Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
 I will work with pharmaceutical companies to develop a drug to right the imbalance, either by blocking the action of the sleep-disturbing cytokines or by increasing the release of the sleep-producing cytokines. But, obviously, all this will take time.
I also gave some thought to the fact that nearly every study on immune function had looked within blood. That left out a whole range of other possibilities. One of the first studies I ever did showed that patients with fatiguing illness—produced by CFS or MS—also had cognitive problems. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
See book keywords and concepts |
| The American Medical Association rakes in an additional $20 million annually by selling detailed profiles of all American doctors to pharmaceutical companies. With such information, these companies can market specific drugs directly to physicians in a particular field related to those products' "benefits".
The colon is one of many organs negatively influenced by the routine consumption of prescription drugs. Constipation is a very common
DANGER! These Drugs Cause Constipation! |
John J. Ratey, MD
See book keywords and concepts |
 At first glance, this seemed to contradict the cautions from pharmaceutical companies that antidepressants might take three weeks to work. But those time estimates are based on statistics; I have had plenty of patients over the years who have responded within a few days.
Conversely, what about the studies showing that a single bout of exercise can improve mood? For instance, in 2001, Northern Arizona University psychology professor Cheryl Hansen showed that as little as ten minutes of exercise can immediately improve vigor and mood in healthy subjects. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
See book keywords and concepts |
| Pharmaceutical companies spent over $39 billion on domestic
217 n
> — -— sC
Staggering Statistics About Modern Medicine and Pharmaceutical Drugs (contd.) drug research and development in 2005 alone. Incredibly, this figure represented less than 16% of sales for that same year!93
21!
0 c u w x
:-
pb x f—
<
U
Aren't Prescription Drugs Supposed to Fix What's Wrong with You?
Nearly half of all American citizens take at least one prescription drug and about one in five take three or more medications. |
| So what is the response to digestive disease by the pharmaceutical companies? These companies depend on product longevity so they develop and patent laxatives which cause even further bowel damage so they can keep selling you their "treatment." If they actually cured anything, these companies would go out of business because they wouldn't be needed anymore.
This obvious conflict between eliminating disease and continued profit makes me wonder if that's the reason why most pharmaceutical drugs list "constipation" as a major side effect. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 There are literally dozens of pharmaceutical companies that are, right now, engaged in similar behavior. They are heavily promoting toxic drugs. They are burying negative evidence. They are distorting and exaggerating the benefits of these drugs. They are altering the results of clinical trials. They're ghostwriting scientific papers that are published in the names of other physicians. They are refusing to disclose the financial relationship between their own companies and the authors or physicians or industry groups that promote the interests of pharmaceutical companies. And the list goes on. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 The next thing that should be addressed at the FDA is the dissolution of the financial arrangements between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA. Today, pharmaceutical companies actually pay the FDA to review their drugs. This turns drug companies into customers, and the more customers the FDA pleases, the more money the agency earns, meaning it can grow its own staff and expand its power base. So of course it's going to be in the long term interests of key FDA decision makers to please its customers. Those customers are the drug companies.
This financial relationship must end. |
Dr. Abram Hoffer, MD, FRCP (C) and Dr. Harold D. Foster, PhD
See book keywords and concepts |
 However, the statin drugs, roughly ten times as expensive, have the backing of the pharmaceutical companies and continue to play this role. Even when niacin alone is not completely effective, it can be combined with simvastatin.10'11 This dual treatment approach has produced marked clinical and angiographic benefits for patients with coronary disease and low HDL levels. |
Charles Barber
See book keywords and concepts |
 Almost two-thirds of the doctors who frame the formal guidelines of clinical best practice have received funds to conduct research, and more than a third have worked for pharmaceutical companies as employees or as consultants. Seven percent of authors admitted that their relationship with the pharmaceutical industry influenced their writing of guidelines, but 19 percent thought their co-authors were influenced.89
The blame here, in my view, ultimately lies with the doctors and the universities, not the big drug companies. |
| When asked why GlaxoSmithKline went ahead with campaigns promoting depression and antidepressants, the Japanese product manager for Paxil explained: "When other pharmaceutical companies were giving up on developing antidepressants in Japan, we went ahead for a very simple reason: the successful marketing in the United States and Europe. |
| In order to create a market, pharmaceutical companies had to actually invent a phrase for mild depression: kokoro no kaze, which, roughly translated, means one's soul catching cold. After furnishing the catchy phrase, the drug companies followed up with all the usual artillery that had worked so well in the West: public awareness campaigns paid for by the drug companies and an army of 1,350 Paxil representatives who canvassed selected doctors an average of twice a week. |
| Or as the pharmaceutical companies would no doubt prefer to put it: reentry by selective serotonin reuptake inhibition.
