The Debate Over Vitamin and Supplement Regulations
January 21,2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
To hear opponents of natural medicine say it, vitamins and herbs are extremely dangerous for your health. They should be regulated, we’re told, because they’re so dangerous!
Statistics from the U.S. National Poison Data System prove otherwise. According to a 174-page report just published, the number of people killed in 2009 across America by vitamins, minerals, amino acids or herbal supplements is exactly zero.
Compare that to the 100,000 (or so) Americans killed each year by FDA-approved pharmaceuticals — and that’s even according to studies published in JAMA. Also consider the thousands of women harmed or killed by medically-unjustified cancer treatments following false positives from faulty mammograms. And don’t forget about the more than 16,500 Americans killed each year from internal bleeding caused by NSAIDs (over-the-counter painkillers).
As the July 1998 issue of The American Journal of Medicine explains:
“Conservative calculations estimate that approximately 107,000 patients are hospitalized annually for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-related gastrointestinal (GI) complications and at least 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur each year among arthritis patients alone.” (Singh Gurkirpal, MD, “Recent Considerations in Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug Gastropathy”, The American Journal of Medicine, July 27, 1998, p. 31S)
So if NSAIDs alone are killing 16,500 people a year (or likely much more now, as use of these drugs has risen significantly since 1998), and nutritional supplements are killing zero people a year, why do health regulators try to scare everybody about vitamins being so “dangerous?”
Pharmaceuticals, meanwhile, are openly allowed to be prescribed for off-label use, meaning that doctors can prescribe them for diseases and health conditions for which they’ve never even been tested!
What’s wrong with this picture? It’s clearly a war against nutrition — a war against natural medicine — being waged by the health regulators of the world who are conspiring with Big Pharma to keep the people trapped in a state of malnutrition (all while profiting from their disease by selling them more patented pharmaceuticals).
The Orthomolecular Medicine News Service published a full article on this issue. Here’s what they had to say about the safety of nutritional supplements and the misguided attempts by world governments to limit or outlaw many supplements.
Most Patients Unaware of What Drugs They Are Taking
January 18, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
A recent study published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine has revealed that nearly all hospital patients do not know what drugs are being administered to them. The research revealed that nearly half think thought they were receiving one type of medication when they were actually receiving another and only four percent were able to identify at least one drug they received during their time there.
Researchers from the University of Colorado at Denver’s School of Medicine conducted the study to evaluate whether or not hospital patients understood what treatments they were receiving while under professional medical care. Each participant claimed to be aware of his or her outpatient medications and all were coherent and reasonably informed. What the study revealed was that most patients do not know what drugs they are being given and the few that care to or believe they know are often misinformed.
About one in five hospital medication treatments was also found to be wrong, with either an improper dosage or an incorrect drug being administered. Since the patient is the last stop before a drug is administered, researchers are stressing the importance of patient awareness concerning drug therapies in order to avoid grave errors that could inflict serious harm.
Once out of the hospital, less than 15 percent of patients over age 65 could identify the medications they were told to take. Only 40 percent of those under 65 could properly identify theirs.
Study authors believe that increased patient responsibility and awareness about given and prescribed treatments is necessary in order to prevent medical errors and their potential for serious injury.
Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
This research reveals the sad, sad state of western health care. The statistic that one in five medication treatments were incorrect is nothing short of astounding. That means 20% of the drugs patients are given in the hospital are either the wrong drugs or the wrong doses.
Astonishing. No wonder so many people die in hospitals!
The other part of this research is just as startling: Most patients didn’t even know what drugs they were being given! This speaks to the incredible dis-empowerment of patients in a western medical setting. When patients don’t even know what medicines they’re being given, it puts all the power in the hands of doctors and medical staff. And this study demonstrates that even medical staff all too frequently make mistakes that can be deadly.
The bottom line is obvious: Don’t go to a hospital except as a last resort. Hospitals are dangerous places where frequent mistakes can easily lead to you being harmed or killed by carelessly-administered pharmaceuticals.
And don’t expect to be kept informed of what’s happening to you at the hospital, either. Real communication between doctors and patients is virtually nonexistent (because they’re too busy to spend more than about two minutes with each patient).
Click here for the full report
Healthcare Bill Supports Corrupt Conventional Medicine
January 5, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
Even if Obama’s health care reform bill becomes law, mandating that all Americans buy health insurance policies for a failed system of “sick care”, I will refuse to comply. I’ve read the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, and nowhere in that document do I find that the federal government has the power to force consumers to purchase for-profit insurance products from private companies.
