Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 We need to hold people responsible for the crimes against humanity that are taking place right now in the pharmaceutical industry. I think a number of individuals, CEOs and legislators need to do a little prison time, and clearly the FDA needs wholesale reform from top to bottom so that it can once again act like an agency concerned with protecting the public rather than protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.
I think we can make changes for the better. |
| My aim is to help people realize how atrocious the pharmaceutical industry is and take action to make positive changes.
Obviously, we need a whole new system of medicine in this country. We need to hold people responsible for the crimes against humanity that are taking place right now in the pharmaceutical industry. |
| I have a question, though: Suppose the pharmaceutical industry did commission a terrorist attack on the drugs coming from Canada, and suppose the American people started taking those drugs and dying. How would we know? How could we tell the difference between people dying from prescription drugs that are somehow tainted by terrorists, versus people dying from prescription drugs that are dangerous and toxic enough themselves?
People are dropping dead right now from prescription drugs in record numbers. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 It's time for the Justice Department to charge the pharmaceutical industry with racketeering. Because the activities of drug companies, combined with the criminal actions of the FDA, are nothing short of a criminal racket designed to deceive the American public in order to generate profits. It's classic RICO behavior. In fact, it would be difficult to find a more relevant example of racketeering than what's happening today in the pharmaceutical industry. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
| How disrespectful can this pharmaceutical industry be? To what lengths will it go to try to convince us that drugs from outside the United States are unsafe? I wouldn't be surprised if the industry actually commissioned a terrorist attack on drugs from Canada. Then it could say, "Look how unsafe drugs are from Canada! Now you have to buy them here in the United States."
Prescription drugs aren't safe, no matter where you get them
Prescription drugs are actually the fourth-leading cause of death in this country, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. |
| I think a number of individuals, CEOs and legislators need to do a little prison time, and clearly the FDA needs wholesale reform from top to bottom so that it can once again act like an agency concerned with protecting the public rather than protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.
I think we can make changes for the better. I think we can help people realize the healing power of foods if we teach the fact that foods contain all the medicine we need and that healthy, unprocessed foods make most prescription drugs obsolete. |
Steven V. Joyal
See book keywords and concepts |
 In my prior experience within the pharmaceutical industry, I had the opportunity to work with great medical scientists, terrific researchers, and dedicated clinical trial coordinators during global drug development programs for metabolic disease. During my tenure in the pharmaceutical industry, I learned many things. One key lesson is that pharmaceutical medications are tools, and like any tool, they can be very useful in the right situation, but one tool can't handle every task. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
See book keywords and concepts |
 The power and influence of the pharmaceutical industry is enormous, and there's no end in sight. This comes despite recent governmental warnings about the dangers of psychiatric drugs and continuing strong evidence regarding the benefits of nutritional, psychosocial, and environmental therapies.
Even those in the medical establishment are recognizing the problem. In 2005, American Psychiatric Association President Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein issued this assessment: "The practice of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry have different goals and abide by different ethics. |
Katharine Greider
See book keywords and concepts |
 And indeed, few would deny that the history of the pharmaceutical industry is, in part, the history of human progress: From vaccines to antibiotics and, more recently, an array of cardiovascular drugs, some medicines have produced benefits beyond measure. But brush aside the industry platitudes about new cures tor a close look at products coming tnougn R&D pipelines, and you'll find that often their value is more commercial than social. |
| Among the wealthy nations that support the global pharmaceutical industry, the United States is by far the most permissive in its regulatory scheme. As other countries move to control prices and sharply limit advertising, the industry increasingly turns to American consumers for its profits. Meanwhile, America is facing a harsh economic downturn that makes it less fit to bear this burden. State and federal budgets are no longer so ample, making for bitter debates about how to control drug costs in government programs like Medicaid and Medicare. |
| Drug companies make something we want and need: medicines that promise to protect us from pain and illness, that safeguard our ability to keep our routines at work and at home. The pharmaceutical industry can claim for its products seemingly magical benefits, from making us look better to literally saving our lives. Behind these magical claims lies a complex product whose merits are not easily evaluated by scientists, much less consumers. |
| Ehrlich, believing industry leaders can benefit from listening to outside perspectives, has invited to Rx Insight's 2003 conference for marketing people none other than staunch critic Ralph Nader. "The pharmaceutical industry is now the most resented industry," another marketing executive said at the roundtable printed in Pharmaceutical Executive. "And that probably is because we're having something of an identity crisis ourselves. What are we really about? Is it about making money? Is it about saving lives? Obviously the answer is yes and yes... |
| In the year 2002, though, the pharmaceutical industry found itself in an unusual period of uncertainty. While some companies continued to grow and thrive, others slogged through a soup of patent expirations, regulatory action, manufacturing glitches, lower earnings, and disappointing research pipelines—all of which sent drug stocks, along with other highfliers of the 1990s, down. It's as if Big Pharma were staggering under its own weight. It remains to be seen where this trend is going. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 In fact, if you used to be diseased, and you changed your lifestyle and started consuming outstanding foods giving you optimum nutrition, the pharmaceutical industry is now losing a customer. You have just cost conventional medicine a paying customer. And given the sky-high cost of most prescription drugs these days, they might have been counting on you to generate a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars in revenues over the next few years. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
| In fact, it would be difficult to find a more relevant example of racketeering than what's happening today in the pharmaceutical industry.