This has been the reentry path most favored and cherished by our Julie. This has certainly been the mode of reentry favored by the American public, and like Percy's other modes of reentry, reentry by antidepressants has both a history of success and a history of failure. |
| But today, pharmaceutical companies realize that they need to brand drugs as early as they can and build equity in the brand."113 The stakes are so high that drug companies now work with branding agencies to select just the right name ... a name like Zoloft, uplifting and scientific all at the same time. The hard, decisive sounds of the letters X, Z, C, and D are attractive to drug namers. According to James L. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
See book keywords and concepts |
| With conventional medical doctors in their hip pockets, it's easy for pharmaceutical companies to convince you their products are beneficial. Meanwhile, these companies marginalize or outright attack alternative therapies (such as nutrition, exercise, and natural supplements) so you have no option left but to take their drugs. I want you to know you have other options. Your body belongs to you, not to Big Pharma (a common nickname or euphemism for the collective pharmaceutical industry in the U.S.A.), and you don't have to depend on drugs anymore. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
See book keywords and concepts |
 That being said, the guidelines are optional and there are still pharmaceutical companies that use these tactics to promote their drugs.
Drug manufacturers are making the same adjustments any large corporation would make in light of bad press. Three decades ago we saw tobacco companies making similar adjustments as they were faced with legal challenges and nightmarish public relations issues. Clearly, it should be illegal to bribe physicians in any way to promote a specific drug, yet it still happens. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
See book keywords and concepts |
 Therefore they are more likely to study problems that will advance their career interests, ones that will allow them to compete for and win large grants—perhaps ones that come from large pharmaceutical companies.33 As a result, they are more likely to conduct research on chemotherapy rather than on herbal treatments for cancer. It follows inevitably that the body of published research, even with its sample biases, will defend the status quo.
PLAN OF THE BOOK
It goes without saying that medicine and the medical model, at the very heart of American culture, will not disappear. |
| Making and marketing drugs is what pharmaceutical companies do (we'll return to this issue at the chapter's conclusion); prescribing drugs is what physicians do; retailing them is what pharmacists do. For better or worse—and both outcomes are evident, though the latter is more frequent—each of these legal activities is tremendously profitable. Blaming the abuser is not inappropriate; blaming only the abuser is fallacious, as is not blaming the pharmaceutical industry and the medical industry. |
| Vioxx, the first of the COX-2 inhibitors, was approved for marketing in 1999. The pharmaceutical companies made billions of dollars in profits, in part by inappropriate (though legal) direct advertising. Olympic gold medalists Dorothy Hamill and Bruce Jenner did television endorsements for Vioxx. Three Dog Night sang, "Celebrate," to sell Celebrex. Five years later it was all over. Commentators used the label "debacle," "folly," and other synonyms to summarize what happened.
Such judgments miss the point. |
Andreas Moritz
See book keywords and concepts |
 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), negotiate the price for prescription drugs directly with the pharmaceutical companies and pay merely 10 percent of the amount that Medicare has to pay for the top 10 prescription drugs. Since this bill was passed over three years ago, Medicare has been legally required to pay an average of 60 percent more than the VA pays for the same prescription drugs. Most other countries in the world, which receive their prescription drugs from the same source as Medicare, also pay the lower rates. |
C. W. Randolph, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
 Consequently, for almost three-quarters of a century, pharmaceutical companies have been developing, patenting, and marketing hormones that have a slightly different molecular structure from natural human hormones and bio-identical hormones. The pharmaceutically produced and patented hormones are correctly referred to as synthetic hormones. The list of synthetic hormones on the market today includes such brand names as Premarin, Prempro, Menest, Ortho-est, Activella, and Femhrt. There are many others.