The very basis of the health care reform bill is, at its core, unconstitutional. If this mandate is allowed to stand, it sets a dangerous precedent for the U.S. government to require us to purchase other products and services from whatever industries it chooses to support. What’s next? Will the government pass a law forcing us to buy pharmaceuticals at thousands of dollars a year? Will it force us to purchase U.S.-made automobiles in order to boost the automobile industry? Is our economic free choice now centrally planned by our own government operating like Communist China?
This is a serious question that Constitutional scholars will no doubt be debating in the months ahead. But who am I kidding anyway? The U.S. government has long since abandoned the U.S. Constitution and no has any intention of abiding by it. Want proof? Read just one amendment: the 10th amendment.
Our right to choose has been stolen away
In addition to the very serious legal problems with government-mandated private health insurance, this health care reform law strips away my right to choose what type of medicine I wish to be treated with. I don’t find any credibility in the drugs-and-surgery approach to health care. The pharmaceutical industry is riddled with scientific fraud, quackery, corruption and criminal behavior — much of it documented right here on NaturalNews.com. Its drugs are approved by a corrupt, dishonest regulatory agency (the FDA) that has abandoned science in its quest to push more drugs onto the people. Why should I, as a “free” American, be forced to pay money to a system that I know to be largely based on fraud?
If I had a choice, I would prefer to buy into a system of naturopathic care, where doctors respect the healing ability of the human body and try to work with the patient instead of assaulting him with chemicals and surgeries. But Obama’s health care reform bill gives me no such choice. I cannot choose to direct my money into a system of medicine that I trust and respect. Instead, I am being forced to pay money into a system that is morally corrupt and scientifically fraudulent. It is a system that will only bring more harm and suffering to the people while enhancing the profits of the greed-driven corporations behind this medical scam.
Click here for the full report
Crestor the latest in Drugs Approved for People With no Health Prolems
December 30, 2009
Natural News
By Mike Adams
Big Pharma has been trending this direction for a long time: marketing medicines to people who don’t need them and who have nothing wrong with their health. It’s all part of a ploy to position prescription drugs as nutrients — things you need to take on a regular basis in order to prevent disease.
The FDA recently gave its nod of approval on the matter, announcing that Crestor can now be advertised and prescribed as a “preventive” medicine. No longer does a patient need to have anything wrong with them to warrant this expensive prescription medication: They only need to remember the brand name of the drug from television ads.
This FDA approval for the marketing of Crestor to healthy people is a breakthrough for wealthy drug companies. Selling drugs only to people who are sick is, by definition, a limited market. Expanding drug revenues requires reaching people who have nothing wrong with them and convincing them that taking a cocktail of daily pharmaceuticals will somehow keep them healthy.
All this is, of course, the greatest quackery we’ve yet seen from Big Pharma, because once this floodgate of “preventive pharmaceuticals” is unleashed, the drug companies will be positioned to promote a bewildering array of other preventive chemicals you’re supposed to take at the same time. Did you take your anti-cancer pill today? How about your anti-diabetes pill? Anti-cholesterol pill? Don’t forget your anti-Alzheimer’s pill, too.
Children Becoming Pshychiatric Gold Mine
December 17, 2009
TruthOut
By Evelyn Pringle
Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.
On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.
In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion off antidepressants, $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion in sales of ADHD drugs, for a grand total of $40.3 billion.
The path to child drugging in the US started with providing adolescents with stimulants for ADHD in the early 80s. That was followed by Prozac in the late 80s, and in the mid-90s drug companies started claiming that ADHD kids really had bipolar disorder, coinciding with the marketing of epilepsy drugs as “mood stablizers” and the arrival of the new atypical antipsychotics.
The Cost of Drug Advertising Raising Healthcare Costs
December 11, 2009
Natural News
By Paul Louis
Prescription drug ads are banned in all industrialized nations except New Zealand and the USA. Yet most off those other nations have effective medical care programs while managing to keep costs from soaring. In 1997, the FDA opened the floodgates to prescription drug advertising in the USA. This was based on an earlier Supreme Court decision that said restricting such advertising was illegal.
Last summer, some U.S. Congress members were mounting campaigns to refute the Supreme Court’s decision by restricting prescription drug advertising. In August of 2009, the New York Times selected a panel of eight highly qualified individuals for its “Editorial Room for Debate” section and posed the following two questions:
How much harm do prescription drug ads do to consumers? Are these ads a valuable way to educate people?
All but one panelist agreed that commercials and ads for prescription drugs were harmful and should be banned or at least restricted for a variety of reasons. The lone dissenter in the panel claimed that TV ads for prescription drugs educate and empower.
Disputing that premise, another panel member pointed out that people in countries banning prescription drug ads are better educated about health matters than Americans. Another panel member cited the deaths and heart problems from Vioxx created by Merck’s aggressive advertising campaigns before Vioxx’s safety could be determined.
