The Kevin Trudeau Show: 3-17-10
Today, Kevin explains how far the FDA will go to protect the profits of the precious drug companies and why red bull is banned in France and Demark.
Daily Finance Claims Alternative Medicine is Ineffective… “or Worse”
Over a Million UK Patients Addicted to Pain Killers
Government Workers Feel No Economic Pain
March Madness Membership Drive
Plus, the modern day Nostradamus and founder of The Trends Research Institute, Gerald Celente, stopped by to tell you how he was able to get out of Chile unharmed after the 8.8 earthquake hit the country and to give you his predictions for the next few years.
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Cost of Failed Cancer Treatments Hit $90 Billion
March 17, 2010
USA Today
By: Liz Szabo
The cost of cancer treatment is “skyrocketing” — both for individual patients and the nation, a new analysis shows.
From 1990 to 2008, spending on cancer care soared to more than $90 billion from $27 billion. The increase was driven by the rising costs of sophisticated new drugs, robotic surgeries and radiation techniques, as well as the growing number of patients who are eligible to take them, says Peter Bach of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, co-author of an analysis in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Many older, frailer patients — who might not have been considered strong enough to weather traditional surgery — now have the option to have less invasive operations or more tightly focused radiation treatments, the analysis says.
More of these patients also are able to have chemotherapy, both because of new treatments as well as “supportive” drugs to manage chemo’s side effects, such as nausea.
From 1991 to 2002, for example, the proportion of breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy doubled, to about 24%. The cost of care for each patient also doubled, from $6,642 to $12,802, the analysis says.
Those increases are “unsustainable,” says John Seffrin, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Growing numbers of people simply can’t afford to get the care we know they need,” Seffrin says. “We hear about a growing number of people turning down treatment.”
Charities are struggling to keep up with requests for help. In the past, the American Cancer Society could help one in five patients pay for health care bills. Today, the society can help only one in six, says Seffrin, who notes that the poor economy only adds to cancer patients’ hardships.
The social service group CancerCare helped 13% more people in 2009 than the year before and distributed nearly $4.4 million. Both CancerCare and American Cancer Society have set up organizations to help insured people with co-pays.
One in four cancer patients or their families said they used up all or most of their savings to pay for treatment, according to a 2006 survey by USA TODAY, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.
A spate of new drugs for advanced colorectal cancer also has helped patients live slightly longer but at great cost, says David Howard of Emory University, author of a new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Drugs approved in the past decade extended these patients’ survival in 2005 to about 16 months — an improvement of 7 months — at an additional cost of $37,100 a patient, the study says.
Howard and Bach agree that doctors and drug companies today have no incentive to lower prices.
Cancer specialists can make more money by prescribing more expensive drugs, Bach says. Studies show that doctors who are “generously” reimbursed tend to prescribe more costly therapies.
The use of hormone-suppressing drugs for prostate cancer, for example, fell 14% in just two years after Medicare slashed what it was paying doctors, according to a 2008 study in Cancer.
“Right now, there are no economic incentives to use resources wisely,” Bach says.
Click here for the full report.
Fish Oils May Slow Genetic Aging in Heart Patients
January 20, 2010
ABC News
By John McKenzie
Heart disease patients have long been encouraged to eat more fish or take fish oil supplements containing omega-3 fatty acids. The reason? People who do, tend to live longer.
Now, some say a study out this evening in the Journal of the American Medical Association might explain why.
Specifically, the researchers behind the study report that for heart disease patients, omega-3 fatty acids may protect against death and illness by slowing biological aging.
However, the findings were met with skepticism from some cardiac experts who said the study had serious limitations.
In the study, Dr. Ramin Farzaneh-Far of the University of California San Francisco and colleagues followed more than 600 men with heart disease and found those taking the most omega-3 appeared “biologically younger” — that is, the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, looked longer and healthier.
“Patients with the highest levels of omega-3 fish oils were found to display the slowest decrease in telomere length, whereas those with the lowest levels of omega-3 fish oils in the blood had the fastest rate of telomere shortening,” Farzaneh-Far said. “This suggests that these patients were aging faster than those with higher fish oil levels.”
Some doctors agreed that the findings seem interesting.
“Telomeres do help the body repair damage,” said Dr. Stephen Kopecky, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who was not involved with the study. “The longer they are, the more the damage repair that can occur.”
“It’s a risk-free way of potentially extending lifespan and reducing disability,” said Dr. Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer of the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.
Yet some cardiologists were quick to point out that the results are preliminary, and need to be replicated before physicians can use them in practice.
Since the study was observational and couldn’t prove cause-and-effect, “we don’t really know whether ingestion of omega-3 fatty acids resulted in this ‘benefit,’” said Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic. “It remains entirely possible that individuals who consume more fish also have other favorable healthy habits. … The relationship between telomere shortening and cardiovascular health is not well established.”