Synthetic hormones have shapes that are not found in nature. |
Andreas Moritz
See book keywords and concepts |
| The research is sponsored by government agencies such as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and huge pharmaceutical companies such as Glaxo, Pfizer, Squibb and Genentech. One of the studies, "The Effect of Anti-HIV Treatment on Body Characteristics of HIV-infected Children" seeks to identify the causes of "Wasting and Lipodystrophy [fat redistribution]" by using drugs known to cause wasting and lipodystrophy. |
| The studies are sponsored by NIH subdivisions; many are cosponsored by the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the drugs being tested. The studies use the standard AIDS drugs: nucleoside analogues, protease inhibitors and Nevirapine. |
| In the Name of Prevention
The pharmaceutical companies producing the vaccines seem to have a more powerful effect on the population than the scientists who invented them. As early as 1980, Dr Albert Sabin, one of the world's leading virologists and a pioneer of the polio vaccine, spoke vehemently against the use of the flu vaccine, claiming that it was unnecessary for over 90 percent of the population. This, however, has not discouraged the vaccination industry to endorse vaccination for all in the name of health and protection against disease. |
| According to an August 2004 issue of the Guardian, some few health-conscious governments in Europe that are less dominated by the food industry and big pharmaceutical companies, are beginning to protect their people from obvious harmful practices.
Health officials in Denmark recently banned the addition of vitamins and minerals to 18 varieties of breakfast foods and cereals produced by Kellogg Co. The reasons given include increasing evidence that eating those products regularly can ruin the health of children and pregnant women. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
See book keywords and concepts |
 High prescribers are identified from the Physician Masterfile database maintained by the American Medical Association, which pharmaceutical companies license for their own use. Reps work hard to maintain relationships with
The average doctor has a limited tool kit, and that tool kit consists exclusively of drugs. Asking the average doctor to recommend a natural treatment or supplement is like asking your piano teacher to recommend a tennis racket. the highest prescribers. "The highest prescribers are every rep's sugar mommies and daddies," writes Ahari. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 Many disease organizations, for example, like the American Diabetes Association or the American Heart Association, accept millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies or even junk food manufacturers.
Similarly, some nutritional supplement manufacturers are now partially owned by those very same pharmaceutical companies. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
See book keywords and concepts |
| Today
From the time medical students enter med school to the time they retire, their lives (and continuing education) are influenced by pharmaceutical companies. The companies buy them lunch when they're starving residents putting in ninety-hour weeks and can barely afford cafeteria fare. They give them gifts. (Take a look at the prescription pad your doctor uses or the paperweight on his desk. That's just the tip of the iceberg.) They sponsor and fund the research they read and the journals that publish it. |
Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
| Pain management has become a subspecialty in medicine and is recognized as an area needing further drug discovery by the pharmaceutical companies. And all of these treatments for pain will undoubtedly have a positive impact on face and jaw pain, too.
Treatments for fatigue and brain fog lag behind, but, as I have indicated, a pharmacopeia does exist. One major problem of taking medicines for any medical problem is that their use often comes with side effects that limit the duration of time they remain useful. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
See book keywords and concepts |
| The pharmaceutical companies are exploiting our desire for easy answers to our health issues. The inability or lack of responsibility for our own lives is leading to the deterioration of our health. As the pharmaceutical industry grows, so too does the number of potentially harmful drugs that we take without asking the right questions. As the side effects add up, so do the number of drugs we take to mask the symptoms.
Here's a vivid example of how lifestyle changes, rather than drugs, would provide huge benefits. |
| We are gulping down drugs by the handful, helping the pharmaceutical companies generate profits that are the envy of other industries.
This book is not a crusade against the pharmaceutical industry. There are plenty of others who have done a great job documenting the corrupt antics of big business and politics in the name of profit. My goal is to highlight the dangers of legal drugs and bring awareness about disease prevention so that you can avoid taking drugs unless absolutely necessary. If we focus on prevention we can avert many illnesses altogether. |
Email this page to a friend