The general consensus of the panel was that drug ads, especially TV commercials, tend to create a pill popping public rather than health conscious citizens. (Patients often demand advertised pharmaceuticals from their doctors!) Big Pharma’s annual advertising budget is double the federal budget for the FDA.
So how does this advertising outlay from drug companies affect the market? The cost of advertising is included in drug pricing. But the drug makers insist that their high advertising budgets create more sales, thus enabling prices to drop.
A recent study seems to disprove that assertion. Michael Law headed up a group in The Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at the University of British Columbia and looked into the connection between advertising and product costs. The team studied advertising expenses and pharmaceutical sales data for Plavix or clopidogrel.
Plavix is often dispensed to senior citizens for heart conditions. Law’s group focused on 27 Medicaid programs from 1999 through 2005. Their study, which was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, concluded that product costs went up, yet there was no increase in sales to help lower costs.
From this study, it’s easy to conclude that pharmaceutical advertising expenses contribute to the soaring costs of health care while encouraging the public to pop pills for every symptom imaginable.
Click here for the full report
GlaxoSmithKline Tells Canadian Doctors to Stop Using Swine Flu Vaccine
November 25, 2009
Caymanmama
Health officials regularly monitor vaccines for any signs of potential problems, including the occasional allergic reactions that do rarely occur each year.
GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman Gwenan White said that the pharmaceuticals company advised Canadian medical personnel last week to immediately stop using one specific batch of the vaccine while they proceed with investigations into the cause of the odd number of allergic reactions.
According to the AP, ix people in Canada had suffered an allergic reaction, said Tim Vail, the spokesman for Canada’s health minister. The batch contained about 170,000 doses. It was not immediately clear how many had been administered, although Vail said the majority had been.”
“We’re not seeing any thing wild or spooky or crazy about our vaccine at all,” Vail said.
White said no other doses of the vaccine around the world are part of the vaccines that are to be discontinued..
Irresponsible Reporting – Journalists Exaggerating Claims of Pharmaceuticals
November 20, 2009
Eureka Alert
An editorial published online November 20 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute discusses the exaggerated fears and hopes that often appear in news coverage of cancer research. The editorial provides guidance for both the media and journals to help alleviate the problem.
Lisa M. Schwartz, M.D., M.S., and Steven Woloshin, M.D., M.S., of Center for Medicine and the Media at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire, and Barnett S. Kramer, M.D., editor-in-chief of the JNCI, use recent media coverage of two studies from the New England Journal of Medicine and the JNCI to demonstrate their point.
Coverage of trial results of the new anti-cancer drug olaparib, which appeared in the NEJM, exaggerated hope in many ways. One national news outlet claimed the drug “was the most important cancer breakthrough of the decade,” but failed to note that the study was uncontrolled (so there is no way to know if the drug accounted for the findings), and very preliminary (it is not known if the findings will ever translate into longer life).
The editorialists also point to coverage of a JNCI article on alcohol consumption and cancer risk among women, which may have caused unwarranted fear: “A drink a day raises women’s risk of cancer,” read one newspaper headline. Unfortunately, the coverage did not provide the magnitude of the risk. Comparing the highest level of drinking (≥15 drinks a week) to the lowest (one to two drinks per week), the investigators observed a 0.6% absolute increase in the risk of breast cancer diagnosis: from 2% to 2.6% for more than 7 years.
Journalists are not the only ones to blame, though, according to the editorialists. Medical journals sometimes leave important elements out of studies. In many cases, absolute risks and study limitations are omitted from the abstracts and journal press releases.
To help journalists and medical journals, the editorialists include tip sheets with guidance on questions to ask study authors, the interpretation of common statistics, and ways to highlight study limitations.
Pharmaceuticals in NYC Drinking Water
November 23, 2009
Environmental Working Group
By Olga V. Naidenko, Ph.D.
Mr. Chairman and distinguished Members of the Committee: My name is Olga Naidenko, and I am a Senior Scientist at Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC; Ames, Iowa; and Oakland, California. We focus much of our research on potential health risks from chemical contamination of food, water, consumer products and the environment.
With this testimony, we express our strong support for the proposed law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York that would require testing by the Department of Environmental Protection for the presence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the New York City drinking water supply and the effluent from wastewater treatment plants. We commend the Council for considering this important measure that will serve as an essential step toward protecting public health from potential adverse effects of life-long, cumulative exposure to mixtures of multiple pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupting chemicals in drinking water.
