were pushing cigarettes as healthy and the ones who say Global Warming is not happening today.

Big Pharma is the devil. Eat healthy (organic if possible) and don't touch cigarettes and alcohool as much as possible, get a dose of natural vitamins & herbs in your diet and you shouldn't need to see a doctor for a while (provided you are mostly healthy in the first place).

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They way to immense profits and wealth is by joining a monopoly; patent medicine/drugs, insurance companies, hospitals, medical profession, the military industrial complex, major sports, and major media, to name a few. These monopolies have joined together to present a unified front in pursuit of the helpless pawns that are called CONSUMERS.

Like a few large sharks circling schools of small fish, monopolistic huge corporations TRY to control what people think, believe, who they go to, and who ends up with a major share of the MONEY.

The choice people have is; DO NOT BUY INTO THE BELIEF SYSTEM. DO NOT SUPPORT THE MONOPOLY.

Do not support the monopolies. Vote for anyone supporting average citizens rights. Vote against anyone who supports the monopoly point of view, in medicine, sports, military or anywhere else.

This means empowering yourself and those you know with solutions that work for yourself, rather than giving up all of your power to a monopolistic PROFIT driven machine that cares only about how they can end up with more people who are sicker, for longer times and with more dis-eases, so they can make more PROFITS and end up with even more POWER.

The dis-ease and selfish POWER based monopolies would all go out of business if they truly empowered people and prevented disease, hunger, and war with real world, free or low cost solutions. The answers are  there, but they are ignored, suppressed, denied and attacked, because there is NO PROFIT and no selfish POWER there...

The solutions are not monopolistic and true competition reigns. Conservatives say they are FOR the free market, but when it comes down to it, they end up supporting MONOPOLIES, like the military, doctors, insurance companies and drug companies.... Watch the money. Watch who supports the monopolies and who speaks for them..

Do not listen to the words, but rather watch the ACTIONS.  

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Drug Company Ties Common In Med Schools

Two-thirds of academic leaders have financial links to industry, study says.

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Moved from another thread:

Steve A.
Merck...... I wonder what their liability insurance costs are? 7:08 AM

Merck Unblinds AIDS Study

Two international trials of Merck & Co. Inc.’s experimental AIDS vaccine were stopped after researchers realized the vaccine did not prevent infection with the AIDS virus.

Instead, indications suggest that the vaccine may actually raise the risk of infection, though it cannot cause an HIV infection itself.

Now, Merck has announced that it will “unblind” the study, and let the thousands of volunteers know who received the active vaccine and who got a dummy shot.

Researchers have begun counseling volunteers that they could now be at a higher risk of contracting HIV.

The AIDS vaccine trials were conducted in the United States, Peru, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Australia and South Africa.

Sources:

• Reuters November 13, 2007

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Go to www.whale.to/m/scott7.html this says it all.

George Merck in his greed had scientist create a mycobacterium and the mycobacterium that causes AIDS so that they could make monies on the sick.

Prof. Garth Nicholson of www.gulfwarvets.com has been trying to help the Vets with Depleted Uranium Syndrome ect.

We have been poisoned, by big PHARMA, FDA and Lies that started in 1945. It has gotten worse and worse. The bugs are oupacing Drugs that shouldn't even be on the market.

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La Mentira Del Colesterol/ The Lie About Cholesterol by Dr. Walter Hartenbach

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  (tags: AlternativeMed, government, medicine )

Michele
- 39 minutes ago - naturalnews.com

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An Obama Win Would End Big Pharma's Pre-Emption Victory
http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000430_Big_Pharma_Supreme_Court_Obama.html

&

http://www.pharmalot.com/2008/11/if-obama-wins-preemption-will-be-history/

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Pharma - Not In The Business of Health, Healing, Cures or Wellness

I could not figure out how to put the Video in here so I did a link to it. Anyone want to teach me how to do videos if they can be done in here?

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Because it is the only way for the 'capitalistic' system to survive.

'Free markets' are a sham.

It boils down to scams to glean money from people, and then the pain falls on the same people that were scammed.

Yet, those who profited escape with the 'booty of looting'.

Pointing this out gets the old accusation of 'class warfare', when in reality it is they who are waging class warfare against the mass of people.

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used to describe evil, and witches, it is "PHARMAKIA" (ask the J.W.s)!!! We have given our nation, to these witches, and put our faith and trust, in their hands, and their witches brews!!! We have allowed the government to outlaw nature, and natural substances, such as marijuana, opium, cocoa...these live saving herbs, were a gift of God/ nature, and we gave them up for witches brews!!! We took our faith and trust from Gods plants, and put it in man's plants/ manufacturing plants!!! It won't be long before vitamins are restricted, as well as most other non-narcotic herbs!!! face IT NATURE IS ILLEGAL, AND WE ALLOWED IT TO HAPPEN, BY NOT STANDING UP FOR NATURE, OR THOSE WHO TRUST IN IT!!! PREPARE FOR THE MARK OF THE BEAST, BECAUSE WE GAVE OUR NATION TO THE MACHINE!!!

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