This concern was echoed in a statement by a spokeswoman for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, who told ABC News that while the study “shows a possible association between omega-3 fatty acids and telomere length,” it “does not show causation.”
Anti-Depression Drugs Found Mostly Useless in Study
January 13, 2010
LA Times
By Shari Roan
Antidepressant medications probably provide little or no benefit to people with mild or moderate depression, a new study has found. Rather, the mere act of seeing a doctor, discussing symptoms and learning about depression probably triggers the improvements many patients experience while on medication.
Only people with very severe depression receive additional benefits from drugs, said the senior author of the study, Robert J. DeRubeis, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor. The research was released online Tuesday and will be published today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
Hundreds of studies have attested to the benefits of antidepressants over placebos, DeRubeis said. But many studies involve only participants with severe depression. Confusion arises, he said, “because there is a tendency to generalize the findings to mean that all depressed people benefit from medications.”
The current analysis attempted to quantify how much of antidepressants’ benefit is attributable to chemical effects on the brain and how much can be explained by other factors, such as visiting a doctor, taking action to feel better or merely the passage of time.
Researchers reviewed six randomized, placebo-controlled studies with a total of 718 patients who took either an antidepressant or placebo. The patients were adults with levels of depression ranging from mild to very severe based on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, a questionnaire widely used in depression research. The studies did not exclude patients who were likely to have a strong response to a placebo. Researchers then compared the patients’ depression scores at the beginning of treatment with those after at least six weeks of treatment.
The study found that the magnitude of the drugs’ benefit increased with the baseline level of depression. The effect of treatment was similar in people with mild, moderate and severe symptoms, regardless of whether they took an antidepressant or placebo. Only the people who rated very severe on the depression scale at the start of the study showed measurable improvements on antidepressants.
“There is no doubt that there are tremendous benefits from antidepressants, as our study showed,” DeRubeis said. “But this study helps us resolve, to some degree, the question of how much benefit people can expect from the medicines themselves when symptoms are not severe.”
Disinfectants Helping Germs Evolve into Superbugs
January 06, 2010
Natural News
By S. L. Baker
The opportunistic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa is increasingly recognized as a cause of severe nosocomial infections — those are infections people contract as a result of treatment in a hospital or other medical center. In fact, a Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection can be life-threatening, especially if someone is immunocompromised.
The germ also causes chronic infections in cystic fibrosis patients. So it’s no surprise that disinfectants are widely sprayed, sloshed and wiped over surfaces in medical settings to supposedly protect patients. But now comes evidence the very act of relying on disinfectants to prevent Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections could be turning the already dangerous germ into a superbug that’s resistant to antibiotics as well as the disinfectant itself.
Germs adapt to survive
For a study just published in the January issue of the journal Microbiology, researchers from the National University of Ireland in Galway took laboratory cultures of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and added increasing amounts of disinfectant to the bacteria. They found this caused the germs to adapt over time so they could survive the disinfectant.
But something else also happened when the bacteria were exposed to the disinfectant. Remarkably, the germs became resistant to ciprofloxacin, a strong antibiotic widely-prescribed to fight Pseudomonas aeruginosa. And the germs became resistant to the drug even though they weren’t exposed to it.
How could this be possible? The scientists discovered that when exposed to the disinfectant, the bacteria adapted to more efficiently pump out antimicrobial agents (both the disinfectant and antibiotics) from the germ’s cells. The researchers also found the bacteria’s adaptation resulted in a DNA mutation that allowed the Pseudomonas aeruginosa microbes to specifically become immune to ciprofloxacin-type antibiotics.
Dr. Gerard Fleming, who headed the research team, warned in a media statement that the study results could mean “… residue from incorrectly diluted disinfectants left on hospital surfaces could promote the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. What is more worrying is that bacteria seem to be able to adapt to resist antibiotics without even being exposed to them.”
Obviously, if disinfectants used to kill bacteria on surfaces to prevent their spread are actually making the germs stronger so they survive and go on to infect patients — and if antibiotics used to treat these infections are no longer effective — the results could be a serious threat to hospitalized patients. Dr. Fleming added that it is important for scientists to zero in on environmental factors that might promote antibiotic resistance, thereby creating superbugs.
“We need to investigate the effects of using more than one type of disinfectant on promoting antibiotic-resistant strains. This will increase the effectiveness of both our first and second lines of defense against hospital-acquired infections,” he stated.
Antidepressants As Good As Placebo Pills
January 06, 2010
Reuters
By Eric Walsh
Mild to severe depression might be better treated with alternatives to antidepressant drugs, which do not help patients much more than an inactive placebo, researchers said Tuesday.