The presence of hundreds of unregulated pharmaceuticals and other synthetic chemicals in the nation’s surface, ground, waste and drinking water has been documented in studies done by the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) and water utilities. Research demonstrates that although individual pharmaceuticals occur at relatively low levels, conventional wastewater treatment does not effectively remove them. This is cause for concern and a call for timely action.
Below, we highlight three key areas of concern around pharmaceuticals in drinking water:
The full spectrum of pharmaceuticals and related contaminants in the New York City drinking water supply is currently unknown; this gap must be urgently addressed by systematic, long-term water quality monitoring;
The results of the testing must be fully disclosed in order to maintain the public’s confidence in the health and safety of their drinking water;
The development of appropriate, economically feasible plans for the protection of drinking water and for ensuring the healthy survival of aquatic life requires a robust dataset on the occurrence of pharmaceutical contaminants in water sources.
Below we address these points in detail.
1. The full spectrum of pharmaceuticals and related contaminants in the New York City drinking water supply is currently unknown; this gap must be urgently addressed by annual water quality monitoring.
The Associated Press investigation (“AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water,” March 9, 2008) brought to the attention of the public what the scientific literature has been documenting for a decade – our waters are polluted with a mixture of synthetic chemicals that have been designed to have powerful effects at very low concentrations. Of especial concern are human and veterinary medicines such as steroids, antibiotics, anti-depressants and hormones, which find their way into wastewater due to pharmaceuticals excreted by the body; disposal of unused drugs; farm fields treated with biosolids (sewage sludge); manure from animals fed antibiotics that is used as fertilizer; and industrial discharge from pharmaceutical manufacturing (AP (Associated Press) 2008).
There are no federal or state standards or monitoring requirements for the vast majority of these contaminants in drinking water or wastewater. While the health effects of these pharmaceuticals at therapeutic doses are relatively well-known, their ecological and public health impacts, especially their side effects and potential for synergism with other pollutants, remain to be addressed and cannot be dismissed (Jones 2003; Pringle 2008).
Some studies have suggested that for individual pharmaceuticals, a person would have to drink hundreds of gallons of water to get anywhere near a medical dose (Caldwell 2009; Snyder 2008). However, no study has so far addressed the cumulative human health risk posed by the mixtures of pharmaceuticals that we may ingest on a daily basis (Benotti M.J. 2009; Focazio 2008; Kingsbury 2008; Kolpin 2002). Meanwhile, according to the U.S. EPA, many drug classes of concern are found in the nation’s water sources, including (U.S. EPA 2009b):
Antibiotics and antimicrobials that may lead to the development of drug-resistant bacteria;
Estrogenic steroids that may affect the reproductive system in wildlife and people;
Antidepressants and calcium-channel blockers, which have been associated with effects on spawning in shellfish and “dramatic inhibition of sperm activity in certain aquatic organisms” (U.S. EPA 2009b);
Antiepileptic drugs such as phenytoin, valproate, carbamazepine that may act as human neuroteratogens and trigger cell death in the developing brain, which leads to neurodegeneration.
Genotoxic drugs that are primarily used at hospitals and have a high acute toxicity.
Scientists do not yet understand what impact all of these water pollutants will have on human and environmental health.
Click here for the full report
Ritalin Side Effects can Include Sudden Death
November 20, 2009
Examiner
By Etta Brown
After years of speculation and rare case reports, a recent FDA-funded study by The National Institute of Mental Health claims that drugs such as Ritalin – widely used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder in children – increase the risk of sudden death by five hundred percent among children and teens.
“Drugs are not the answer,” said Etta Brown, a licensed educational psychologist, veteran social worker and author of Learning Disabilities, Understanding the Problem and Managing the Challenges from Langdon Street Press. “Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are quick to tell parents there is a pill that will fix their kids, but it’s a false bill of goods. In many cases, these drugs – like Ritalin – will serve only to dull their kids’ senses and create health risks the parents could never have imagined.”
The irony of Ritalin, Brown added, is that it actually damages the neural connections needed for learning. While it may calm a hyper-active child, so that he is less of a problem in the classroom, it does not create the ability to learn.
“Another well-documented side effect of Ritalin is that it may cause a permanent tic of the face, head and neck,” Brown said. “There is a long fifty-year history of false advertising by drug companies that sell drugs with known side effects that are more damaging to the developing nervous system of children than the condition they are designed to treat.”
Between two to18 percent of American children are thought to be affected by ADHD, and Ritalin remains one of the most prescribed drugs for the behavioral disorder. This suggests that the medical approach to poorly nourished children who aren’t getting enough exercise is to dose them with a drug that is known to interfere with the development of their brains, cause permanent tics of the face, head and neck, and increase the likelihood of sudden death by 500 percent. And the FDA is not looking.
Click here for the full report
