You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Big Pharma’ tag.
Some little-reported British news has emerged, which is positive for a change.
Let’s start with the French view of Britain.
Although England and France are historical enemies, The Telegraph‘s Anthony Peregrine tells us that all is not lost in ‘Britain through the eyes of French tourists: “It’s like being whisked back to a more refined era”‘. The article has a splendid photo of Betty’s Tearoom in Harrogate.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine:
Word has got about, not least in The Telegraph’s reader comments section, that the French don’t like us. Some don’t, of course … But an awful lot do like us, many of them very much. I know this because I have just conducted a survey.
The French remain the number two foreign visitors to Britain – after the US, but ahead of the Irish, Germans and Spanish – and, though 2022 numbers are still down on 2019 (the last normal tourism year), their spending jumped some 13 per cent, to more than £1.5 billion. So they not only appreciate us, but are paying handsomely to do so.
Despite the many Michelin-starred British restaurants to appear in recent years, our older food classics score highly:
Quite a lot of that cash is being spent on food – British food which, against all expectations, the French like …
Sunday roasts, notably in pubs, get every vote, as do fish and chips – so esteemed that they’re now found, in the original language (“le fish ’n’ chips”), across France – and, supremely, the full English.
Jean, an agronomist from Marseilles, said: “I have to admit that the first time I was served beans for breakfast, I was perplexed. But they’re really good, with egg, English bacon and sausage” …
Meanwhile, in a nation of cheese fanatics, Stilton stands so proud that a French chef I know named his dog after it. You hear a bloke yelling “Stilton!” in a park in the Tarn, you’ll know who it is. And its near, unpasteurised relative, Stichelton – served to our king and queen at the recent banquet in the Palace of Versailles – has been termed one of the five best cheeses in the world by multi-starred French chef Anne-Sophie Pic.
And there’s nothing like a decent curry or Chinese meal:
The sheer range of cuisines easily available in Britain is another source of pleasure among people who, on home territory, consider foreign food a threat to their national sovereignty. British stand-outs, though, are Asian restaurants. “In Indian and Chinese places, they serve dishes without compromise,” said Benoït, a civil servant from the Pas-de-Calais. “Similar restaurants in France invariably soften the edges.”
Afternoon teas are also popular:
Cucumber sandwiches and shortbread had several fans, as did Fortnum and Mason. Béatrice, county council officer in the Creuse department, said: “The place is so magnificent. It’s like being whisked back to a more refined era. And the tea with cakes – extraordinary!”
Home fare also scored highly:
Refinement is, nevertheless and evidently, an ace in the British hand. “Garden parties!” said Valérie, a tourism official from Avignon. “A jug of Pimms – unknown in France – sparkling in the sun, delicious to sip. Little canapés on old, unmatched plates… and port jelly as dessert.”
However, Valerie did object to the modern British way of catering for every possible eating issue:
Vegetarian, vegan, no gluten, no dairy, no tomatoes, no heaven-knows-what-else – you need an algorithm to work out what you can safely cook. We don’t ask such questions in France.
Incredibly, for a people whose grocery shopping revolves around daily markets, the French like ours, too:
A lady I know recently spent almost her entire city break in London at Camden Market. “Best bit by far,” she said. Borough and Spitalfields markets also had their aficionados, as did farmers’ markets further afield. “The only place I can get artisan-made chutney,” said Benoît.
He was not alone, either, in appreciating food courts-cum-markets like The Good Shed at Canterbury and Macknad at Faversham. Clearly, Britain is closing on France, market-wise.
Pubs are viewed as being more liberating than cafés:
Evelyne, a retired teacher from Montpellier, put it best: “Cafés in France are extensions of the street by other means. Pubs are cosy refuges from the street, for conversation and easy laughter.”
The French find that personal freedom is best expressed in Britain. This, too, amazed me:
Said Carole in Normandy: “There are the parks, of course, and the City. But the real Britishness is in the freedom to be oneself. The street is a show, but also a breath of liberty, less closed in by codes of conduct than Paris.”
Béatrice of the Creuse is of similar mind: “There’s real diversity, even fantasy, in London, which you don’t get in Paris. You feel you are swept along in a cosmopolitan crowd.”
This translates into a more informal life in Britain. Said Céline of Brittany: “I love the soft words and the chit-chat. People, especially shop-keepers and restaurateurs, call you ‘love’ or ‘sweetie’, they ask how you are. It lends warmth to exchanges.” Jean from Marseilles agrees: “That kind of kindness makes daily life really agreeable.”
And when, by night, British life flips over to party time, that’s pretty good too – even if, as he said, “dignity sometimes takes a hit”. Jean evidently knows Britain well enough to have mastered understatement rare in his hometown.
The Royal Family and what they represent also struck a chord:
Marnie, Countess de Vanssay – whose family have owned the Château de la Barre in the Loire valley for six centuries – was unambiguous. “On a personal note, I can say that as French aristocrats – and many French people who are not aristocrats would join me in this opinion – we miss the elegance and decorum that the English have preserved via their monarchy.
“In France, we have vulgar, common presidents who are playing at being monarchs, but have no tradition, no decency, no stature.”
Enthusiasm for royals is not confined to the French nobility. Commoners share it. Said Valérie from Avignon: “I have a lovely tin of shortbread produced for the coronation of Charles III. Everybody I know is very jealous. The equivalent in France would be a box of macaroons with a picture of the Macrons on it. We deprive ourselves of panache. If only we’d cut off a few fewer heads.”
The French even think our dramatists are better than theirs:
Fortunately, British theatre won over French theatre, said Countess de Vanssay, because it was witty and underplayed whereas the Parisian stage regularly overacted. Said Evelyne from Montpellier: “It’s Molière versus Shakespeare – and, even in France, most people know that the world would chuck Molière off a raft to save Shakespeare.”
Are there any things the French dislike?
They find us too apologetic and too verbose:
Valérie from Avignon admired the British talent for self-deprecation – “you need great self-confidence to pull that off,” she said – though grows quickly irritated by our constant apologising (“even for things you haven’t done”) and long-windedness. “Why say ‘in the not too distant future’, when ‘soon’ will do?”
The cost of entering historic churches rightly shocks them:
Several French people were scandalised that they had to pay to enter Westminster Abbey (£29 from Nov 1) and Canterbury Cathedral (£17).
“That’s not what places of worship are about,” said one, who was mollified, but not entirely, by the fact that most British museums are free, including the British Museum. I pointed out that entry to the Louvre is £14.75. “Ok,” she said, “but it’s one of the world’s greatest, and still cheaper than Canterbury cathedral.”
They had a few other quibbles:
Just a couple of things. Four, in truth. If we’d finally ditch feet and inches, stop putting milk in tea, improve the quality of coffee – and bin all cream crackers (a mystery to most French people), then scarcely anything would impede a truly cordiale entente.
I know what they mean about cream crackers, which I find absolutely vile.
Ultimately:
I could go on. Asking French people what they like about Britain opens floodgates – and Brexit really doesn’t get in the way.
Marvellous!
On the down side, the French have had drug shortages over the past few years. One of my French friends has been seriously impacted by it. We do not seem to have had that problem outside of Northern Ireland, which is, sadly, still largely regulated by the EU. So, there is one (more) positive point for Brexit, at least for mainland Britain.
On October 10, EuroNews carried a news story, ‘”Trying to find solutions”: Worsening drugs shortage is leaving pharmacists and patients in the dark’:
Shortages of common older medicines are increasing. Experts say it’s in part because pharmaceutical companies are de-incentivised from producing them.
At a pharmacy in eastern Paris, there’s a long list of medicines that are currently unavailable from suppliers.
Pharmacist Pierre-Antoine Drubay says he has seen these shortages increase in the last year, estimating that on any given day, around a third of the medicines patients are seeking are out of stock.
It is affecting medicines for all pathologies, he added, from antibiotics to medicines used to treat cardiovascular disease and diabetes. When the pharmacist’s supplier outside the French capital says the medicines aren’t available, the only option left is to troubleshoot …
Often, he has no information about why there is a shortage or when it will be over.
“It puts us in an awkward position with patients and doctors, it increases our workload, and the lack of transparency, that’s really the worst,” he added.
A new statement on Monday from one of France’s pharmacy unions, the USPO, called for more transparency as well, adding that drug shortages were becoming a permanent problem.
Officials are aware of the concerns, and with the prospect of a triple epidemic of COVID-19, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) this winter, France’s medicines agency (ANSM) presented a plan last week that aims to reduce potential shortages of commonly used drugs.
But this is also a larger problem that experts say has increased over the last decade due to production and supply disruptions related to how medicines are manufactured.
Older medications are often subject to shortages because medicine prices drop once a laboratory’s original patent expires and other companies can make generics.
“There is a shortage of these older drugs because they bring in less money than the new drugs, and since the pharmaceutical companies make less money, they try to save money,” said Professor Jean-Paul Vernant, a haematologist at the Paris hospital la Pitié Salpêtrière.
Both the active ingredients and manufacturing of medicines used to be done by pharmaceutical companies in France or other European countries, but increasingly, these companies have outsourced the work.
“To save money, instead of working with laboratories that they had worked with previously [chemical laboratories that manufacture the active ingredients and subcontractors that do the manufacturing], they send that work to India and China where it’s much cheaper,” said Vernant of the situation in France.
“In India and China, wages for people working in chemical factories are extremely low and environmental standards are very poor,” he added.
Pharmaceutical companies also do not keep stocks of these older medicines that are much less profitable than the newer therapies. A small disruption during manufacturing, for instance, can lead to a shortage.
The article goes on to say that France is not the only EU country experiencing crucial drugs shortages. The United States also has the same difficulties.
Returning to the French pharmacist, he says he is between a rock and a hard place:
Drubay says at his pharmacy in Paris, without more information about the shortages, it’s like working blindly. Sometimes the shortage only lasts a week, so the patient could have waited without it impacting their health as well.
“We didn’t have the information at the time and we sent the patient to the other side of Paris to be able to collect their medication,” he said.
But they can’t just tell patients to wait for medication when they don’t know when it will next be available.
“The patient wouldn’t come back to the pharmacy, and from a health perspective, it’s inadmissible to tell a patient that,” he added.
My commiserations. I hope that the EU — and the US — find a solution soon.
More positive news for Britain follows tomorrow.
Three recent news items about coronavirus are worth passing along.
Long Covid and olfactory nerves
One of the many drawbacks of long Covid is the loss of the sense of smell.
To some extent, this can happen with any virus. Fifty years ago, my mother contracted a winter virus and lost her sense of taste and smell for two years. Although she wasn’t a foodie, her inability to enjoy our daily family dinner disappointed her the most. Her GP said there was nothing he could do. She would have to wait and see what happened. Two years later, suddenly, her olfactory senses returned and she had no more problems.
A December 22 article in The Times said that researchers are working on a similar problem with long Covid. It seems that the immune system blocks olfactory nerves (emphases mine):
The loss of smell suffered by people with long Covid is caused by an immune response affecting nerve cells in nasal tissue, scientists have said.
The researchers who conducted the study found that there was a decline in the number of these nerve cells in such patients.
The study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, was led by researchers at Duke University in the US and involved colleagues from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego.
They looked at tissue taken from the olfactory epithelium, found in the nose, where nerve cells responsible for smell are located …
The single-cell analyses revealed that there was a widespread infiltration of T-cells, a type of white blood cell used by the immune system, engaged in an inflammatory response in the nasal tissue.
