Crestor Study Highlights Corruptness of Modern Medical System

Note to all Knowledge of Health readers: the recent publication of a report in The New England Journal of Medicine regarding the use of rosuvastatin (Crestor) among healthy American adults for prevention of heart disease represents evidence for:

1. The treatment of "health" with a "side effect pill." Crestor has the worst side effect profile among all statin drugs and its approval was initially declined by the FDA.

2. The collaboration by the news media, medical publications, health authorities and industry to foist off pseudo-science upon the public. Would you take an expensive pill ($3.45 a day), when you are perfectly healthy, a pill that is only going to prevent a heart attack in less than 1 in 100 users, and places you at risk for liver toxicity, memory impairment and muscle wasting. The best you could possibly get out of this pill is that it would induce memory loss and you would forget to take it. Health authorities know how to read scientific literature. There is a concerted effort to mislead the public here. The maker of Crestor wants to expand the use of statin drugs to adults with low or normal cholesterol levels. Their target market is 7.7 million middle-aged Americans, which would reap $8.8 billion in annual sales.

3. The report published in The New England Journal of Medicine failed to distinguish mortality from non-mortal heart disease, so we don't really know how many lives would be saved. Their estimation is 1 life saved for every $500,000 spent. If this drug therapy were taken by the masses and it prevented even half of the 1 million heart attacks annually it would bankrupt most health insurance plans.

4. The New England Journal of Medicine report provides more evidence that modern medicine is no longer affordable to most Americans.

5. The report will likely spur TV advertising which the FDA and the FTC will permit, without mention that side effects are more likely to occur than any health benefit and that the chances of the pill preventing a cardiac death is less than 1 in 100. This means false advertising will continue to be permitted by the FDA and FTC when it comes to drugs, but not dietary supplements. Doctors will prescribe this problematic drug because it will bring patients to their offices via TV advertising. The masses will fall for this false advertising, as they did for Vioxx which led to the premature death of 20,000 Americans. The public must have gumption and begin to resist recommendations made by their doctors.

6. The Crestor study represents disease substitution, not disease prevention, as it increased the risk for doctor-diagnosed diabetes.

7. The concerted effort to publish studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the same day as the release of the Crestor study, studies that falsely show vitamin C and E do not prevent heart disease, is more evidence of modern medicine's orchestrated efforts to dismiss alternatives to drugs. The dosage of vitamin C (500 mg) used in that study could not significantly raise blood levels for more than 2-4 hours, and the dosage of vitamin E (400 mg) was not correlated with the oxidative stress levels of the subjects in the study. Therefore, both studies are bogus.

You are urged by this writer to practice self care and to advise your family and loved ones that adoption of modern medicine is hazardous to one's health. The Crestor study adds to the growing list of bogus health recommendations by public health authorities, namely the use of statin drugs for heart disease, ineffective flu vaccines to prevent winter-time illness, and the use of sunscreens which have only served to increase skin cancer-related mortality. The US healthcare system is an unaffordable, self-serving, dysfunctional system.

-Bill Sardi, Knowledge of Health, Inc.

Pushing Prescriptions: How the Drug Industry Sells Its Agenda at Your Expense

The drug industry, Washingtons's largest lobby, spent more than $189 million on lobbying last year, a recent investigation from the Center for Public Integrity shows. That's up 32 percent since 2006 and -- get this -- nearly three times the amount they spent on lobbying in 1998, the first for which year complete data is available.

CPI's report, Pushing Prescriptions: How the Drug Industry Sells Its Agenda at Your Expense, also shows that Big Pharma has significantly upped its campaign contributions to Democrats since their November 2006 win. Nearly half of that money went to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, House Committee on Ways and Means, and Senate Committee on Health, Education and Labor -- all of which are supposed to regulate the pharmaceutical industry.

Apparently, all that cash did the trick. The drug companies' intense lobbying -- I wish we could just say "bribing" and call it what it really is -- has sped up the drug approval process (arguably decreasing the attention given to drug safety), delayed the entry of lower cost generic drugs to the market, increased direct-to-consumer advertising (which has risen 20-fold in the last 10 years), created incentives for performing drug testing on kids, and resulted in a serious conflict of interest by "making the FDA dependent on the industry it regulates for budgetary resources."

Source: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/92037/

China sentences ex-head of FDA to death over drug company bribes

May 30, 2008
by Byron Richards

The penalty in China is death, in America it's business as usual. Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China's FDA, was sentenced to death for accepting $832,000 in drug company bribes and for dereliction of duty. Like China, our country is in the middle of a drug and food safety crisis. Why is FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach, M.D. getting a free pass? Why did the Senate just pass legislation (S.1082) that gives von Eschenbach significantly more power to do whatever he pleases? And exactly what is it that von Eschenbach is doing?


Read full: http://www.helpstopbillc51.ca/index.php?command=show&ID=12906

More: http://ahrp.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html