Combining data from six studies that examined the effectiveness of two commonly prescribed antidepressants — paroxetine and imipramine — found the drugs produced benefits only slightly greater than a placebo in patients with mild to severe depression.
“They would have done just as well or just about as well with a placebo,” said Robert DeRubeis, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, who with colleagues performed the meta-analysis.
Paroxetine is one of a popular class of drugs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and is sold under the brand name Paxil by GlaxoSmithKline. Imipramine is an older tricyclic antidepressant drug developed in the 1950s.
The so-called placebo effect is powerful in treating depression, where people believe they are helped even though they are taking an inactive sugar pill, DeRubeis said.
CONSIDER ALTERNATIVES?
In the report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association involving nearly 800 patients, the drugs’ impact was noticeably stronger than a placebo in people diagnosed with very severe cases of depression.
Using a scoring system for depression where a diagnosis of 24 or above indicates a very severe case, the researchers said patients treated with drugs saw their scores drop by 13 points, compared to a drop of 9 points for those given a placebo.
But for those with initial depression scores of 23 or below the drop averaged 8 points for those given antidepressants and 7 points for those given a placebo. Roughly half of those prescribed antidepressants fit into the mild to severe categories.
“Our data should give some pause” to doctors and patients weighing antidepressants, DeRubeis said in a telephone interview. “They should give some consideration to other alternatives.”
Exercise has been shown to be helpful to stem depression, as does psychotherapy, and even “self-treatment” with the aid of the plethora of self-help literature, he said.
A spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline said the report “contributes to the extensive research” into antidepressants, noting that Paxil received U.S. government approval in 1992 and has helped “millions of people battling mental illness.
“The studies used for the analysis in the JAMA paper differ methodologically from studies used to support the approval of paroxetine for major depressive disorder, so it is difficult to make direct comparisons between the results,” spokeswoman Sarah Alspach said.
At least 27 million Americans take antidepressants, nearly double the number that did in the mid-1990s, according to a study by Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania researchers reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
More than 164 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in 2008, totaling nearly $10 billion in U.S. sales, according to IMS Health. Global sales were twice that.
Flu Exposes Weaknesses in U.S. Biopreparedness
December 18, 2009
InfoWars
The spread of the H1N1 flu virus through the United States this year revealed that the nation’s medical care system remains ill-prepared to handle the intensive demands that could develop from acts of bioterrorism or other major health crises, warns an annual report published yesterday (see GSN, June 8).
“The H1N1 outbreak … vividly demonstrated the existing gaps in public health preparedness. Decades of chronic underfunding of public health meant that many of the core systems that would have been invaluable to have in place during an emergency were not at-the ready when H1N1 emerged,” the document asserts.
From fiscal years 2008 and 2009, 27 states “disproportionately” cut their public health budgets in response to the economic crisis, says the report, “Ready or Not? Protecting the Public’s Health from Disease, Disasters and Bioterrorism.”
“Federal funding for public health emergency preparedness and hospital preparedness has declined 27 percent since [fiscal] 2005 when adjusted for inflation. While additional funding has been provided to respond to emergencies, this is less effective than ongoing support for preparedness,” states the document prepared by the Trust for America’s Health, a nonpartisan think tank, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Most states have failed to develop plans for accommodating the massive influx of hospital patients that could follow a biological attack, the report concludes (see GSN, Jan. 29). In addition, the nation lacks a “federal clearinghouse to share information on best practices for planning and development of crisis standards of care.”
“There has been limited public outreach regarding how the U.S. health care system will function in a public health emergency, which could lead to confusion and/or mistrust of the system if a mass casualty event were to occur,” said the document’s authors.
Pharmaceuticals Paid Psychiatrists to Use Children for Testing
December 18, 2009
Natural News
By E. Huff
A federal lawsuit has been filed against pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca for its role in paying Chicago psychiatrist Dr. Michael Reinstein nearly $500,000 over the course of a decade to conduct research and to promote its anti-psychotic drug, Seroquel. Reinstein is being accused of wrongfully preying on thousands of mentally-ill patients in order to rake in profits for AstraZeneca.
Reinstein has a long history of working with AstraZeneca, receiving regular payments for speeches he would make across the country promoting the drug. AstraZeneca was also paying a for-profit research company, Uptown Research Institute, who in turn was paying Reinstein consulting fees for his services.
Cited in the lawsuit was the fact that Reinstein would continually prescribe roughly double the amount of drugs other psychiatrists would prescribe for the same conditions. When patients would report their pain and suffering due to the tremendous side effects of such drugs and their abnormally high dosages, Reinstein would largely ignore their concerns.