Researchers found this immune response from these T-cells continued even when there were no detectable levels of Covid in the patient …
Dr Bradley Goldstein, an associate professor in neurobiology at Duke, who was a senior author for the study, said researchers had been encouraged to find that nerve cells appeared to maintain some ability to repair themselves.
He said learning which sites in the nose were being damaged and what cell types were involved would be a key step in designing treatment. “We are hopeful that modulating the abnormal immune response or repair processes within the nose of these patients could help to at least partially restore a sense of smell,” he added.
In the meantime, the only prescription is patience. Patience is a virtue.
Recovering from long Covid: mind over matter
On November 19, The Times featured an article by Francesca Steele, a long Covid sufferer, detailing how she overcame her debilitating condition.
Steele had tried everything and ended up spending £15,000, most of which was for naught. In fact, some of the medical treatments she underwent made her feel worse.
As a last resort, she embarked on putting mind over matter. The old saying worked.
She describes the journey back to normality:
It was on a particularly bad day that I started to wonder about mind-body courses, which suggest you can control the reactions of your body by “retraining” your brain. I had come across people who had success with these courses while searching online. One that kept cropping up was called the Lightning Process (LP), a short brain-training programme that, enthusiasts said, also had an impact on the body.
Developed in the Nineties by the British osteopath Phil Parker, LP is a three-day seminar (which you can do in person or on Zoom, with a range of coaches you can find online) that combines neuro-linguistic programming with life coaching, hypnotherapy and osteopathy. Its goal is to give people tools to help themselves with a range of conditions, including post-viral fatigue syndromes, chronic pain and anxiety, by reducing the brain’s stress response. It claims to have helped 25,000 people around the world.
Whenever I found someone online who claimed to have recovered from post-viral fatigue conditions in this way I tried to track them down and speak to them directly to check they were real and not invented by snake oil salesmen. They weren’t. I spoke to a journalist who said the techniques had cured him entirely of ME. I spoke to a GP who had gone on to train as an LP practitioner after it helped her ten-year-old daughter to recover after three years. I chatted to several writers who said mind-body work had “cured” them of long Covid but they were afraid to speak out, something I understand because I was trolled after mentioning the concept on Twitter …
However, I kept hearing positive things about it on social media, and decided it was at least worth a shot. In March I did the course. The thinking is that a serious shock like a bad virus can send your body into permanent “fight or flight” mode and that your nervous system gets stuck sending messages of sickness that are no longer needed. Using the science of neuro-plasticity, which says that the brain adapts to the neural pathways used most often — and that in this case your brain has adapted to using neural pathways that prompt a sickness response — the course teaches you to “train your brain” to send different signals. So, instead of your immune system, your endocrine system and your inflammation responses all gearing up for an attack, they relax. Your hormones, your blood pressure, your heart rate, your thermoregulation and so on, all, in theory, return to normal. As Dr Anna Chellamuthu, a GP and LP practitioner, puts it: “The LP is absolutely not saying, ‘This is all in your head.’ This is a physical illness. It’s saying that physiology can change when you change your thoughts.”
During a £750, three-day Zoom course, our coach talked the three of us (all with long Covid) through various exercises and taught us all a routine to interrupt negative thoughts. Every time I had an anxious thought about symptoms, I had to say “Stop” and do an intense visualisation, imagining myself in a situation where I was energetic, healthy, confident.
It was not easy to stick to. Constantly interrupting your thoughts feels unnatural at first and there were times I was out at the park with my kids when I really didn’t feel like scooting off to do the process behind a tree. I often doubted it would work. Yet within a month I was back at work. Two months later I celebrated my 40th birthday with a long walk and delicious dinner. Seven months on from the course, I am about 80-90 per cent back to my old self. I do sometimes get symptoms but they are far fainter and less frequent than before.
To those who say that I’d have got better anyway and that LP just happened to coincide with my recovery, I strongly disagree. I was unable to walk beyond our street for months. Within a week of the course I was able to go much further; within eight weeks I was able to run, after 16 months without exercise.
Various studies suggest the efficacy of mind-body work. In a recent pilot study conducted by a professor at Harvard Medical School, for example, all symptoms of patients with long Covid improved on a 13-week psychophysiological course. There is no doubt that more biomedical research is needed into post-viral fatigue conditions, and I, like others, hope that more evidence is found of the exact mechanisms at play. Dr Boon Lim, a consultant cardiologist at Imperial College Hospital who has treated many people with long Covid, says: “As medics we have been taught to focus all our attention on physical issues, to the detriment of patients. I think you need both physical and mind- body help to improve.”
I am also conscious that mind-body courses can be expensive. LP costs £750 (plus more for follow-up guidance). I found the intense nature of it uniquely motivating but cheaper mind-body work does exist, including the app Curable (I know one woman who recovered from 14 years of ME using it) and Suzy Bolt’s extremely compassionate, cheap (and some free) online classes.
For me, the process has been gradual, not immediate. I don’t claim that it will work for everyone or even that the theory is definitely correct, but I feel as if I’ve come back from the dead. Before it, I tried everything mainstream medicine had to offer, to no avail. Mind-body work has got me this far, and I believe it will get me the rest of the way. Without it, I believe I’d still be in bed, without hope.
What an encouraging story. This is further evidence that alternative medicine is viable and worth trying. As with any treatment, conventional or otherwise, doing one’s homework beforehand is a prerequisite.
Parliamentary debate on vaccines: broken silence
On Tuesday, December 13, the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen was granted an adjournment debate in the Commons on the potential harms of coronavirus vaccines. Finally, someone had the gumption to break the silence in Parliament.
I had just tuned into BBC Parliament by chance at the moment he started speaking. How providential.
Here’s the beginning:
The transcript is here. Excerpts from his hard-hitting speech follow:
Three months ago, one of the most eminent and trusted cardiologists, a man with an international reputation, Dr Aseem Malhotra, published peer-reviewed research that concluded that there should be a complete cessation of the administration of the covid mRNA vaccines for everyone because of clear and robust data of significant harms and little ongoing benefit. He described the roll-out of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine as
“perhaps the greatest miscarriage of medical science, attack on democracy, damage to population health, and erosion of trust in medicine that we will witness in our lifetime.”
Interestingly, there has so far not been a single rebuttal of Dr Malhotra’s findings in the scientific literature, despite their widespread circulation and the fact that they made international news.
Before I state the key evidence-based facts that make a clear case for complete suspension of these emergency use authorisation vaccines, it is important to appreciate the key psychological barrier that has prevented these facts from being acknowledged by policymakers and taken up by the UK mainstream media. That psychological phenomenon is wilful blindness. It is when human beings—including, in this case, institutions—turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, reduce anxiety, avoid conflict and protect their prestige and reputations. There are numerous examples of that in recent history, such as the BBC and Jimmy Savile, the Department of Health and Mid Staffs, Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, and the medical establishment and the OxyContin scandal, which was portrayed in the mini-series “Dopesick”. It is crucial to understand that the longer wilful blindless to the truth continues, the more unnecessary harm it creates.
Here are the cold, hard facts about the mRNA vaccines and an explanation of the structural drivers that continue to be barriers to doctors and the public receiving independent information to make informed decisions about them. Since the roll-out in the UK of the BioNTech-Pfizer mRNA vaccine, we have had almost half a million yellow card reports of adverse effects from the public. That is unprecedented. It is more than all the yellow card reports of the past 40 years combined. An extraordinary rate of side effects that are beyond mild have been reported in many countries across the world that have used the Pfizer vaccine, including, of course, the United States.
… Only a couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by a journalist from a major news outlet who said that he was being bombarded by calls from people who said that they were vaccine-harmed but unable to get the support they wanted from the NHS. He also said that he thought this would be the biggest scandal in medical history in this country. Disturbingly, he also said that he feared that if he were to mention that in the newsroom in which he worked, he would lose his job. We need to break this conspiracy of silence.
It is instructive to note that, according to pharmaco-vigilance analysis, the serious adverse effects reported by the public are thought to represent only 10% of the true rate of serious adverse events occurring within the population. The gold standard of understanding the benefit and harm of any drug is the randomised controlled trial. It was the randomised controlled trial conducted by Pfizer that led to UK and international regulators approving the BioNTech-Pfizer mRNA vaccine for administration in the first place.
Contrary to popular belief, that original trial of approximately 40,000 participants did not show any statistically significant reduction in death as a result of vaccination, but it did show a 95% relative risk reduction in the development of infection against the ancestral, more lethal strain of the virus. However, the absolute risk reduction for an individual was only 0.84%. In other words, from its own data, Pfizer revealed that we needed to vaccinate 119 people to prevent one infection. The World Health Organisation and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges have previously stated and made it clear that it is an ethical responsibility that medical information is communicated to patients in absolute benefit and absolute risk terms, which is to protect the public from unnecessary anxiety and manipulation.
Very quickly, through mutations of the original strain—indeed, within a few months—covid fortunately became far less lethal. It quickly became apparent that there was no protection against infection at all from the vaccine, and we were left with the hope that perhaps these vaccines would protect us from serious illness and death. So what does the most reliable data tell us about the best-case scenario of individual benefit from the vaccine against dying from covid-19? Real-world data from the UK during the three-month wave of omicron at the beginning of this year reveals that we would need to vaccinate 7,300 people over the age of 80 to prevent one death. The number needed to be vaccinated to prevent a death in any younger age group was absolutely enormous.
At this point, Bridgen’s fellow Conservative, Danny Kruger (Prue Leith’s son), intervened to ask whatever happened to the initial policy (Matt Hancock’s) to vaccinate only the vulnerable and certainly not children. Note the pro-vaccine statements BBC Parliament put up when he spoke:
Kruger said:
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing this debate to the House. It is a very important debate that we should be having. He is talking about the relative risks for different cohorts of the population. He will remember that, when the vaccine was first announced, the intention was that it would be used only for those who were vulnerable and the elderly because, as he says, the expectation was that the benefit to younger people was minor. Does he agree that it would be helpful for the Minister to explain to us why the original advice that the vaccines would be rolled out only for the older population, and would not be used for children in particular, was laid aside and we ended up with the roll-out for the entire population, including children?
Bridgen responded as follows, then continued:
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and his support on this very important issue. Of course, it is important that the Government justify why they are rolling out a vaccine to any cohort of people, particularly our children. He will recall that, in the Westminster Hall debate, we questioned the validity of vaccinating children who have minimal risk, if a risk at all, from the virus when there is a clear risk from the vaccine. I will again report on evidence from America later in my speech about those risks, particularly to young children.
In other words, the benefits of the vaccine are close to non-existent. Beyond the alarming yellow card reports, the strongest evidence of harm comes from the gold standard, highest possible quality level of data. A re-analysis of Pfizer and Moderna’s own randomised controlled trials using the mRNA technology, published in the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine, revealed a rate of serious adverse events of one in 800 individuals vaccinated. These are events that result in hospitalisation or disability, or that are life changing. Most disturbing of all, however, is that those original trials suggested someone was far more likely to suffer a serious side effect from the vaccine than to be hospitalised with the ancestral, more lethal strain of the virus. These findings are a smoking gun suggesting the vaccine should likely never have been approved in the first place.
