Wednesday January 28, 2009, 2:20 pm
Is it possible to watch a TV show without being told what new drug you need or how men just need to pop a pill and suddenly they will have the sex life of Oh...Hugh Hefner? Can't advertise cigarettes on TV but drugs that WILL kill you - well that's OK. And we all know why - LOBBYIST. The real power in this country is always the power just out of sight.

Wednesday January 28, 2009, 4:59 pm
Hi Kit,
Now you may find that the Big pharma mob will bring forward other issues to cloud their obvious position. My guess is that they will push in a big way for supplementation of natural or synthetic food supplements to be brought under the banner of "drug" legislation. To be able to use any food supplementation you will be required to get a prescription from your medical practitioner who may or more to the point has had NO training in this field.

The medical practitioner will more than likely prescribe only those "supplements" provided by the big pharma mob. You can be assured that these "artificial" supplements will not do anyone much good and or even worse will magnify disease instead of alleviating it.

Some 30 or so years ago tests were done on vitamin and mineral supplements and the final conclusion was that they were just so much expensive urine. Of course, they did not explain that they had only tested the artificially made stuff which is pure chemical and does NOT have the periferral nutrition that makes anything work properly. Pure vitamin without its cofactors is rejected by the body system as a toxin and not recognised as food.

This will all be done "for the good and protection of the people". There is too much money to be lost by these companies to take it sitting down.

To give an idea of how they fudge the figures, some years ago there was this big advert about how one drug had a 50% greater result than another drug. What they did not emphasize was that the poorer drug only had a 2% success rate while the one with the fantastic 50% greater result had a 3% success rate. Quite often, natural products will have up around 60% or more success rate, but that is not brought into the equation.

Apparently over 80% of the profits of the top 500 companies in USA is gained by the Big Pharma companies of which only a small percentage is of that 500. They certainly will NOT take all this legislation that would make them honest without a lot of nasty undercurrent to stop those who are honestly trying to improve the health of the community. You toucha my wallet and I willa killa you somehow somewhere someway..

Wednesday January 28, 2009, 5:55 pm
It goes far deeper than just the FDA. This has been an overgrowing problem dictated by the psychiatric industry and their ties with the FDA, Monsanto and the insurance industry.

If you look at the whole senario of natural herbs and vitamin companies getting the heat and being banned, Monsanto killing our natural resources and killing nutrients in our foods they are starving our bodies of what they need. When your body is deprived of nutrients hallucinations and mood swings are inevitable. It is not enough to make money from illness alone one has to acquire the mind as well to gain total control over a persons well being. Insurance companies make a killing off of the government in overcharged non generic drugs which ultimately the taxpayer is paying for.

Now in the meantime, the food and water supply is quickly being depleted. Over fishing, companies taking bottled water, fluriode and chemicals in the water, radiation in our foods, organics being attacked,farmers being attacked, livestock being ID, GM and GE. Pretty soon now there will be no natural food available.

In other words these industries have found a system to make you pay to be sick and the way you don't notice is because over half of the country is on mind altering drugs that can kill you and leave you brain dead!

How stupid are we we? They banked on that (literally) Pretty ingenious when you think about it eh!

Sunday February 22, 2009, 8:02 am

Cutting Corners

by digby

Here's an email I received yesterday from regular reader Sleon about E coli conservatism and its consequences:

I wanted to thank you for your piece on the issue of the FDA, medical device companies, the corruption surrounding them and the laws they got enacted to prevent victims of defective products from suing them. I am one of those people. I had a defective lead (the wire that that connects my defibrillator to the heart itself) installed and when it failed, the device shocked me repeatedly. The device manufacturers euphemistically refer to those shocks as "inappropriate" and the sensation "uncomfortable but fleeting", but I and many other patients I have spoken with call them excruciating and terrifying. It had only been installed a few weeks before and so I had to undergo surgery again to have it replaced. It turns out the failed product was a new one, supposedly improved, that had recently been sanctioned by the FDA. After the second surgery, the electrophysiologist who performed the operation followed up with the manufacturer and was told by someone there that they had already been "looking into" reports of other failures. The stress on my body from the second surgery soon caused my heart to go into an abnormal rhythm, which triggered additional shocks (10 in five minutes because the device itself couldn't actually correct that particular kind of arrhythmia) and the whole incident was nearly fatal.

Even so it was still more than six months before the company issued a recall, though doctors like mine (who is one of the leading experts in these surgeries in all of new England) had refused to continue implanting them much earlier. I sought legal counsel afterwards and my attorney recommended joining a class-action suit that was in the works, rather than trying to go at them on my own. I took that advice even though at the time I was less interested in suing them for making a defective product than I was for their knowing it was defective, but still allowing it to be placed inside my body. These products are extremely expensive to develop and the company's brass must have decided it was more profitable to continue to sell as many as possible before they were forced to recall them, in part because they had recently successfully lobbied for a new law they thought would protect them from lawsuits.

And as of today, that's exactly what happened. The judge hearing the case threw it out citing the new law that said since the FDA had approved the device the manufacturer was protected from suits. Since then however, there have been numerous press reports that scientists and other whistleblowers within the agency are beginning to expose the corruption at the heart of the Bush FDA's symbiotic relationship with the manufacturers - and in addition to outright graft and administrative incompetence, the certification process had been reduced to the manufacturer telling the FDA the product was safe and the FDA then certifying it was so. That, coupled with the fact that Congress has begun to consider clarifying the law in question to remove the protection loophole court decisions have provided the manufacturers, leads me to hope our rights will eventually be restored in this case. It is, of course, only the cost of punitive sanctions that will protect the public from the greed of under-regulated corporations like this.

Many people who received this and other defective parts and devices have been killed by them. I'm one of the lucky ones. All I had to do was suffer the torture of the "inappropriate" shocks; go through unnecessary additional surgeries; become so sick afterwards I nearly died; lose 20 pounds in 10 days as a result; miss a lot of work - it was months before I was back to my full, regular schedule; and suffer from repeated nightmares to this day of the device failing and shocking me again and again.

This is all part of what happens when the deregulation fetishists have their way. Add in that the political appointees entrusted with the agencies created to protect us from the unscrupulous have in fact worked to weaken and destroy the oversight we ought to have learned time and time again is necessary. The result is a world where the powerful control the legal process to the point where they can make profit trump public safety and morality. While we face many other pressing problems, I would hope we can find time to urge our representatives to support legislation that will restore sanity to the process and the necessary resources to protect us to the agencies charged with doing so.

Sincerely,
sleon



I'm convinced that one of the mistakes we've made over the years is not telling enough stories of real people who were affected by the conservative movement's deregulation fervor. When they can keep it all abstract and clean it sounds great. It's not so impressive when you see the human results of their "ideology."

digby 2/21/2009 02:30:00 PM

Sunday February 22, 2009, 8:20 am
A chilling story that should serve as warning to all of us. Thanks for posting that Blue.