Health and the Mainstream Media. What does mainstream meida think we need to know about health issues? And what it refuses to investigate and discuss with us?

The mainstream media is not prepared to tell us the whole truth about what is happening within conventional or pharmaceutical medicine. It is too close, too dependent on the funding they receive from drug companies, to do any of the following:

• The inexorable rise of Chronic Disease in recent decades.

• The ineffectiveness and failure of conventional medical treatment to cope with chronic disease.

• The massive increase in pharmaceutical drug prescriptions during the last 70 to 100 years.

• The truth about the real seriousness of the ‘side effects’ of drug and other conventional treatments“.

• The role of pharmaceutical medical treatment in generating the epidemics of chronic disease.

Since writing my ‘Safe Medicine’ articles, first on Blogger, now on Substack, I have focused on these issues. But a few days ago I wondered about what sort of medical information the mainstream media was prepared to share with us. So I went to the BBC’s health news website, and looked at what this was featuring. I discovered that the full enormity of the failure of conventional medical treatment was there for anyone to see. All that was necessary was for someone to site back and identify exactly what was happening. Conventional, drug-based medicine is failure - day by day. Here is a brief outline of the articles.

GP’s told to guarantee same day appointment for urgent cases. This highlighted the inability of the NHS to cope with the huge amount of patient sickness that it now has to cope with routinely.

Streeting (the government’s Health Secretary) says he takes the Leeds maternity care inquiry extremely seriously. This is yet another inquiry into the distressing failings of yet another NHS maternity service in the UK.

First baby born using transplanted womb from dead doner. A good news story, certainly from the parents point of view, indicating that surgery can now do all kinds of brilliant medical treatment - with exception of effective treatment for more common chronic diseases.

GP’s to get £3,000 bonus to maximise weight-loss drug prescriptions. The NHS regularly pays doctors to prescribe pharmaceutical drugs, not least for increasing vaccine take-up. These are often ‘incentives’ for doctors to prescribe drugs that have known serious side effects, like these weight-loss drugs. (I have written about this recently here).

“It was like buying groceries”. Woman calls for tighter weight-loss jabs checks. The woman had bought the drugs on a website, spending £118, which caused serious and distressing side effects. No need for a GP to be incentivised in this case. Yet this was the same drug, with ‘distressing side effects’, which is NHS is going to encourage doctors to prescribe!

Puberty Blockers Trial paused over concerns from medicine’s watchdog. Although these drugs had already been used for young ‘transitioning’ children, this belated trial was supposed to test their safety and efficacy. But they were found to be too harmful even to allow the continuation of the tests!

Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flu’s, researches say. Great news? But this is a typical ‘good news’ health story, greatly favoured by the BBC and the mainstream media generally, and its apparent desire to support the pharmaceutical industry. Yet note, the vaccine has only been tested on mice! And it might be available in 5-10 years time! (Or perhaps might never be heard of again)! But such stories gives hope and belief that conventional medicine is capable of overcoming illness and disease. Such ‘good news’ stories come regularly. The problem is that the actual outcomes rarely (never) corresponds with the much heralded new treatment!

Children injured by NHS can claim damages for lifetime lost earnings, court rules. It’s not just the pharmaceutical drugs are expensive. Increasingly the NHS us having to pay for the ‘side effects’ they caused patients, another ‘secondary cost’ of medical failure that has to be borne by the tax-payer funded NHS.

Woman’s regret over botched Brazilian butt life, and also Stop dithering on Brazilian butt life crackdown, say MPs. We are told, regularly, that surgeons can do such wonderful things that many people are prepared to pay for expensive plastic surgery that (allegedly) makes them look better. Surgeons receive the fee, patients pay the price, and once again, the NHS has to pick up the pieces!

Why are fewer people donating their organs? Perhaps a more pertinent question might be “why are more people requiring organ donation?”, and “why is demand for organs outstripping supply” Organ donation is required for patients who have organs that need replacing. Why do they need replacing? Because the medical system used by the NHS is not capable of supporting/saving the original organs.

There are several more articles on this BBC webpage, but these outline the health news diet that we get from the mainstream media. Each day the articles change (so have a look at the current day’s selection, and see if you can spot the ‘medical failure” that is not mentioned)!