In the past, vaccines have been completely withdrawn from use for a much lower incidence of serious harm. For example, the swine flu vaccine was withdrawn in 1976 for causing Guillain-Barré syndrome in only one in 100,000 adults, and in 1999 the rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn for causing a form of bowel obstruction in children affecting one in 10,000. With the covid mRNA vaccine, we are talking of a serious adverse event rate of at least one in 800, because that was the rate determined in the two months when Pfizer actually followed the patients following their vaccination. Unfortunately, some of those serious events, such as heart attack, stroke and pulmonary embolism will result in death, which is devastating for individuals and the families they leave behind. Many of these events may take longer than eight weeks post vaccination to show themselves.
An Israeli paper published in Nature’s scientific reports showed a 25% increase in heart attack and cardiac arrest in 16 to 39-year-olds in Israel. Another report from Israel looked at levels of myocarditis and pericarditis in people who had had covid and those who had not. It was a study of, I think, 1.2 million who had not had covid and 740,000 who had had it. The incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis was identical in both groups. This would tell the House that whatever is causing the increase in heart problems now, it is not due to having been infected with covid-19.
It was accepted by a peer-reviewed medical journal that one of the country’s most respected and decorated general practitioners, the honorary vice-president of the British Medical Association and the Labour party’s doctor of the year, Dr Kailash Chand, likely suffered a cardiac arrest and was tragically killed by the Pfizer vaccine six months after his second dose, through a mechanism that rapidly accelerates heart disease. In fact, in the UK we have had an extra 14,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in 2021, compared with 2020, following the vaccine roll-out. Many of these will undoubtedly be because of the vaccine, and the consequences of this mRNA jab are clearly serious and common.
Bridgen then went on to discuss conflicts of interest and how they influence vaccine approvals. He then talked about a few subsequent investigations:
In a recent investigation by The BMJ into the financial conflicts of interest of the drug regulators, the sociologist Donald Light said:
“It’s the opposite of having a trustworthy organisation independently and rigorously assessing medicines. They’re not rigorous, they’re not independent, they are selective, and they withhold data.”
He went on to say that doctors and patients
“must appreciate how deeply and extensively drug regulators can’t be trusted so long as they are captured by industry funding.”
Similarly, another investigation revealed that members of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation had huge financial links to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation running into billions of pounds. Ministers, the media and the public know that the foundation is heavily invested in pharmaceutical industry stocks.
Unfortunately, the catastrophic mistake over the approval, and the coercion associated with this emergency-use authorisation medical intervention, are not an anomaly, and in many ways this could have been predicted by the structural failures that allowed it to occur in the first place. Those shortcomings are rooted in the increasingly unchecked visible and invisible power of multinational corporations—in this case, big pharma. We can start by acknowledging that the drug industry has a fiduciary obligation to produce profit for its shareholders, but it has no fiduciary obligation to provide the right medicines for patients.
The real scandal is that those with a responsibility to patients and with scientific integrity—namely, doctors, academic institutions and medical journals—collude with the industry for financial gain. Big pharma exerts its power by capturing the political environment through lobbying and the knowledge environment through funding university research and influencing medical education, preference shaping through capture of the media, financing think-tanks and so on. In other words, the public relations machinery of big pharma excels in subterfuge and engages in smearing and de-platforming those who call out its manipulations. No doubt it will be very busy this evening.
It is no surprise, when there is so much control by an entity that has been described as “psychopathic” for its profit-making conduct, that one analysis suggests the third most common cause of death globally after heart disease and cancer is the side effects of prescribed medications, which were mostly avoidable …
It has also been brought to my attention by a whistleblower from a very reliable source that one of these institutions is covering up clear data that reveals that the mRNA vaccine increases inflammation of the heart arteries. It is covering this up for fear that it may lose funding from the pharmaceutical industry. The lead of that cardiology research department has a prominent leadership role with the British Heart Foundation, and I am disappointed to say that he has sent out non-disclosure agreements to his research team to ensure that this important data never sees the light of day. That is an absolute disgrace. Systemic failure in an over-medicated population also contributes to huge waste of British taxpayers’ money and increasing strain on the NHS.
Danny Kruger intervened a second time:
My hon. Friend is being very good with his time. I just want to call his attention to some research, since I chair the all-party parliamentary group for prescribed drug dependence. He refers to the waste of money; there is £500 million being spent every year by the NHS on prescribed drugs for people who should not be on those habit-forming pills, causing enormous human misery as well as waste for the taxpayer.
Bridgen acknowledged what Kruger said, then concluded his speech:
I thank my hon. Friend for making a point that only reinforces the items in my speech that the public need to know. I thank him again for his support.
We need an inquiry into the influence of big pharma on medications and our NHS. That is been called for many occasions and by some very influential people, including prominent physicians such as the former president of the Royal College of Physicians and personal doctor to our late Queen, Sir Richard Thompson. On separate occasions in the last few years those calls have been supported and covered in the Daily Mail, The Guardian and, most recently, The i newspaper.
We are fighting not just for principles of ethical, evidence-based medical practices, but for our democracy. The future health of the British public depends on us tackling head-on the cause of this problem and finding meaningful solutions …
That first step could start this evening with this debate. It starts here, with the vaccine Minister and the Government ensuring in the first instance an immediate and complete suspension of any more covid vaccines with their use of mRNA technology. Silence on this issue is more contagious than the virus itself, and now so should courage be. I would implore all the scientists, medics, nurses and those in the media who know the truth about the harm these vaccines are causing to our people to speak out.
We have already sacrificed far too many of our citizens on the altar of ignorance and unfettered corporate greed. Last week the MHRA authorised those experimental vaccines for use in children as young as six months. In a Westminster Hall debate some weeks ago, I quoted a report by the Journal of the American Medical Association studying the effect of the covid-19 mRNA vaccination on children under five years of age. It showed that one in 200 had an adverse event that resulted in hospitalisation, and symptoms that lasted longer than 90 days.
As the data clearly shows to anyone who wants to look at it, the mRNA vaccines are not safe, not effective and not necessary. I implore the Government to halt their use immediately. As I have demonstrated and as the data clearly shows, the Government’s current policy on the mRNA vaccines is on the wrong side of medical ethics, it is on the wrong side of scientific data, and ultimately it will be on the wrong side of history.
Conservative MP Maria Caulfield responded on behalf of the Government. She is a nurse who worked on the front line during the darkest days of the pandemic. Not surprisingly, she strongly, but politely, disagreed with Bridgen:
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) for securing the debate. It is important that all Members get to discuss and debate such issues, and they are entitled to their opinion.
I have to say that I strongly disagree with my hon. Friend, not only in the content of his speech, but in the way he derided doctors, scientists and nurses. Many of us worked through the pandemic and saw at first hand the devastation that covid caused. There is no doubt in my mind that, despite the personal protective equipment, social distancing and infection control, the thing that made the biggest difference in combating covid was the introduction of the vaccine …
Caulfield told us things we already know about the Government’s support of the vaccine and how the yellow card system works. She refused to take an intervention from Bridgen but did take one from Kruger, who asked about vaccinating children:
I am grateful. The Minister’s predecessor had asked the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to review the evidence behind the decision to roll out the vaccine to children. Can she update the House or write to us to explain where that review has got to? Does she agree that the JCVI should be looking at the vaccination of children?
She responded, then continued:
I will write to my hon. Friend with an update on that report. It was touched on that the MHRA has licensed the vaccine for babies, but that has not yet been approved by the JCVI, so that is just a licence rather than a recommendation to roll out. However, I am happy to send him the details of that report.
I want to put on the record that the covid vaccines have saved tens of thousands of lives and prevented hundreds of thousands of people from being hospitalised. I completely disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire that there is a whole conspiracy of doctors, nurses and scientists—they have done nothing but work hard to get us through the pandemic.
In the end, Bridgen got his intervention:
I thank the Minister for giving way on that important point. The claims about the number of lives saved worldwide by the vaccination are sponsored by vested interests. The modelling is the lowest form of scientific evidence—in fact, it is more science fiction than science fact.
Needless to say, Caulfield disagreed and concluded by promoting the vaccines:
I completely disagree. I worked on the covid wards with patients who were dying from that virus. We had infection control measures, antibiotics, dexamethasone—a steroid—and every known facility available, and the only thing that made a difference was when those vaccines were introduced. They do not necessary stop people from getting the virus, but they certainly reduce its intensity and the likelihood of someone dying from it.
I completely debunk the conspiracy theories about a whole group of people benefiting financially from the roll-out of the vaccine and would gently say to my hon. Friend that if he has evidence, there are mechanisms in place for raising concerns, as we have seen with other drugs. Only today, I was before the Health and Social Care Committee talking about sodium valproate—we also had an Adjournment debate on that last week—where there are genuine safety concerns. The MHRA is taking that extremely seriously. It is not worried about pharma concerns; its first priority is patients, and it is exactly the same with the covid vaccine. So if there is evidence—I am not saying that there is not—it absolutely must go through the proper channels so that it can be evaluated.
We have launched a nationwide campaign to encourage people to come forward this winter to get their booster. I recommend that people do that safe in the knowledge that the vaccine is safe for people to have.
The debate ended and the House was adjourned.
Last Saturday, December 18, GB News’s Neil Oliver covered Bridgen’s debate and Aseem Malhotra’s findings in his editorial. Oliver rightly wonders why the vaccine scandal isn’t getting plastered all over the media the way coronavirus statistics were in 2020 and 2021. Instead, he says, there is nothing but deafening silence:
Dr Aseem Malhotra’s journey
When governments first announced the vaccines, Dr Malhotra, a cardiologist, was enthusiastic and encouraged everyone to get them.
Like the rest of us, he believed it when world leaders said the vaccines would prevent transmission. We saw that they did not.
Then, Malhotra’s father fell ill from one of the jabs. While he was an older gentleman, he was fit and ran daily. He also led an active life.
Malhotra examined his father and saw that he had suddenly developed heart problems.
On October 6, the cardiologist spoke publicly at the World Council for Health about the dangers the vaccines pose. He also said he doubted whether the original claims about preventing transmission were true. He urged a pause in vaccine roll outs:
Even with treatment from his son, Malhotra senior died in October. What a blow that must have been:
On December 17, Malhotra and Dr Peter McCullough discussed the vaccine’s dangerous side effects with Jan Jekielek of Epoch Times:
Medical practitioners now speaking out
Fortunately, within the past week, medical practitioners have begun speaking out about the dangers of the vaccines.
On December 16, a vascular specialist urged a pause in the vaccine roll out:
On December 17, a British GP said he would like an investigation into the vaccines:
https://twitter.com/dr_cartland/status/1605613000479477761
Doctors for Patients UK aired their views on Wednesday, December 21:
https://twitter.com/chrislittlewoo8/status/1605532188459487236
Their video was taken down for a time but is now back up and running:
https://twitter.com/chrislittlewoo8/status/1605559546625159168
Apparently, one place where speaking out is forbidden is California, where one’s licence to practice can be suspended. No surprise there:
We can but hope that 2023 blows the vaccine controversy out into the open once and for all.
I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that every media outlet knows these interventions don’t work and are injurious to health. As Andrew Bridgen said of the media personality he spoke with, they’re afraid of losing their jobs if they say something openly.
One media outlet that is covering the vaccines is GB News, particularly on Mark Steyn’s weeknight show. My best wishes go to him as he recovers in France from two heart attacks in succession. I hope they are not related to ‘the jabs’.
Brendan Dilley is a Congressional candidate in Arizona and YourVoice™ America Co-host.
He receives intelligence messages from a source he keeps anonymous. Dilley’s Twitter account has many positive messages about life. His Periscopes have the intel data.