Physicians promoted tobacco and drugs
If prescription drugs are so dangerous, you might ask, then why are so many physicians still strongly in support of them? The answer is that not too long ago, physicians were strongly in favor of cigarettes, too! In fact, a quick search through historical print ads in mainstream magazines like TIME showed physicians actually endorsing cigarettes. Smoking was good for your health, doctors insisted. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
See book keywords and concepts |
 There is a related problem. The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the scientific process that supposedly underlies their existence. And we, the people, or at least our government, have let them do it! The very clinical trials which are crucial in establishing a new drug's efficacy are designed, carried out, and interpreted not by independent investigators, but by the very drug companies that have an enormous vested interest in the outcomes.
The government agency that is supposed to regulate the industry is the FDA. It has not done its job, especially in recent years. |
| Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote of two myths that enshroud the pharmaceutical industry: First, it spends huge amounts of capital on the development of new drugs (which justifies the high prices for their products); and second that in so doing, it produces a significant number of new drugs.
What about the vaunted research and development (R&D)? In 2002, according to Angell, the industry spent $31 billion (14% of its sales) on R&D, compared to its profits, which were $36 billion (17%). |
| Blaming the abuser is not inappropriate; blaming only the abuser is fallacious, as is not blaming the pharmaceutical industry and the medical industry. The neat distinction between "medical" and "nonmedical" is nothing more or less that an attempt to blame the victim—and only the victim—for his or her addiction.
No doubt: synthetic narcotics are a threat—a growing threat at that—to the public health. Unfortunately SAMHA's analysis lead us away from facing the problem, let alone finding a solution.
TRENDS
We need to throw out some numbers. |
| If the connections between the companies and their regulators are suspicious, so are the ties between the industry and physicians. The pharmaceutical industry employs about 88,000 sales representatives, which comes to about one for every five physicians. It is their job to "educate" physicians on the purported benefits of particular drugs. To put it bluntly, these company employees bribe physicians with gifts large and small. The AMA instructs physicians not to take gifts, and in 2002, the industry adopted a "voluntary" code of conduct to "discourage" expensive gifts. |
| Indeed the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical community is at the heart (should we say brain?) of the matter. "The way to sell drugs," according to one bioethi-cist, "is to sell psychiatric illness."55 According to the clever New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd: "The more anxious the companies feel about profit, the more generalized the generalized anxiety get."56
This story contains a profound lesson for our book.
It is easy, and not incorrect, to blame the medical community— from pharmaceuticals to practicing physicians—for this state of affairs. |
| We have discovered that the huge and vaunted pharmaceutical industry accomplishes less—in terms of saving lives—than one might expect. Seven new drugs in 2002 is hardly a great record. But, let us review the efficacy of the best-selling drugs. Semisynthetic narcotics save no lives. They do alleviate pain, no small achievement, but this accomplishment must be balanced against their widespread misuse. The routine use, and even legitimate prescription of, Vicodin is a national scandal. |
Andreas Moritz
See book keywords and concepts |
 Your body is capable of manufacturing every drug that could possibly be produced by the pharmaceutical industry. Synthetically derived drugs only "work" because the cells of the body have receptors for some of the chemicals contained in the drugs. This means that the body is capable of making these chemicals, too, otherwise these receptors wouldn't exist. The body knows how to make them with the utmost precision, in the correct dosage, and with perfect timing. The body's own drugs cost us nothing, and they have no harmful side effects. |
| In fact, most medical research has been used to serve vested interest groups, such as the pharmaceutical industry, to manipulate the masses into submission and expose them to potentially fatal treatments. All research is unaltered by the changing factors of time, the unaccountable subjectivity of the researchers and those being researched, as well as the intended objectives of the research.