Other accusations include illegitimately prescribing Seroquel for various other conditions, including losing weight, despite the fact that studies show the drug actually causes weight gain. Reinstein was found to have made numerous false claims about Seroquel in promotional material, claims that would result in the destruction of people’s lives and health.
When all was said and done, more than 1,000 patients a year received Seroquel prescriptions from Reinstein at a cost of $7.6 million to taxpayers. It is unknown how many billions of dollars AstraZeneca has made from the widespread efforts of Reinstein in promoting the drug nationwide for all those years.
Despite all of his wrongdoings, Reinstein is not even a defendant in the case. AstraZeneca, the perpetrator which funded Reinstein, is the defendant in the lawsuit. While both Reinstein and AstraZeneca appear guilty of unethical and illegal behavior, AstraZeneca is rightfully bearing the brunt as it knowingly continued to fund Reinstein and rake in the profits of his misconduct.
Alzheimer’s Drug Testing Results in 9 Deaths
December 16, 2009
Reuters
By Ben Hirschler
Elan Corp (ELN.I) and Transition Therapeutics Inc (TTH.TO) have dropped the two highest doses of their experimental Alzheimer’s drug from a mid-stage clinical trial following nine deaths.
The news raised doubts as to whether the drug will now get to market, industry analysts said, although the impact on Irish-based Elan was limited as little value has so far been attributed to the product.
Elan shares were off 2.3 percent in early trade on Tuesday.
Patients will be withdrawn immediately from the Phase II study of ELND005 in the two higher dose groups, 1,000 milligrams and 2,000 mg dosed twice daily. The study will continue unchanged for patients on 250 mg, the companies said.
The decision was agreed with the Independent Safety Monitoring Committee for the 353-patient trial.
“Greater rates of serious adverse events, including nine deaths, were observed among patients receiving the two highest doses. A direct relationship between ELND005 and these deaths has not been established,” Elan and Transition said in a statement.
Elan and Transition, a small Toronto-based drugmaker, signed a worldwide development and commercialisation agreement in 2006 for the treatment.
An initial Phase I study for ELND005, an orally-administered drug, had produced encouraging results, showing that high concentrations of the drug remained in brain tissue. The data also found the treatment preserved choline acetyltransferase, an enzyme in neurons that helps protect nerve cells.
But Jack Gorman, an analyst at Davy Stockbrokers, said news of the deaths in patients on high doses considerably increased the perceived risk of the medicine reaching the market.
“At the very least efficacy at the lower dose will need to be compelling to justify development and ultimate approval,” he said. “That said, we believe that little if anything is in Elan’s share price today for its Alzheimer’s disease pipeline.”
Elan is also developing another Alzheimer’s drug called bapineuzumab with Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N), which has a different mechanism of action and is in final-stage clinical trials.
The highest dose of bapineuzumab was also dropped from testing in April because of safety concerns.
Treating Alzheimer’s disease is a “holy grail” of drugmakers but developing effective new therapies for the degenerative brain disease has proved notoriously difficult.
Antidepressants Alter Your Personality
December 9, 2009
Los Angeles Times
By Melissa Healy
Peter D. Kramer, the psychiatrist and author of the path-breaking 1993 book “Listening to Prozac,” said in an interview today that he felt “vindicated” by a newly published study (“Personality Change During Depression Treatment,” by Tony Z. Tang et al) finding that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants cause dramatic personality changes in depressed patients who take them.
“It’s hard not to feel justified” in the view–offered long before it became fashionable–that antidepressants now taken by 7% of American adults do more than lift depression: They nudge underlying personalities–even those of healthy people–into brighter, more appealing territory, and in so doing, raise ethical concerns about “cosmetic psychiatry.”
The study offers evidence that people who are unassertive, pessimistic, prone to worry and prefer to be by themselves or in small groups are more likely to develop depression, and that, when they take SSRIs, those underlying personality traits change more than most peoples’ change in an adult lifetime–in the span of 16 weeks. That change in basic outlook not only seems to be the thing that lifts them out of depression; it may even reduce the likelihood that they’ll relapse. (You can read our detailed account of the study and its findings here.)
While a group of subjects undergoing cognitive therapy had some of the same effects, they weren’t nearly as powerful as those that came from a pill–which in this case was paroxetine, marketed as Paxil.
Kramer found one possible inference from the study particularly striking: that it might turn on its head the view that many clinicians have of the value of drugs and/or cognitive therapy for their patients. “It looks like medicine is good for chronic personality traits and cognitive therapy is good for acute illness,” he said. Translation: Maybe any of us who are given to sad or worried rumination should be on SSRIs, and then, if we fall into depression anyway, we can get some time-consuming and expensive cognitive therapy. (That DOES sound like a treatment algorithm that would appeal to insurance companies.)