Someone on 8chan watches the videos then summarises the content. I’ve read this intel several times over the past few weeks and found it interesting enough to share.
Part 1 covers excerpted drops from January 17 through January 27, 2018.
Part 2 covers intel from January 29 through February 1.
Part 3 covers February 2 and 3.
Part 4 covers intel from February 5.
This post covers intel from Thursday, February 8.
Most of the typos are fixed, although I left some capitalisations and abbreviations in. The transcriber seems to want to stress the capitalised words. Emphases mine below.
To explain the first part, refer back to the end of Part 4, which includes a Q message. Here is message 688:
People asked for arrests.
Gave one example.
Just because you can’t see doesn’t mean it’s not ongoing.
Trust the plan.
Q
The first part of Dilley’s Periscope is summarised as follows:
Dilley spoke to a ex-military c who speaks to generals. Says EVERY perp must do a perpwalk to restore faith in our republic.
Dilley is holding Trump and Sessions to the highest standard. Says ‘I am a sycophant to no man’ if they to not prosecute.
Dilley says Arrests Happened 2-3 days ago, relates it to Q but wants to know who Q showed being arrested, not just “somebody in China.” he will ask his source for a name!!
This is an excerpt from the second part, which has to do with Q’s identity. There is also a mention of Anthony Weiner (currently in prison in Massachusetts), husband of Huma Abedin, a former Hillary staffer and her close companion:
Dilley believes Q is in the administration
Dilley says there is real panic in DC, they have lost the ability to push back fast enough
Dilley says we need e-verify for voting
Mentions Weiner’s phone contact list dropping
‘Things aren’t done on your timeline’ ref voter fraud
update on voter fraud – “voter fraud count at 8.75 million atm”
multiple reports will come out
This is the third part:
Dilley says his source monitors Twitter
His Source WILL NOT give a name for Q China arrest drop but give a hint: “WAS SUPERB”
Dilley mentions 84 doctors killed over last few years
Dilley was a personal trainer to a Lady who was a researcher on cancer cures.
She discovered something about the early stages of a cancer cure on Monday- by Wednesday, the lab was SHUT DOWN.This was in 2009.
That does not surprise me one bit. How can they get a cure for cancer or even the flu released to the public when healthcare, particularly cancer care, has been an industry for nearly 50 years? It’s a money spinner.
Q also posted on the same day about this (messages 690 to 692):
Q !UW.yye1fxo ID: ee33a6 300473
Q !UW.yye1fxoID: 296675 300885
How many top medical researchers found dead in past 5 years? Why is this topic relevant now? Why does the US taxpayer subsidize meds for the rest of the world? Q
Back to Dilley and his source. An additional sentence appeared later:
Remember during the campaign when POTUS said that maybe we will even cure cancer. He KNOWS!
Here is the fourth part:
When Dilley gets to Congress, he will SCOPE from the Hill and name names as to WHO is on our side
New Intel:
Shanghai Grab and Hit ‘first of many’
Watch the skies over Cali next
Then borderland north
Runners cant run with broken legs
Think misery
(Garbled) Mueller about to open his Special Counsel Reveal
I read anecdotally about military planes flying over California for an extended period of time around that date.
This is an excerpt from the fifth part. I haven’t included the whole message as part of it is over the top. Anyway, this is what Dilley’s intel source says about Robert Mueller:
Mueller is a guy trying to stay out of jail
No, he is not a good guy
Here is the sixth part, which concerns Valerie Jarrett, close adviser to Obama who now lives with them in Washington DC and Bush I:
Let’s run some names
Obama answers to VJ who answers to rogue CIA
Rogue CIA is run by GHWB
Who runs p[oin]t for GHWB?
The seventh part answers that question and brings up the late Michael Hastings, an American investigative journalist who had a lot of information about the CIA. He died mysteriously in 2013 in what some think was a car cyber attack. Sparks began flying then the car veered and slammed into a tree. Some of this message is a nod to Q, e.g. ‘crumbs’ and ‘fly, fly, fly’:
JOHN MCCAIN is the man who runs point for GHWB
Someone is about to be arrested in California
Hannity has intel
DHS busy at border
Someone has twitchy feet
Crumbs drop to incite perps to run
Fly, fly, fly
Michael Hastings has scary raw intel…murdered by maybe john brennan?
Hastings was sitting on massive intel
His girlfriend is a contributor on Morning Joe
Why is USSS on high alert? not for reason you think…’think mirror’
Who protects POTUS? drones up,we see all, time to go hunting
Why are non government official pervs important to big picture. Think Weiner. now think Weinstein. Laptop. What does Perv #2 have?
Dilley says Big things are coming very very soon
including convictions and indictments
wheels are turning behind the scenes
nothing is an accident
Dilley then took questions from his listeners. He referred to Bush II who recently gave a speech overseas with some anti-Trump barbs:
Although, great work by some Anons were done, I’ve provided another report with additional details
Someone in post asked Dilley if Q was real.
Brendan responded: “How much more evidence do you have to be shown that the information you’re getting is legit before you finally believe it?”
Same question is asked of Brendan’s source. “Brendan, is your source legit?”
Brendan responded: “I’ve been giving you information for 3 months. I don’t know how many times in a row I have to be right before ppl go ‘ok, we’re gonna listen'”
“Your own critical mind should be able to decipher what’s real and what’s not anymore. It’s time to start using your nugget“
“You ask the wrong questions. You waste time. You waste my time, you waste your own time.”
“Who is Q?”, Dilley responds “Who cares. It doesn’t matter whether you like the Intel or you don’t. If they’re right, they’re right.”
“It doesn’t matter if you know who Q is. At the end of the day, what you’re seeing comes into the public domain and the information ends up being real.”
Everybody wants things to be like CNN and Fox News. That’s not the way this works. You’re expected to be smarter than that.
You want spoon-fed information… Mockingly “Brendan, what date on this guy will this person come get arrested?”
Even if I had this information, I’m not telling you. That’s just not the way this works.
Dilley expect smarter people in his scopes asking better questions.
Begins talking about news drops about Texts, Memos, revolving around Obama.
You can’t put the Genie back in the bottle. IT IS OUT! The MSM is unsuccessfully trying to divert attention away from it.”
Mocks George W Bush who was trending today claiming “Russia, Russia, Russia”. No one cares what he has to say. He’s a treasonous sh!tBag.
It’s a big charade but the evidence is brutal. These ppl are AWFUL. They will not be able to run from what this is.
It’s their HUBRIS that continues to try and maintain their power right now in America.
They continue to trot themselves out with their “comments” and “opinions”. Nobody cares what George Bush thinks especially in this day and age.
“We know what you did Georgy Porgy! We don’t care. You’re full of crap, buddy”
Answers attack on Trump Supporters as “Conspiracy Theoists”:
Even if president Trump wasn’t in the equation, if you found this stuff out, you should be absolutely furious! There’s no way any American should be look at the evidence against these people. They tried to take over this country and almost did.
Dilley’s statement to POTUS “We will not settle for anything less than FULL BLOWN PROSECUTION for these people’s crimes. No one can to walk on this one.”
“THIS MUST BE OUR LINE IN THE SAND.”
“I don’t care if half the country tries a civil war because of it. As an American citizen, you either have a country or you don’t” …
“Liberals can’t allow the truth to happen because if the truth happens, they’ve got to reassess their own identity. That’s why they reject everything“
“Q showed you guys an arrest last night? That’s funny, My guy told me there were arrests coming a couple days ago. I was like, huh?”
The next part has a few more new pieces of information:
Dilley agrees with Periscope, we ABSOLUTELY need e-verify for voting …
Dilley confirms Voter fraud info/report WILL come out …
“It’ll come out. There’s multiple reports. It just won’t be one location“
“I can tell you that my source is EVERYWHERE“. Dilley believes he listens to comments and twitter.
It’s a team of people… Not just one person.
Source replies back that not allowed to give out any info person snatched in China …
Dilley encourages his Periscope followers to DO THEIR OWN RESEARCH
He is then is fascinated by the fact that may of his followers have good intel:
“You guys have got good information in here”
He then begins to give insight on what he’s seeing:
“One of the things I hope you’re learning from the Q drops and certainly from me is there is a VALUE in asking large groups of ppl to pray for the country“
“GOD & COUNTRY – Keeping those 2 things together… The power of your prayers are what’s bringing about ALL of this truth. It’s your PRAYERS“
“You’re literally manifesting everything you’re seeing right now. That is a HUGE thing that ppl are overlooking in this process.”
“Your resilience for the truth. Your ABSOLUTE, UNRELENTING pursuit of that truth combined with your prayer is what’s allowing all of this to happen.”
“You’re literally creating this. This was NOT gonna happen.”
“You guys are actually bringing this about. IT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. This HUGE group, this HIVE MIND that you’ve got right now for TRUTH and for PRAYER.”
“That’s why GOD & COUNTRY – every single time.”
“Right now, we’ve got the HUGE COLLECTIVE that is committed to the truth. That power is REAL and it’s AMAZING”
2nd INTEL was dropped in the middle of Periscope:
Shanghai Grab and Hit
‘First of Many’
Watch the skies over Cali next
Then borderland north
Runners can’t run with broken legs
Think MISERY
The questions and answers continued. Some asked about California Democrats — Jerry Brown, Ted Lieu and Nancy Pelosi:
Someone jokes on Periscope: I hope it’s Gov Brown
Dilley laughs and compliments his Periscope:
“I love that you guys all know who the actual enemies are now. Cause there are a bunch of Democrats who are faceless. They’re just democrats… and they’re not evil people, they’re just kind of.. whatever. But you guys know the evil ones. You guys recognize them REAL QUICK!” …
Persicope asks about Rod Rosenstein
Dilley responds: “I told you guys RR would be screwed in, like, December. Remember when my source was breaking it down for you guys?”
People who Dilley agrees with Periscope on who is “Screwed”:
Ted Lieu
Nancy Pelosi
Everyone keeps asking about if Mueller is a “Good Guy”
Dilley Responds:
“No he is not a good guy, he’s just a selfish old bum who wants to stay out of prison so he’s gonna do this in the middle. I keep telling you guys this.”
Dilley begins discussing someone he knew who swears that Soros and Hillary Clinton installed real Nazis into Ukraine Government.
“It is my genuine belief that the corruption is SO DEEP AND SO BAD that they’re having to ease an American Public into the reality of what’s been going on. It’s is THAT BAD“…
The penultimate part has this information:
Dilley Live 2/8/18 2230 pm Facebook Live
https:// http://www.facebook.com/dilleyforcongress/videos/325851541240999/
A lot of people are compromised. This is all part of the red-pilling that is going to take place.
“They’re all dirty and we’re finding it out more and more“
Follow Sundance on Conservative Treehouse …
Michael Hastings Raw Intel is scary, I wonder who has twitchy feet now that coded Anon post told them we have the whole story fully deciphered
Crumbs drops sometimes for the purpose of the perpetrator ONLY …
In the final part, Dilley discusses Harvey Weinstein, the military, the panic among the elites and the executive order from December 21, 2017 about asset seizure:
Repeats Intel Drop, this time with his own opinions:
Who protects POTUS? Dilley answers, not just USSS, but Marines!
Perv #2 is Weinstein, what does Weinstein’s laptop have?
Harvey Weinstein’s charges are now at the DA’s office & he could be grabbed @ any time.
How many people does Harvey Weinstein have leveraged just the way Anthony Wiener had leveraged through the laptop.
