The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal

'The doctors prescribing the drugs don’t know they don’t do what they’re meant to. Nor do their patients. The manufacturers know full well, but they’re not telling.

Reboxetine is a drug I have prescribed. Other drugs had done nothing for my patient, so we wanted to try something new. I’d read the trial data before I wrote the prescription, and found only well-designed, fair tests, with overwhelmingly positive results. 

Reboxetine was better than a placebo, and as good as any other antidepressant in head-to-head comparisons. It’s approved for use by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the MHRA), which governs all drugs in the UK. Millions of doses are prescribed every year, around the world. Reboxetine was clearly a safe and effective treatment. The patient and I discussed the evidence briefly, and agreed it was the right treatment to try next. I signed a prescription.

But we had both been misled.'


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Scandal at the FDA: Board Members with Drug Maker Ties Voted to Approve Drug that's Killing Women

'An investigation by the Washington Monthly and the British Medical Journal determined that at least four members of an FDA advisory board which voted to approve a drug used in the birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin had either done work for the drugs' manufacturer or received research funds from the manufacturer. Though the four committee members disclosed their ties to the FDA, the FDA decided that the ties did not matter and did not make the disclosures public. Tragically, the drugs the committee endorsed have been killing the women who take them.'


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Pharmaceutical Drugs Kill More People than Ever

'It is clear from this report that the number of people in the U.S. maimed or killed from pharmaceutical drug use is breathtakingly large and growing. It is also a clear indictment of the inadequacy or unwillingness of the FDA to fulfill its mandate to protect us. Given the zealousness it applies to the regulation of the natural health industry, this discrepancy is indeed curious.'


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Drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in U.S., data show

 

'Fueling the surge in deaths are prescription pain and anxiety drugs that are potent, highly addictive and especially dangerous when combined with one another or with other drugs or alcohol. Among the most commonly abused are OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma. One relative newcomer to the scene is Fentanyl, a painkiller that comes in the form of patches and lollipops and is 100 times more powerful than morphine.

Such drugs now cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined.'

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100,000 Americans Die Each Year from Prescription Drugs, While Pharma Companies Get Rich

'The study estimating that 100,000 Americans die each year from their prescriptions looked only at deaths from known side effects. That is, those deaths didn’t happen because the doctor made a mistake and prescribed the wrong drug, or the pharmacist made a mistake in filling the prescription, or the patient accidentally took too much.

Unfortunately, thousands of patients die from such mistakes too, but this study looked only at deaths where our present medical system wouldn’t fault anyone. Tens of thousands of people are dying every year from drugs they took just as the doctor directed. This shows you how dangerous medications are.'

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