Most people will read these articles and not interpret them as a ‘failure’, especially failure of pharmaceutical drug treatment. Instead they are discounted as isolated errors, unfortunate mistakes, or the result of NHS underfunding.

After all, if the mainstream media does not question the underlying competence of conventional medical practice why should their readers? But what this means is that the media’s misplaced allegiance to pharmaceutical medicine does patients no favours.

Will Weight-Loss Drugs become another Medical Catastrophe?

The promotion of GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, Wygovy, Mounjaro, et al, continues; yet the situation has all the usual elements of a pending medical disaster. There are signs now of the promotion of GLP-1 weight loss drugs spiralling out of control, and that the Conventional Medical Establishment is losing control of the situation. Let me precis the story, thus far

• The pharmaceutical industry introduced GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, Wygovy, Mounjaro, et al, to treat diabetes. It is well known that these drugs can cause serious adverse effects.

• It is then discovered that the drugs can cause weight-loss. As obesity has become a serious health epidemic around the world the industry, supported by both the NHS and the mainstream media, began to promote them, heavily, in order to increase sales.

• Although the drugs are expensive the NHS agreed to prescribe them for a specific, restricted group of obese patients, providing that there was a health plan that supported the patients who were prescribed the drug for time-limited periods.

• The known adverse reactions to these drugs have not been heavily advertised; we are told, as usual, that the benefits (loss of weight) outweighs any disadvantages.

The problem has been that many, less obese patients, who like the idea of losing some weight, want to have them too. But they discover they do not fit the NHS criteria. So what do they do?

1. The promotion continues.

Apparently weight loss drugs are to be ‘incentivised’ in new GP contracts. New obesity targets, we are told, will be used to incentivise doctors to prescribe weight loss drugs “where clinically appropriate”. This article states that doctors will be ‘incentivised’ with a payment of £3,000 “to maximise weight loss drug prescriptions”. So the NHS wants to increase, rather than reduce, the number of people who take the drugs.

2. Demand for the drugs increase.

The Daily Mail has reported recently that 2,000 doses of ‘fake’ weight loss drugs were seized in a double gang property raid, and reports “warnings about illegal Mounjaro pens being sold on online pharmacies”. So people who cannot get the drug on the NHS (as they do not fit the obesity criteria) are resorting to buying them from the internet - at ‘discount’ prices. Yet note that in the same paper, attached to the same article, continues to promote the drugs! “Woman who was too fat for IVF on NHS lost six stone on fat jabs”!

3. More evidence of Adverse Drug Reactions

During recent weeks more evidence is emerging about the ‘side effects’ of these weight-loss drugs. The known side effects are reported in the Drugs.com website here. They are bad enough, but new ones are emerging, and can be found in these articles. These are in addition to those already accepted by the pharmaceutical medical establishment.

• Weight-Loss Drugs cause Mental Health Issues, including suicide.

• 70 USA Lawsuits alleging Vision Loss.

• Possible links to cancer.

• Links to dental decay.

So clearly the full impact on human health of these drugs is not fully known. Evidence is even now emerging which conventional medicine did not know about when the drugs were approved by the drug regulators. How much more will come out? And how many more people who be ‘incentivised’ by doctors to take the drugs, or seek them on internet pharmacies (of which there are many).

The Conventional Medical Establishment is playing ‘Russian Roulette’ with these GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Certainly the full extent of the harm they are causing is not yet fully known. Yet their promotion continues, in full swing.

I suspect there will come a time when so many people will be damaged by these drugs that they will seek compensation. Have they been warned about all the ‘side effects’ these drugs are known to cause? Leave along the ‘side effects’ that have not been fully substantiated yet? And if they have not been properly and fully informed, they will have a strong case.

So I write this article with a sinking feeling that, at some time in the future, we will be dealing with yet another medical disaster rather than a nation of slimmer, fitter people!

For the latter we will need to inform and educate people about their diet, not least about the harm (including the obesity) that is being caused by ultra-processed foods.

To avert the former conventional medicine will need to inform people, more openly, honestly and transparently, about the harm these drugs can cause; and stop making the assumption that they are beneficial.