Dilley believes Weinstein was definitely into Human Trafficking & is going to try to keep himself out of prison & there is only one way to do that.
Turn on everyone else involved in it.
There are major happenings every single day now. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.
There are things happening both at home and abroad that you are completely unaware of.
Our president and our military, specifically our Sec. of Defense General James Mattis have managed to close all leaks on the military side.
You’ll notice most Americans have no clue of any operations we’re executing right now.
The media is in the total dark about what the military is performing right now. THAT IS PERFECT!
The less we know of what our military is doing, the safer our troops are abroad. This is a good thing so.
You’ve got military operations happening around the globe.
Many people that you may know… friends, family… Soldiers are being recalled in right now.
There are big operations underway and commencing very soon.
But more importantly, as this is being made globally, here at home,
there is a full blown panic within Washington DC/establishment class.
Because their handlers and their financiers are in real big trouble.
This is one of the most undertold stories in 2018
It’s not going to stop at Obama, the Clintons, McCain, Flake. The ppl that “own” them will be outted.
The real goal is “how far up can we go to get the rest?”
The real power and money, this is where you then begin to see names like “Gates, Bezos, Soros”
These financiers of corruption around the globe are about to face their day and they’re not going to have any choice.
Because without their money, they’re nothing.
This upcoming EO that Dilley has been priming for weeks is absolutely still in the works. They’re pretty close to rolling it out.
EO ties in directly with the last EO as well as with the Dec 21 EO.
One of the most important elements of this effort/Operation to restore this republic is YOU THE PUBLIC.
More ppl have to become aware of what’s been going on and not be tolerant of this corruption.
To doubters: this is important. It is not a joke.
To those who say things aren’t happening quickly enough, this is why things are moving at the current pace. I’m not sure Q actually said this, because it is too straightforward, but it gets the point across nonetheless:
Those who cannot understand that we cannot simply start arresting w/o first ensuring the safety & well-being of the population, shifting the narrative, removing those in DC through resignation to ensure success, defeating ISIS/MS13 to prevent fail-safes, freezing assets to remove network-to-network abilities, kill off COC to prevent top-down comms/org, etc etc. should not be participating in discussions.
Q
In closing, two things happened since the beginning of the month.
First, Sergey Medvedev was arrested at his Bangkok residence on February 2. He is a bad hombre. US authorities shut down his Infraud (yes!) international theft ring on February 6. Infraud operated on the dark web:
It was “the premier one-stop shop for cybercriminals worldwide”, said Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Rybicki …
The gang allegedly sells narcotic drugs, illegal weapons, stolen credit card PINs, protected wild animals and illegally obtained government documents, the source said.
Secondly, the CFO of Rosatom, Vyacheslav Ivanov, was one of the passengers killed in the plane crash outside of Moscow on February 11. Rosatom is the Russian company that bought Uranium One in Hillary Clinton’s crooked deal while she was Secretary of State.
Yesterday’s post on narcotics addicts in the Bakken oil fields region — North Dakota and Montana — where MS-13 has a foothold, shows just how difficult kicking the drug habit is.
On March 21, 2017, Cleveland’s News 5 had an article about the money Big Pharma is making off drugs that admittedly save people from an overdose — a good thing — but also influences Ohio’s politicians.
‘Pharma company linked to Ohio senator benefits from opioid addiction and treatment’ says it all and is accompanied by a video of News 5 of their broadcast. This is one of the worst articles I’ve ever seen with regard to incomplete sentences and punctuation. (I’ve made the corrections that I could below, but stopped. Otherwise I would have to rewrite it.) However, the content is excellent. Excerpts follow, emphases mine:
CLEVELAND – We’ve seen the videos of countless Northeast Ohioans revived with Naloxone[, t]he drug fighting an epidemic fueled in part by the billion dollar pharmaceutical industry.
But our News 5 investigation found at least one those big pharmaceutical companies is making money off the overdoses too …
But where did this nightmare begin? “The way we got here frankly is prescription drugs and people getting addicted to opioids,” said Ohio Senator Rob Portman in a phone interview with News 5. To combat this epidemic, emergency crews have their own drug of choice, Naloxone …
See how Big Pharma, big money and the senator are connected. Furthermore, this has helped Big Pharma nationwide. Naloxone, or Narcan is:
A drug so effective, Senator Portman ensured every first responder in the U.S. [c]arried it, expanding access through the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA) he co-authored. “Because they are saving lives every day,” said Portman.
An antidote to a deadly epidemic experts say was fueled by pharmaceutical companies, the same companies, that have donated heavily to Ohio lawmakers, including Senator Portman.
Interesting, to say the least.
Portman denied being influenced by donations and said that he receives a lot of them from various industry sectors. However:
According to the Associated Press, Portman was a top recipient collecting over $200,000 in six years. One of those companies Pfizer Inc. [a]lso contributed to his most recent campaign.
Portman told News 5 he doesn’t even know what type of drugs Pfizer makes. Really?
News 5 went on to state:
besides the opioid painkillers Pfizer is most notable for, it has also recently begun producing Naloxone by acquiring the leading seller of the reversal drug.
Portman insisted he knew nothing about that and acts in the interest of his constituents.
News 5 named other politicians who have received Big Pharma donations:
From 2006 to 2015 the Pain Care Forum, a coalition of pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists, poured $3.5 million dollars into Ohio political coffers. According to the Associated Press, a huge chunk, $875,000[,] went to then House Speaker John Boehner, below him Representative Pat Tiberi received $300,000, while Congresswoman Marcia Fudge collected $78,000.
Okay, we knew this was going on. However, it’s good to see actual figures.
But don’t think for a moment that anyone in power — whether captains of industry or politicians — is interested in seeing a drop in drug addicts.
Drugs fuel the mighty money machine in more ways than one.
As President Trump says, ‘Follow the money’.
The worried well are, by and large, Westerners overcome by health fears.
Many of these fears are driven by preventive health programmes — interventions — present not only in doctors’ offices but places of employment.
Denmark’s puzzling statistics
Some of these can actually harm one’s health. My reader from The Last Furlong has a report from Denmark which says that their public health programmes have actually increased the number of hospitalisations, oddly, after the country’s smoking ban in 2007. Soon afterward:
the number of hospital admissions exploded.
By 2012, there were
a staggering 1.33 million annual hospital admissions – it was 150,000 more compared to 2006, or 13% more. This is double the rate of increase compared to the corresponding period before the smoking law.
Is this a mere coincidence? Or are Danes fretting more about their health?
Another curious increase is in the number of Danish patients admitted for heart disease, which increased between 2006 and 2012. Surely, with healthier lifestyles being mandated, this should have continued to decline.
Then there is the public health intervention encouraging people to exercise more. The result is that more Danes, especially women, have been admitted to hospital for joint and bone fractures caused by the perceived need for rigorous physical workouts in the name of better health.
The plan to reduce medical expenses by means of patronage has not worked as intended. The “healthy” Denmark, on the contrary, has been a regular disease factory.
The figures make a total failure of the idea that the state should interfere in people’s lifestyle to prevent disease.
Preventive [medicine] makes healthy people sick – and pharmaceutical companies happy.
Preventive interventions dubious
Huffington Post has an interesting article on preventive medicine by Allen Frances, Professor Emeritus at Duke University. Dr Frances begins with a quote from Aldous Huxley:
Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.
Isn’t that the truth!
Frances says (emphases mine):
The evidence is compelling that we in the developed countries (especially the US) are overtesting for disease, overdiagnosing it, and overtreating. Wasteful medical care of milder or nonexistent problems does more harm than good to the individual patient, diverts scarce medical resources away from those who really need them, and is an unsustainable drain on the economy.
Westerners, especially Americans, might have noticed that screening advice and frequency has changed over the years. One example is prostate cancer screening:
It used to be recommended that men of a certain age be tested yearly. It is now recommended that the test not be done at all unless a man has a family history or other special risk factors.
Why the big change? Definitive long term studies prove that the test doesn’t save lives and instead ruins them by triggering invasive interventions with painful complications. Screening is usually too late to stop fast spreading tumours and too good at identifying slow growing ones that don’t count and are better left alone. If they live long enough, the majority of men will develop an incidental and benign prostate cancer before they die from something else. Picking up these tumours early causes great grief for no return.
But, surely, early screening encourages disease prevention? Frances disputes that line of thinking:
The reality is that getting there too early misidentifies too many people who are not really at risk and then subjects them to needless and harmful tests and treatments.
Along with that is the psychological stress not only for the patient but for his nearest and dearest.
As for the radiation from certain tests, he tells us:
If we do enough CT scans we can find structural abnormalities in just about everyone. But most findings are incidental and don’t have any real clinical meaning. Paradoxically, lots of otherwise healthy people will get dangerous cancers from the CT radiation that served no useful purpose.
Other questionable procedures
Dr Kenny Lin is a family physician and public health professional who practises medicine in the Washington, DC, area. He teaches at Georgetown University School of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. His website is called Common Sense Family Doctor.
He advocates a cautious, informed approach to batteries of medical tests.
With regard to routine blood tests:
In 2007, I co-authored an editorial in the journal American Family Physician about this topic. We wrote:
“‘Big-ticket’ tests [such as CT (Computed tomography) scans and MRIs] are easy targets for those seeking to reduce waste in health care. But what about the seemingly innocuous practice of performing routine tests such as a complete blood count (CBC) or urinalysis? … These tests would be useful only if they provided additional diagnostic information that would not otherwise be obtained during a history and physical examination. In fact, large prospective studies performed in the early 1990s concluded that these tests rarely identify clinically significant problems when performed routinely in general outpatient populations. Although the majority of abnormal screening test results are false positives, their presence usually mandates confirmatory testing that causes additional inconvenience, and occasionally physical harm, to patients.”
Don’t misunderstand me. There are certain situations in which targeted screening tests can provide valuable information for the early detection of diseases. To learn more about which tests are recommended for your or your family members, I recommend that you visit the excellent website Healthfinder.gov. But the next time you go to a doctor’s office and he or she proposes to check some “routine blood work,” be sure to ask what these tests are for and what would happen if any of them turn out to be positive, so that you can make an informed choice about what’s right for you.
As for mammography:
the only reliable measure of a screening test’s superiority is whether or not it leads to fewer deaths. For 3D mammography, there’s absolutely no proof that it does.
I recognize that for women or loved ones of women who believe their lives to have been saved by mammography, no amount of scientific evidence that I or anyone else can marshal will change their minds …
So how can we counter the prevailing narrative of the Task Force [recommending fewer mammographies] as a group of cold-hearted scientists who are more concerned about population-level data than the individual lives of the women we love? We can tell the human story of the guideline developers – half of whom are women over the age of 40 who have personally faced the mammography decision at some point themselves – but we can do much more than that. We can tell a representative story of the hundreds of thousands (or millions, perhaps) of women who experienced serious emotional or physical harm as a result of screening mammography …
He goes on to recount a case that Dr Louise Aronson wrote about for the Journal of the American Medical Association. Mammogram results for this patient, Elizabeth, revealed ‘gross’ abnormalities. Not surprisingly, she was called back for more mammograms over the next few weeks. She was beside herself with worry as was her family. She could barely concentrate at work and that year the family Thanksgiving gathering was sombre, to say the least. Aronson wrote:
Meanwhile, her physicians were at war: based on the x-ray films, the radiologists argued she had metastatic cancer with a less than 50% chance of 5-year survival, while her surgeons, based on the biopsy pathology, contended she had a rare, mostly benign condition. Fortunately, the surgeons were right. Still, sorting that out took weeks, and because the condition was associated with increased cancer risk, they insisted on bilateral surgery to remove all of the suspicious areas. So Elizabeth’s mammogram didn’t find cancer, but it did lead to the permanent mutilation of her breasts, huge medical bill copays, significant lost time from work, months of extreme stress, and ongoing anxiety about her disfigurement and risk of cancer.
