"Decades of Medical Scandal". The persistent dishonest assertions of conventional medicine that their treatment is safe.

• A report written at the request of the government that is critical of the medical safety. 
• The Guardian newspaper, abandoning its more usual slavish support for pharmaceutical medicine, publishing a story that is critical of the conventional medicine. 
• BBC News actually daring to publish a criticism of the UK's NHS. 

These facts alone represent an important, highly unusual news story! But still there is much to be said about medical scandals.

"Denial of women's concerns contributed to decades of medical scandals, says inquiry" .

The Guardian

Lives ruined as damage viewed as 'women's problems'.

BBC News

The Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review, chaired by Baroness Julia Cumberlege, was asked in February 2018 by Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary, to undertake a review into how the NHS responds to patient reports about the harmful side effects of drugs and medical devices. The chair has said this about the report:

               "I have conducted many reviews and inquiries over the years, but I have never encountered anything like this; the intensity of suffering experienced by so many families, and the fact that they have endured it for decades. Much of this suffering was entirely avoidable, caused and compounded by failings in the health system itself."

The review followed several patient-led campaigns against unsafe and harmful medical treatments which had, as usual, been ignored for many years by conventional medicine. "Just problems women have to accept" was the message. So immediately I must ask some pertinent questions. 

• What is unusual about these three campaigns? Does it not happen all the time with conventional medicine? 
• Why have these campaigns been identified - when every single pharmaceutical drug and vaccines, and most non-drug treatments, are known to cause serious patient harm?
• Why do all these harmful treatments continue to be used, without review?
• And why do doctors continue to assure us routinely that they are 'safe'?
• And why has our government, the NHS, our doctors, and the mainstream media hitherto ignored these campaigns, and denied them?
• And why do they all continue to deny all the other known harms caused by conventional medicine?

1. Primodos

Primodos was a hormonal pregnancy test, withdrawn from the market in the 1978 when it was associated with birth defects and miscarriages. I do not remember that this withdrawal received any significant coverage - by anyone. And as usual, the link has always been denied by Schering, the manufacturer (now part of Bayer) and by the entire conventional medical establishment.

One campaign was led by the Association for Children Damaged by Hormone Pregnancy Tests, whose website claims to "...reveal the cover up by the drug companies Bayer/Schering and Sanofi/Roussel and expose the deliberate suppression of evidence by the current U.K. Regulators, the MHRA and Commission on Human Medicines". 

In 2017 the use Primodos was investigated by Sky News who discovered "how documents were destroyed and information withheld about a drug that may have deformed and killed babies in the womb". Yet, as so often happens, this was presented as a one-off 'error' or 'mistake'; and certainly it did not encourage the mainstream media to look further into the damage cause to patients by pharmaceutical drugs.

2. Sodium Valproate - the anti-epileptic drug
Sodium valproate, and other antiepileptic drugs, have long been known to cause serious side effects. These drugs are supposed to be effective for preventing seizures; but it is not a new revelation that pregnant women who take the drug can cause physical abnormalities, birth defects, to the foetus, as well as developmental delay and autism in children. And this is not all these drugs do. They cause serious harm patients in many other ways - there is a long list of known serious side effects.

Yet doctors continue to prescribe them, and regardless of this review, they will no doubt continue to prescribe them on the misguided, and unquestioned assumption that 'there is no alternative'.

3. Surgical Mesh

Pelvic mesh implants have been used to treat prolapse and incontinence for a long time. Yet many women have been left with internal damage, and agonising chronic pain. As a result, in recent years, its use has been restricted; but conventional medicine has never been stopped using it despite the harm it is known to cause.

The failure of medical implants is a story that has been ignored, even more perhaps than the failure of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. But the evidence ihas been well  known for a long time, but systematically ignored by government, the NHS, and the mainstream media, despite the patient harm it has caused; mesh, and other implants, have continued to be used.  

I have blogged about the harm caused by inplants before, in 2018 - but patient damage is something that conventional medicine appears to think is necessary, even inevitable. So do these three stories represent "decades of medical scandal" as the Guardian asserts? And have "lives have been ruined" as BBC News reports. Most certainly, but the issue should not end there.

• Why is there no government backed review on the unprecedented levels of chronic disease, why they have reached epidemic levels, and the role that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines have played?
• Why do mainstream media organisations continue to refuse to tell their readers/listeners/viewers about the patient damage caused by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.

Health Minister Nadine Dorries is reported as saying she is determined to make the changes needed to protect women in the future, that "our health system must learn from those it has failed. We will now give this independent review the full and careful consideration it deserves before setting out our full response." Well, the NHS, and other national health services, have learnt few lessons about patient harm over the last 70 years, and nothing has been done.

The reason for this has often been mentioned on this blog. Conventional medical treatment might damage patients - but doctors have nothing better, nothing safer, nothing more effective to offer them. So they just continue. What else can they do? Move towards natural medical therapies? They would never, ever do this.

So what does the review recommend? The main one is the appointment of an "independent patient safety commissioner" whose task would be to talk and act "from the perspective of the patient", and "hold the health system to account". Patient advocacy sounds like a good idea. 

However, like every other attempt that has been made to supervise and control the conventional medical establishment it is unlikely to work. 

The pharmaceutical industry, as it has done throughout the last 70+ years, both within the NHS and in health services around the world, with medical science and drug testing, and with drug regulatory agencies, will immediately move to ensure that any such commissioner comes under their firm control.

And government, the NHS, and the mainstream media (asleep on duty as they are) will not notice when this is achieved. They will continue to tell us that conventional medical treatment is safe; that anyone who suggests otherwise is peddling 'conspiracy theories', and that their views are strictly censored. 

Conventional medical wisdom will continues to be unchallenged, alternative viewpoints will continue to be ignored, censored, and routinely attacked. Only when patients start to say "NO"; only when patients begin to look at alternative medical therapies will the situation change.

The Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review, is a start; but it deals only with a minor part of the patient damage that is being routinely caused by the conventional medical establishment.