I am not sure that the Conventional Medical Establishment will do either.

Statin Drugs. Are they safe? The Debate goes on!

Once Statin drugs were so safe doctors told us that everyone, ill or not, should take them! Now the advice patients are given is so conflicting it is probably safer not to prove it - either way.

The problem with Statin drugs is that their safety has always been questioned. This does not deter pharmaceutical medicine from telling us they are ‘safe and effective’, and patients who take them, and suffering side effects, regularly disagreeing.

Once, conventional medicine told us that Statins were so effective in preventing heart disease, and so entirely safe, that even fit and healthy people should take them. This was the starting point for Statins. Soon the evidence from patients was challenging this from personal experience. As usual the medical profession ignored, minimised or discounted the concerns: the benefits outweighed the harm, et al - the usual defences were trotted out.

In 2015 I wrote that even doctors are now conflicted about the safety of Statins. At the time they were being told to give them to even more patients, but they seemed ‘resistant’ to doing so.

Over a decade later the safety of Statin drugs is still being hotly disputed. Recently a study, reported here by Medscape, found that there was “Good news for patients worried about Statin side effects”; they “most never happen”.

          “Patients worried about potential side effects of statins can rest easy, according to a new large-scale study: The vast majority of adverse effects listed on statin medications simply never occur. The study, published in The Lancet, analyzed individual patient data from 154,000 patients in 23 large, randomized controlled trials conducted by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ Collaboration. Researchers compiled 66 non-muscle, non-diabetes outcomes that statin labels claim may be caused by these drugs — including cognitive problems, depression, sleep issues, kidney injury, sexual dysfunction, liver disease, and many others”.

So nothing to worry about then? Well, Dr. Wojak’s recent article on Substack fundamentally disagrees. He stated that “Statins are an insidious scam” that were “exposing the Cholesterol myth”, and that “any doctor still recommending statins is inexcusably ignorant or corrupt”.

In his article Dr Wojak walks us through the history of Statin drugs, and the myths about the dangers of Cholesterol, over the past 80 years or so.

“The original theory, popularized in the 1950s, blamed cholesterol as a whole. The claim was that eating saturated fat - primarily from foods like red meat, butter, eggs, and full-fat dairy - raised blood cholesterol, which in turn caused heart disease”.

“When this story failed to hold up under scrutiny, the goalposts were moved. Total cholesterol quietly faded from focus. Cholesterol was split into two different types: “good” (HDL) and “bad” (LDL), and LDL cholesterol alone was rebranded as the villain. From that point on, medical intervention targeted LDL cholesterol specifically—pushed ever lower with each new set of guidelines”.

And still, year-by-year, Statin patients continued to report serious side effects emanating from the drug.

So what is certain is that anyone who is taking Statin drugs, plus anyone who is prescribed them in the future, should read both these articles in order to make an informed choice. It is clear that patients who over decades have reported serious “side effects” have not been believed. The bland reassurances about Statin safety continues to be peddled by the Conventional Medical Establishment.

What everyone should remember is that even the bland reassurances outlined in the Medscape article is a climb-down from the position pharmaceutical medicine was taking in the early years of Statins - that they were “completely safe”, so safe, in fact, that everyone (even those who did not suffer from heart issues) should be taking them.

          “Only four of the 66 undesirable outcomes attributed to statins met false discovery rate significance criteria: abnormal liver transaminases, minor urinary composition changes (mostly mild proteinuria), edema, and other liver function test abnormalities. Absolute risks for these outcomes, however, were under 0.2% annually”.

          “By contrast, the authors found moderate-intensity statin use for 5 years would typically prevent about 1000 major vascular events per 10,000 patients with established cardiovascular disease and about 500 events per 10,000 high-risk patients without prior events — placing the small excess risks for adverse events in a clinical context”.

No problem there, then!

So I urge everyone to make their own decision about Statin drugs. Do you believe the millions of patients, over the last 70 years, who have reported serious harm?

Or do you believe the pharmaceutical industry, whose reputation and wealth depends on selling us drugs, and convincing us that they are safe?

The decision is for each one of us to take.