Was it worth it?
Then there are the CT scans for lung cancer. These are just as contentious as mammograms. Many of Dr Lin’s readers fiercely defend them, however, his post warns that the risks may outweigh the benefits in some cases:
1. The risk of developing cancer from the CT scan itself isn’t trivial. A recent analysis published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that a single chest CT scan exposed patients to the radiation equivalent of more than 100 chest X-rays, and that at age 60, an estimated 1 in 1000 women or 1 in 2000 men would eventually develop cancer from that single scan. (Participants in the lung cancer screening study actually underwent three consecutive annual CT scans.)
2. False alarms are extremely common. In the NCI’s lung cancer screening study, researchers found that 1 in 3 patients had at least one false-positive result after undergoing two CT scans. Of those patients, 1 in 14 needed an invasive lung biopsy to be sure they were cancer-free.
3. Even if screening catches lung cancer early, there’s no guarantee your prognosis will be better. This is due to “overdiagnosis,” or the unnecessary diagnosis of a condition (typically cancer) that will never cause symptoms in a patient’s lifetime, either because it’s so slow-growing or the patient dies from some other cause … because there’s no way of knowing at the time of diagnosis if a lung cancer will be fatal, inevitably many patients will be needlessly subjected to the side effects of treatment.
4. Finally, it’s highly likely that a CT scan for lung cancer will find some other abnormality that will require further investigation. You might think this is a good thing, but studies show that most of these abnormalities turn out to be false alarms, too …
Finally, there are the private screening companies that send you a nice letter about the package of tests they can perform on you. The target market is the 50+ age group, and, even here in the UK, we receive such solicitations.
1. “Blocked arteries” / stroke screening is most likely a carotid ultrasound scan, which doesn’t help because most patients with asymptomatic carotid artery blockages will not suffer strokes. Although the screening test is “non-invasive and painless,” the confirmatory test, angiography, is not (it actually causes a stroke in a small number of patients) and unnecessary carotid endarterectomy can lead to death.
3. “Hardening of the arteries in the legs,” or screening for peripheral vascular disease with an arterial-brachial index, hasn’t been proven to prevent heart attacks but will certainly lead to many false positive results.
He discusses three other tests of dubious value and concludes:
In a nutshell, that’s why companies like Life Line have no business portraying these services as “preventive health screenings,” in my church or any other community setting. (I’ve sent an e-mail to my pastor recommending that they be dis-invited for the reasons I’ve outlined above.) It’s one thing to draw blood for a cholesterol test and take someone’s blood pressure (which will cost a whole lot less than $149), and quite another to offer these other procedures which are, at the very least, a waste of money and quite possibly harmful.
Solutions to excessive testing
Dr Frances makes the following recommendations, excerpted below:
- Tame and shame Big Pharma. Stop the direct to consumer advertising that is allowed only in the US and New Zealand. Prohibit all Pharma contributions to professional associations and consumer groups. Regulate and make transparent all the marketing ploys used to mislead doctors. Force the publication of all clinical research trial data.
- Recognize that all existing medical guidelines that define disease thresholds and make treatment recommendations are suspect. They have been developed by experts in each field who always have an intellectual conflict of interest (and often enough also have a financial conflict of interest) that biases them toward overdiagnosis and overtreatment in their pet area of research interest …
- Employers, insurance companies, and government payors should be smarter consumers of health services and should stop paying for tests and treatments that do more harm than good and are not cost effective.
- Consumers should be smarter consumers and not buy into the idea that more is always better.
- Medical journals need to be more skeptical of the medical research enterprise and should look toward the harms, not just the potentials, of each new purported advance.
He concludes by reminding us that there are many really ill people who cannot get the healthcare they need and deserve.
Big Pharma, he says, is every bit as big a monster as Big Tobacco. On that point, I would disagree. Big Pharma is much more dangerous than ‘Big Tobacco’ — I use the term advisedly — will ever be.
Big Pharma probably kills more people around the world than tobacco. If statistics were honest, we could find out the truth. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait a few more decades. By then, tobacco will no doubt be back in style!
I’ve written about statins before, highlighting the bad science behind them and Professor Philippe Even’s verdict on them as well as THINCS’s theories on cholesterol.
Recently, the Daily Mail featured a guest article by Dr Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist. One of Malhotra’s patients, John, had had heart surgery during the past year, went on statins and then complained of chest pains.
Malhotra performed various tests on John (emphases mine):
But after numerous investigations found nothing untoward, we recognised the real problem: his statins. So I told him to try going without them for two weeks.
The doctor explains:
These drugs, taken by eight million Britons, are routinely prescribed to anyone who suffers a heart attack as they lower the likelihood of a second attack. They have an anti-inflammatory effect, which reduces the risk of a clot forming in the heart arteries.
Statins are also prescribed to patients with high cholesterol. As has happened in the United States, the reading for a ‘high’ cholesterol level in Britain is much lower than it was several years ago. Consequently, more people are being prescribed statins:
High (Total) Cholesterol:
Old Definition: Cholesterol > 240 mg/dl total cholesterol
People under old definition: 49.5 million
New Definition: Cholesterol > 200 mg/dl total cholesterol
People added under new definition: 42.6 million
Percent increase: 86%
The definition was changed in 1998 by U.S. Air Force/Texas Coronary Atherosclerosis Prevention Study.
However, as Malhotra’s patient’s case illustrates, statins can bring a variety of alarming and unexpected aches and pains. They can also result in memory loss.
Yet, whilst patients who stop their statin treatment often experience relief from these side effects, family doctors are less happy. As Malhotra relates:
John … was elated. For the first time in months his chest pains had gone. But he now had a new concern: his GP had since told him: ‘You must never stop your statin!’
The cardiologist says that, although statins can reduce cholesterol, so can changes in diet and lifestyle.
He explains that overhyped clinical trials in the 1980s put the buzz factor into statins, perhaps unwisely:
… increasingly the medical profession is discovering that the health benefits of lower cholesterol have been exaggerated.
Two recent studies have cast serious doubt on early clinical trials into statins in the 1980s. These trials overplayed how good for us they could be, which contributed to a culture of over-prescribing the drug. The studies also suggested significant side effects of statins may have been underplayed.
Last month [April 2013] one of the world’s most respected sources of medical information, the British Medical Journal, presented serious doubts. According to its report, GPs have put an extra three million people on statins in the UK over the past ten years – and have received extra funding for meeting these targets.
… There has, though, been a 40 per cent reduction in the number of heart attack deaths. But while statin prescriptions may have played a role, there have been no studies that prove this link.
Studies have shown a connection between reduction in deaths and the now-routine practice of undergoing emergency angioplasty as soon as someone suffers a heart attack – unblocking the artery with a stent or balloon through keyhole surgery.
Big Pharma is largely responsible for this. How often can it be said? Never often enough.
You might have to give up your job because you can’t walk anymore or because your memory is failing you, yet Big Pharma have managed to convince your GP, also culpable for not thinking critically, that you can never give up your statin! Low cholesterol levels are king!
Think about the logic behind that. You cannot function as a normal human being but as long as you have low cholesterol levels, hey, you’re right as rain.
Statins, as I’ve said before, are another case where the cure is worse than the disease.
Fortunately — and this might come as news to Britons reading this post, as it did to me — the British Medical Journal is currently running a campaign called Too Much Medicine to combat over-prescribing of unnecessary drugs. Finally. Let’s hope it is a success.
In the meantime, it was heartening to read Dr Malhotra state that the health benefits of lower cholesterol levels have been exaggerated.
A number of Americans have been following low-fat diets for decades, some since the 1950s. It is interesting that today we have so many elderly suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Some physicians maintain that we need a regular intake of animal fat in order for our brains and bodies — including the nervous system — to function properly. As we consume less animal fat, more of us are losing our memories. Could this be a coincidence?
Conventional thinkers in the medical field counter that by saying we’re all just living longer and that a diminished memory is a sad eventuality. Yet, I remember my paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather who both lived to a ripe old age — in great mental health — on food they ate when they were children. This included plenty of meat, animal fat, eggs and butter. All of those are on the verboten list today. Should they be? One wonders.
Dr David Diamond’s hour-long lecture is useful testimony which debunks the taboo surrounding meat and animal fat. He actually lost weight on such a diet.
It wasn’t that long ago when scientists discovered that bacteria can cause certain ulcers. It is also thought, although it is not yet proven, that oral bacteria may cause heart disease in older people. If so, regular flossing could be more effective than statins.
The point is — we just don’t know. And neither do doctors, especially general practitioners who spend at best 10 minutes in a patient consultation.
Therefore, we should be approaching prescription drugs with the same scrutiny that we would when purchasing a new house or a new car. Why don’t we?
Over the past two decades, the numbers of prescriptions for SSRIs — selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors — have increased for children and teenagers.
These drugs are said to mitigate behavioural difficulties. Yet, the United States appears to have more bizarre incidents involving young people every year. All sorts of shocking things that never happened to 50+s seem to have become commonplace with some under the age of 40. The rest of us wonder why society is spiralling out of control.
Is it poor guidance at home?
Or is something else at work here? What if it were the drugs?
This post discusses the role of SSRIs in behavioural disorders, including unheard-of drug and alcohol abuse in adolescents. I was particularly interested to find a mention of self-mutilation — cutting — which has become increasingly frequent since the 1990s. Cutters — mostly girls — might well be taking SSRIs, as will be explained below.
What follows are six testimonies from a page called ‘Index to SSRI stories’. It includes 25 years’ worth of news stories about the effects of SSRIs on young people. This is a great resource for parents and teachers, featuring a collection of news stories involving murder, mass shootings and suicides — all of which are SSRI-linked.
Every once in a while, however, a few success stories appear. Excerpts follow, with more information at each link. Emphases mine throughout:
– Former cutter describes her new life (Wales, 2008):
Mar 2 2008 by Catherine Evans, Wales On Sunday
STANDING alone in the dark on a deserted hill, 18-year-old student Bethan [pron. ‘Beth Ann’] Jones pulled back her sleeve and ran a pocket knife across her arm.
As the blood flowed, she felt her worries ebb away. But the scars remained.
On the outside, Bethan appeared to be a popular, happy teenager and conscientious student.
But for years Bethan hid a secret shame – she was self-harming.
As the rest of the nation celebrated St David’s Day yesterday, the former English and religion student at Bath University spoke to Wales on Sunday about her painful past and her plans to set up the first self-harm support centre in Wales.
“Not many people know that March 1 – as well as being St David’s Day – is Self Injury Awareness Day,” said Bethan, who works at the DVLA in Swansea.
“I’m working on a new registered website to offer help and support to others who self-harm. I run the Scar Tissue website – which helps more than 450 people to prevent self injury. But what I really want is to set up the first self-injury support centre in Wales.”
Now 26 and living in Cwmdare in the south Wales valleys, Bethan still doesn’t fully understand why she started to cut herself.
“When I cut myself for the first time it scared me half to death. I honestly don’t know why I did it. I had a penknife that I carried around to clean my horse’s hooves and I used that to cut myself. I got an adrenalin rush from it and soon I was cutting myself every day,” she said …
It was her own failed suicide attempt that forced her to get help.