In my view, scientific research should not be used in an exclusive manner to formulate a particular truth because it is very easy to employ research studies as a means of manipulating opinions and beliefs. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
See book keywords and concepts |
 Plus, there's constant pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to prescribe creams, drugs, and other "remedies."
The problem is muddied further by the fact that there isn't a perfect correlation between diet and acne—some people can eat crap all day long and have perfect skin and others eat quite well and still have outbreaks.
"Acne sufferers are not a homogenous group," says my friend Richard Fried, M.D., Ph.D., author of Healing Adult Acne.
That said, there is overwhelming evidence— both clinical and theoretical—that diet is a huge contributor to acne. |
C. W. Randolph, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
 Unfortunately, because the pharmaceutical industry has created so much marketing hype about a woman's need for estrogen replacement as a fountain-of-youth treatment for menopause, most medical practitioners and healthcare consumers are misinformed and/or confused. The consequence for millions of people is that the very real condition of estrogen dominance is often overlooked or, worse, misdiagnosed and mistreated. For instance, consider the case of a woman I'll call Sylvia.
Sylvia, a thirty-six-year-old divorced mother of three, came to my office six months after moving to Florida from Oregon. |
Anne Harrington
See book keywords and concepts |
 Conclusion making Sense of mind-body medicine
-wj- Jre live in a world where scientists have mapped the human genome, where the pharmaceutical industry is a multibillion-dollar business, and where people look to the brain sciences to illuminate everything from schizophrenia to shyness. Reductionist medicine, it would seem, has triumphed. Nevertheless, this book has been all about demonstrating that there is more to say—much more. In March 2007, I conducted an internet search on Amazon.com using several keywords. |
Joerg Gruenwald, Ph.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
 Tatar buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum), which is used in the pharmaceutical industry is easily distinguishable from Fagopyrum esculentum by its green flowers, usually green stems and curved, dentated, and squat achaenes.
Habitat: The plant is indigenous to northern and central Asia; cultivated in China and U.S.
Production: Buckwheat herb is the aerial part of Fagopyrum esculentum or Fagopyrum tataricum. The harvest takes place 50 to 60 days after sewing and before the fruit forms. There is a slight or small loss of rutin if quickly dried at high temperatures. |
Andreas Moritz
See book keywords and concepts |
| All this published evidence, of course, does not deter the big pharmaceutical industry from coming up with more and increasingly "smarter" drugs. Soon doctors will be recommending one pill to lower your LDL level and another drug to raise your HDL level and lower your triglycerides. Some already do so. This will not only double the already high cost many people are paying for their current statin drugs, but also greatly increase the risk of suffering a stroke or dying from cancer or any other disease.
Even aggressive behavior and suicides are now linked with lower cholesterol levels. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
See book keywords and concepts |
| You can find a full list of the studies investigating the phenomenon of pharmaceutical industry influence on doctors' attitudes and behavior at www.nofreelunch.org.)
The Public Library of Science journal Medicine in 2007 published a damning paper called "Following the Script: How Drug Reps Make Friends and Influence Doctors." In it, coauthor Shahram Ahari—a former pharmaceutical sales rep for Eli Lilly—wrote: "It's my job to figure out what a physician's price is. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
| That is not the pathway to health, and yet that's the empty promise of the pharmaceutical industry.
Disease mongering for business success!
Do you realize the pharmaceutical industry can only continue to grow by inventing new diseases and by redefining existing ones so that more and more people are now labeled diseased? That's the only way the industry can get bigger: By selling more drugs to the same population. The population is not getting any larger around here, so how does the pharmaceutical company make more money? It's easy -- it just invents more conditions. |
Email this page to a friend