“I overdosed on anti-depressants and that’s when my family found out about it and I finally tried to get help,” said Bethan.
– SSRIs linked to craving for alcohol and illicit drugs (Canada, 2010) (emphases in the original in this story):
By SAM PAZZANO, Courts Bureau [Toronto Sun]
Last Updated: June 28, 2010 12:37pm
An Oakville teen using an anti-depressant drug died after hanging herself while “affected by depression, cocaine and ethanol,” a coroner’s jury ruled Monday.
Sara Carlin, an 18-year-old scholar and outstanding athlete committed suicide on May 6, 2007, at her Oakville home, 14 months after she had began taking the anti-depressant drug Paxil, which is a type of drug known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs). She had also been using cocaine and drinking heavily.
Carlin’s parents, Neil and Rhonda were visibly pleased after the jury released its verdict and also made several recommendations aimed at preventing similar suicides …
SSRI Stories note: The Physicians Desk Reference lists “Alcohol Craving” as an infrequent, but not rare, side-effect for Paxil. Also, SSRIs may cause a craving for illegal drugs such as cocaine by inducing mania or mood swings in those taking such antidepressants. According to earlier newspaper accounts, this young girl began drinking alcohol and using cocaine after starting on the Paxil.
– Diagnosis of major depression at age of six to SSRI-induced ‘terrifying anxiety’ and cutting (United States, 2003 or later):
Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee and the Pediatric Subcommittee
of the Anti-Infective Drugs Advisory Committee
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
5600 Fishers Lane
Rockville, MD 20857-0001
Dear Committee and Subcommittee Members:
I am here today to tell you about my experiences while taking selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants as a child and teenager in the late eighties and early nineties.
I was first diagnosed with major depression in 1983 at the age of six, and started on the older form of tricyclic antidepressants. In 1988, when I was twelve years old, my doctor started me on Prozac, touting it as a miracle drug that would finally cure my stubborn feelings of depression stemming from early childhood trauma.
Once on Prozac, the relatively mild depression I felt mixed with a new and terrifying anxiety that I had never experienced previously. When I reported this anxiety to my doctor, he simply upped my dose of Prozac. I immediately began to experience insomnia, for which I was given a mild sedative to help me sleep at night. I felt a horrific inner restlessness, a feeling of wanting to jump out of my skin, that I now know is called akasthisia.
For about two years, my dosage of Prozac was continually being raised in hopes that it would finally start to work. From the beginning, I began to suffer from brief but regular periods of racing thoughts that I could not control. All this anxiety and restlessness was simply attributed to my worsening “illness.” I began to have intense thoughts of cutting myself, killing myself. It occurred to me that I should act on my thoughts of self-mutilation, and began to slice my wrists and forearms with razors. This too, was chalked up to my advancing mental illness, and I began a long downward spiral of hospitalizations, which fed the feelings of depression and anxiety. In 1991, at age sixteen, while taking Zoloft, I made my first bona fide suicide attempt, swallowing an entire bottle of painkillers. I cannot even recall the reason for doing so. I became completely unable to control feelings of terror and rage that seemed to come out of nowhere, surpassing any teen angst or depression that I had ever heard of.
In 1993, at the age of eighteen, I decided to take matters into my own hands as a legal adult, and to get off the antidepressants for good. Since stopping SSRI medications over a decade ago, I have never again self- mutilated, had suicidal thoughts, or entered the hospital. The suicidality simply vanished! For me, this is clear proof that the drugs must have played some kind of role in my suicidality and self-mutilation. In the past decade, not only am I not suicidal, but I have managed to travel the world, get an M.A. degree in political science from Georgetown University, and become an active participant in my society …
It is now incumbent upon the FDA to take seriously the British decision December 2003 banning all SSRIs (except Prozac) for under-18s. There is a growing and consistent body of research available that suggests a causal relationship between SSRIs and self-mutilation and suicidality in some children–and in some adults as well. The FDA must take action now regarding this grave issue of public health. The FDA needs to determine not only the issue of adverse events, but also that of efficacy. Do SSRIs really work better than the drugs they were designed to replace? Do the benefits of these antidepressants outweigh the risks for children, and adults, for that matter? Are medical professionals and the public adequately informed of the very serious risks that are increasingly associated with these drugs? In light of these risks, at the very least, isn’t it time for the FDA to require that these medications be labeled with clear warnings that can save lives? Yes, such warnings may negatively affect the sales of these drugs, which may not sit well with the pharmaceutical industry that makes them. But the FDA was created as an independent regulatory agency to serve the interests of the American public–not the pharmaceutical industry. I am here today with the high hopes that the FDA will take the necessary steps to prevent what happened to me and countless other American children from continuing to occur. Our children are not any less precious than British children–and they are in need of our protection.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Leah Harris
Board Member
National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA)
– Exercise an alternative to SSRIs for depressed and suicidal children (United Kingdom, 2008):
THREE school merit awards are among the prized possessions of Berkeley Vale teenager Keiren Allen.
They rank slightly ahead of two school swimming carnival ribbons Keiren won earlier this year and they proudly hang in his parent’s living room.
Keiren’s merit awards contain teacher’s comments such as “impressive application” and “excellent ideas and contribution in class”.
A year ago Keiren, 13, couldn’t even complete a lap of a pool and teacher commendations were nothing more than a dream …
A turnaround came last year when Keiren, a dyslexic with major learning difficulties, was enrolled in an exercise-based therapy program run by the Dore Centre in Britain.
It stimulates the brain’s cerebellum so that the thinking part, the cerebral cortex, does not have to work so hard.
Keiren was assessed by the Dore Centre and put on a 14-month exercise program.
Mrs Allen said the results were dramatic …
“By the time he was 11 he felt suicidal and after being diagnosed with depression by a doctor we looked for something that didn’t involve medication and that’s when we hit on this program.
“He’s now getting As and Bs at school and he’s so motivated.”
– Boy leading normal life after custody and cessation of SSRIs (United States, 2000s):
For years, 16-year-old Michael Holland has been in and out of state custody. His parents blaming his troubles on the anti-depressants and psychotropic drugs he was being told to take.
“He was very suicidal. He was much threat to society. He was a danger to us, anybody that’s out there,” Mother Lori Holland said …
[Texas] State health officials say they’re already studying prescription drug abuse in the Medicaid program. So far they’ve found anti-depressants, stimulants and anti-psychotics may have been given inappropriately 10 to more than 50 percent of the time …
For Michael Holland, the biggest changes came when he was taken off mind-altering medications.
“Michael’s a junior in high school, he plays on the baseball team. Still has his ups and downs. But he’s doing better than I ever thought he would do,” father Wesley Holland said.
– Girl stops cutting and aggressive behaviour after discontinuing SSRIs (United States, 2004):
MS. WEBB: I am here because three years ago my daughter was suffering some symptoms that the doctor felt represented depression and started her on samples of Paxil. I trusted this decision as a mother and based on my medical background as a registered nurse.
Unfortunately, she did have an obvious worsening of symptoms. Were we aware that the antidepressant could be the cause of this? No, we were not. I am here because I agree that the FDA needs to require further studies to be done to see if it is true that certain antidepressants increase the risk of suicidality …
We could not believe the changes we saw in our daughter in the very short time she had started on the antidepressants. It was unbelievable–the rage, anger, the hostility she exhibited that night. She ended the night by cutting her wrist. Now I am learning that the changes we saw in our daughter, more likely than not, were the side effects of the antidepressant she was taking at the time.
Yes, we did report a worsening of symptoms shortly after she started the Paxil. The doctors only changed her to another antidepressant, Zoloft. She then continued to worsen and they continued to increase the dosage until she began to further harm herself with self-mutilation, cutting, overdose, numerous things. We were fortunate to get her help in the right environment with counselors who spent many hours with the children. She was taken off of the strong antidepressants and, within a short time none of the staff could believe she had done while she had been on Paxil and Zoloft. She continued there, getting counseling, and returned as the child we knew before she took these antidepressants.
Why did we not know about these adverse side effects that are now being reported in children? Was it possible the drug companies may have been aware of these adverse side effects? If we had known, I believe it is possible that maybe my daughter and our family would not have had to go through the agony and heartache we went through …
Tomorrow: The Jack LaLanne story — from wild boy to success via diet
Yesterday’s post concerned Paxil and Karl ‘Market Ticker’ Denninger’s call for the inclusion of a discussion of psychtropic drugs as part of the gun control debate going on in the United States.
A number of Denninger’s readers contributed useful commentary and links in the comments to his original post. Winstonsmith2009 found an article by a doctor listing — from an email he received — the effect that these prescription drugs have on mass shootings.
It was shocking to read the list in full. I would encourage my readers to explore it in depth. For starters, here are a few excerpts (emphases mine):
Dr. Jai Maharaj
Jan 10 (20 hours ago)
Forwarded post from from Stephen Knapp:
Thursday, January 10, 2013
PSYCHOTROPIC DRUGS A MAJOR CAUSE OF MURDEROUS RAMPAGES
Anyone can do the research through various videos on
Youtube about the harm that psychotropic drugs can do to
people, especially the youth who are given these drugs on
an increasing basis for an increasing number of so-called
diagnostic reasons. Practically speaking, every kid that
has gone on a killing spree has been found to be on any
of these psychotropic drugs, such as Prozac, Zoloft,
Paxil, and others. Yet they blame guns as the reason for
such incidents. It is the drug companies that are making
all kinds of profit by marketing madness, though the
Youtube documentaries on this topic has shown that the
FDA and the drug companies know the adverse effects that
these drugs can cause. Yet, the sale of such drugs
provide huge profits to these companies that they will
not take them off the market. So what is the real plan
here? Take away the guns, but spread the drugs for more
profit, at the expense of the mental stability of those
who take them? This seems to be the case.
Also check:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYA6r92_C….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OB-AzVBj….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26e5PqrCe….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4vD4QC0k….
Also, here is a partial list of those teens that were on
drugs when they went on their murderous rampage.
Not sure about the facts here, I received this from a
friend.
– John
Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan
Klebold aged 18 (Col[u]mbine school shooting in Littleton,
Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded
23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical
records have never been made available to the public.
Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg…/day of
Prozac (three times the average starting dose for
adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s
girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake,
Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.
Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High
School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have
hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school
and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the
event.
Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while
taking Prozac.
Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his
grandparents while taking Zoloft.
Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his
parents while they slept then went to school and opened
fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after
beginning Prozac treatment.
Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then
killed two students, wounding six others.
A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went
psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also
killing one sibling and almost murdering another.
Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson,
aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students,
one teacher, and wounding 10 others.
Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a
school shooting in Pennsylvania
Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in
El Cajon, California
Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil
he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.
Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when
she [hanged] herself from a hook in her closet. Kara’s
parents said “…. the damn doctor wouldn’t take her off
it and I asked him to when we went in on the second
visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of
reaction to Paxil…”
Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he
committed suicide in 2002. (Gareth’s father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself.)
Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she [hanged]
herself in her family’s detached garage.
Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th
week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his
physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had
seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been
depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental
illness symptoms.
Missing from list…3 of 4 known to have taken these same
meds….
What drugs was Jared Lee Loughner on, age 21…… killed
6 people and injuring 14 others in Tuscon, Az[?]
What drugs was James Eagan Holmes on, age 24….. killed
12 people and injuring 59 others in Aurora, Colorado[?]
What drugs was Jacob Tyler Roberts on, age 22, killed 2
injured 1, Clackamas Or[?]
What drugs was Adam Peter Lanza on, age 20, killed 26 and
wounded 2 in Newtown Ct[?]
Roberts is the only one that I haven’t heard about being
on drugs of some kind …
It would seem as if these drugs are sometimes making a bad situation worse — ending in someone’s death.
It’s not a question of guns gone wild but prescription drugs which may cause unexpected results not only in young people but also in some adults.
Tomorrow: More prescription-related mass killings
As most of us know, gun control has been one of the topics of the Obama administration since last year’s number of high-profile mass shootings, the most recent of which occurred at Sandy Hook near Newtown, Connecticut, in December.
For years, I have wondered how it is that the United States has so many incidents like this. Fortunately, Karl ‘Market Ticker’ Denninger opened the debate on guns to include the effect of prescription drugs on influencing or creating such situations.
For those who are unfamiliar with Denninger, he is far from being a gun-slinging conservative. However, he does support the Constitution and self-reliance. That said, he might be an ex-Democrat, based on some of his posts. He isn’t a big fan of the GOP, either.
Whatever his politics, he has wisely included Big Pharma in his discussions about the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. In ‘ENOUGH! (Guns, Active Shooters And Pharma)’, he writes (excerpts follow, emphases in the original):
I’m done being nice.
And I’m doubly-done with the damned leftists in this country performing the moral equivalent of ritual human sacrifice of children to advance their gun-control agenda.
That’s what I charge they’re doing.
And I’m going to back it up with mathematics, using just one of the common psychotropic medications used commonly today — Paxil.
This is from the prescribing information for Paxil:
Clinical Worsening and Suicide Risk:
…
There has been a long-standing concern, however, that antidepressants may have a role in inducing worsening of depression and the emergence of suicidality in certain patients during the early phases of treatment. Pooled analyses of short-term placebo-controlled trials of antidepressant drugs (SSRIs and others) showed that these drugs increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults (ages 18-24) with major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders. Short-term studies did not show an increase in the risk of suicidality with antidepressants compared to placebo in adults beyond age 24 …
And it doesn’t end there:
Screening Patients for Bipolar Disorder
A major depressive episode may be the initial presentation of bipolar disorder. It is generally believed (though not established in controlled trials) that treating such an episode with an antidepressant alone may increase the likelihood of precipitation of a mixed/manic episode in patients at risk for bipolar disorder.
Now let’s be frank: Mixed manic states are mental states during which all sorts of really ugly things happen, including panic attacks, agitation, impulsiveness, paranoia and rage — all at extreme levels.
In other words, if you miss someone being bipolar and give them this drug you may precipitate a full-on Hulk-style “rage monster” sort of attack! …
Denninger goes into statistics concerning Paxil’s risks then states:
So let’s assume we’re not talking about bi-polar people — that is, let’s make the assumption that we properly screen for each person and perfectly identify all bi-polar people before we prescribe.
What is the expected number of people who will undergo some sort of manic episode, which includes the subset that will turn into rage-monsters and shoot up schools, movie theaters and other public places?
Answer: About 0.7% more that can be charged to the drug (the risk if you do nothing is 0.3%.)
Other similar drugs have similar risk profiles; Paxil is not particularly-remarkable in this regard.
I note, and you should note, that 0.7% is a pretty low risk! That is, 993 people out of 1000 can get a perfectly good outcome from the drug (or at least no harm) but that other 7 in 1000 have an outcome ranging from bad to catastrophically-bad …
The last figures I have are that in 2005 27 million people in the United States, or close to 1 in 10 of all persons, are on some sort of antidepressant carrying these risks.
So if 0.7% of 27 million people have a manic episode caused by these drugs — that is, under perfect conditions where we catch every single bipolar individual first and never prescribe to any of them we will have 189,000 persons in a year who have a manic reaction to these drugs.
That’s horrifying.
But what’s worse is that if we assume 99% effective surveillance by the medical profession — that is, 99% of the time the doctor intercepts the person with the manic episode and modifies or terminates their use of the drug before something bad happens….
WE CREATE AND THEN FAIL TO DETECT, WITH NEARLY PERFECT PERFORMANCE (that we will never achieve) 1,890 RAGE MONSTERS EVERY YEAR WHO ARE MENTALLY CAPABLE OF COMMITTING A MASS HOMICIDE.
We’re surprised that there are a few of these a year, when we create more than 5 of them each and every day with near-perfect performance — and likely several times that many given the real-world monitoring that can actually be achieved?
We create these Zombies.
We prescribe the drugs to them.
We do this knowing that the risk exists and that at least one subset of that risk is materially higher for those under the age of 25 who are consuming these drugs.
In point of fact, most of the rage monsters who have committed these crimes are under the age of 25 and either using or having recently terminated the use of these drugs …
Utterly nobody is bringing this element to the table in debate, but we must, as the rise of these incidents is directly correlated to the gross increase in the number of people, including most-especially young people, taking these drugs. The number of users doubled from 1996 – 2005.
If you want to address a problem you must look at the data and follow it where it leads.
Where it leads is into a horrifying mess of prescription psychotropic drug use among our youth and the rare but catastrophic side effects they sometimes produce …
It’s true that most of the crazy people in the world aren’t violent, and that being crazy, standing alone, is perfectly legal. It’s also true that nearly all of the people who take these drugs won’t become violent — that’s a side effect that only bites a tiny percentage of the people who take the drug.
But the risk of turning people into rage monsters and suicidal maniacs appears to be mostly confined to those under the age of 24 according to the drug companies own information and this information is strongly correlated with the actual real-world data on these incidents.
We must have a discussion about this as a society. We might decide that out of the 27 million or more Americans taking these drugs that enough get benefit that we are willing to accept the occasional school or movie theater shooting gallery as the price of prescribing these drugs to those under the age of 24.
If so then we need to be honest about the trade-off we have made as a society and shut the hell up instead of dancing in the blood of dead children to score political points and destroy The Constitution.
But if not, and you can count my vote among the “No” votes in this regard, then we must ban these substances from those under the age of 24 until we understand what’s different among that age group that alters the risk unless and except those persons are under continual professional supervision such as inpatient hospitalization.
Yeah, I understand this will cut into the profits of the big drug companies and thus is “unacceptable” to many political folks, not to mention that the media won’t even talk about the subject due to the advertising they run on their networks on a daily basis for this drug or that …
And that is why the media are ignoring prescription drugs and focussing solely on guns in the debate. For those who have not been to the US within the past decade, Big Pharma comprises much of the advertising. Certain adverts, particularly for erectile dysfunction remedies, run several times within the space of an hour or two on certain television stations.
However, it is not only antidepressants which are concerned. Last week, I also posted on two types of sleeping tablets: Eszoplicone and Zolpidem, which produce unexpected results similar to those of antidepressants. (Incidentally, an antidepressant — Nortriptyline — is used in some prisons as a smoking cessation drug. It includes a number of serious side effects which could affect patients suffering both mental and physical maladies (e.g. schizophrenia, diabetes).)
Ignoring these drug effects whilst debating firearms is putting the Constitution in danger. As Denninger concludes:
Mr. Biden, Mr. Obama and the rest on both the left and right who are refusing to go where the data leads are all practicing the moral equivalent of ritual child sacrifice, fueling the pyre under the bodies of our kids with the Bill of Rights.
Stand up America and say in a loud voice: ENOUGH!
Writing to one’s Congressmen and Senators might not produce anything fruitful. However, we can also educate our left-leaning friends and family members, most of whom refuse to acknowledge this dismal truth.
Tomorrow: Antidepressants implicated in mass shootings
The past two posts have explored the possible adverse effects of two drugs, Eszoplicone (a sleeping tablet) and Nortriptyline (an antidepressant sometimes prescribed for smoking cessation).
Both of these — as are countless others — strong medications which need to be administered and taken with care.
A third medication, the subject of today’s post, is Zolpidem which caught my attention when I read this comment from one of Karl ‘Market Ticker’ Denninger’s posts on gun control and psychotropic drugs.
The man discusses Halcion, a popular sleeping aid available on prescription. Although its active ingredient is Triazolam, a benzodiazepine, it got me looking for a few other sleeping tablet descriptions. It’s odd how different active ingredients can produce similar results.
Erbo, Denninger’s commenter, says (emphases in the original):
My ex-wife told me a story about a bad experience she had before we met. She had (and continues to have) really bad insomnia. A doctor prescribed Halcion. While she was on this medicine, she beat the crap out of her then-husband, and afterwards, had no memory of having done so. The only way she knew about it was that her husband, bruised and with a bloody nose, told her what had happened. (Also note: She was decidedly older than 24 at the time of this incident.)
I’m staying away from any and all psychotropic drugs, thank you. (And that includes marijuana, Colorado law notwithstanding.)
The reference to ‘older than 24’ at the time refers to the popular idea in pharma and medical circles that any adverse effects are much less severe in adults over that age.
If you or your loved ones are contemplating psychotropic drugs, please ensure that you or they ask the doctor all possible questions about side effects. Reading the advisory with the tablets or an online search is also indispensable. The symptoms can be physical as well as psychological.
Having read the following, as with Eszoplicone, I do wonder whether a mug of Horlicks wouldn’t be a better remedy for insomnia.
The following excerpted information on Zolpidem comes from Drugs.com (emphases mine):
Zolpidem may cause a severe allergic reaction. Stop taking zolpidem and Get emergency medical help if you have any of these signs of an allergic reaction while taking zolpidem: hives; difficulty breathing; swelling of your face, lips, tongue, or throat.
Report any new or worsening symptoms to your doctor, such as: depression, anxiety, aggression, agitation, confusion, unusual thoughts, hallucinations, memory problems, changes in personality, risk-taking behavior, decreased inhibitions, no fear of danger, or thoughts of suicide or hurting yourself.
Stop using zolpidem and call your doctor at once if you have a serious side effects:
- chest pain, fast or irregular heartbeat, feeling short of breath;
- trouble breathing or swallowing; or
- feeling like you might pass out …
General
In general, zolpidem is well-tolerated and causes little or no residual daytime effects in most young adult volunteers. Additionally, zolpidem does not significantly alter sleep architecture at recommended doses …
Nervous system
Chronic use in high doses and subsequent withdrawal may induce grand mal seizures. Cases of falls have been reported in elderly patients.
Nervous system side effects most frequently have included visual disturbances, ataxia, and dizziness. Headache, drugged feeling, confusion, anterograde amnesia, excessive sedation, lightheadedness, delirium, nightmares, hallucinations, nervousness, and agitation have also been reported.
Other
Other side effects including tolerance to the pharmacologic effects of zolpidem have been reported rarely. Withdrawal symptoms after either abrupt cessation or fast tapering may occur. Withdrawal symptoms may include agitation, restlessness, anxiety, depression, insomnia, tremor, nausea, abdominal discomfort, and sweating.
Other side effects associated with the oral spray have included dry mouth.
A case of sleep driving has also been reported.
Psychiatric
Psychiatric side effects including cases of psychotic reactions have been reported in association with zolpidem therapy ...
There is more information at the link.
After reading this, I’d rather be sleepless than run the risk of causing harm to myself or others — especially if I couldn’t remember the incident afterward.
Prescription drugs are far from foolproof and a variety of reactions are possible. Always be aware of what you are taking and what the side effects are.
More on prescription drugs and gun control next week.
Churchmouse Campanologist 