How dangerous are pharmaceutical drugs? And how long does it take drug regulators take action to protect patients? Does the pharmaceutical companies have a licence to kill?

The magazine WDDTY (What Doctors Don't Tell You) is one that everyone interested in their health and well-being should subscribe to. It often uncovers interesting and important medical research that usually does not attract attention anywhere else, and certainly not the attention it deserves, and patients need. It did this again in its April 2021 edition.

            "Researchers from the SONAR (Southern Network on Adverse Reactions), which represents drug researchers at 50 medical universities, tracked the history of 15 drugs and one medical device that had either resulted in payments or more than $1 billion in damages or had at least 1,000 reported cases of patients who had died or suffered serious reactions between 1997 and 2019".

The conventional medical establishment (CHE) will usually admit that all their pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines can cause patient harm; although they heavily discount the seriousness of this admission. Yet the drugs examined in this study were clearly the most dangerous pharmaceutical drugs that have ever been promoted and used by the CHE.

Drug regulators, like the FDA in the USA, the EMA in Europe, and the MHRA in the UK, are supposed to protect patients from medical harm. It is their primary duty. The SONAR study informs us about how well they undertake this task by looking at how many people died before action was taken (if this was known), and for how long was the drug prescribed before it was banned? This is a summary of what they discovered.

• Epoetin: number of deaths unknown: 13 years
• Darepoetin: number of deaths unknown: 5 years
• Celecoxib: 7,000 death: 7 years
• Rosiglitazone: 47 death: 8 years
• Zoldendronic acid: number of deaths unknown: 3 years
• Pamidronate: number of deaths unknown: 16 years
• Gadodiamide: number of deaths unknown: 17 years
• Levofloxin 66,000 deaths: 29 years
• Valdecoxib 99,000 deaths: 4 years
• Hydroxy-ethyl starch: 900 deaths: 5 years
• Phenylpropanolamine: number of deaths unknown: 62 years
• Rofecoxib: 270,000 deaths: 2 years
• Aprotonin: 22,000 deaths: 13 years
• Fenfluramine-Phentermine 300,000 deaths: 1 year
  

Details of many more pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines that have had to be withdrawn or banned (eventually) because they have caused serious patient harm can be found here.

Asleep on Duty? Incompetence? Or worse? Are drug regulators more concerned with the financial integrity of drug companies than protecting patient from serious harm. This is what WDDTY concluded:

           "This deadly hesitation is often the result of several factors: bureaucratic incompetence by the regulator and its cosy relationship with the drug company; the deliberate hiding of inconvenient data, and executives from the drug company threatening or bullying independent researchers who have discovered the drug's dangers."

Whatever the reason one thing is certain. Dangerous pharmaceutical drugs, however serious their so-called 'side effects', however many people they kill, do not appear to be a cause for serious CHE concern. If a drug kills thousands of patients; if it is prescribed, and known to be dangerous for many years, even decades, little is done about it.

• Even when a dangerous drug is eventually banned little or no action is taken against the drug company, the drug regulator, or anyone else within the CHE.
• Even though each of these drugs went through years of 'scientific' testing, there has never been a serious examination into the integrity and honesty of the  'science' behind the drug, why it was pronounced 'safe', and why medical science consistently fails to pick up the lethal dangers of pharmaceutical drugs. Could this be, for instance, that drug companies pay for the science?
  
• The drug is usually withdrawn quietly, surreptitiously. 
• The government rarely comments, or investigates why its citizens have suffered. 
• Conventional medical bodies, who have instrumental in prescribing the dangerous drug, are usually too embarrassed, or too busy in its own self-justification, to comment. 
• And the mainstream media (MSM), who have usually played a leading role in advertising and promoting the drug, are not interested in critically examining the activities of drug companies who have been harming their readers and viewers.
• Even if patients sue the drug company, they find this difficult and massively expensive against a powerful enemy. And even if they win their case the drug company is usually fined trivial amounts of money. No drug company executive has ever been prosecuted or convicted of manslaughter or homicide.

So the pharmaceutical industry appears to have a licence to kill, back by government, CHE, and the mainstream media (MSM) 

Silence is the usual reaction to the withdrawal of a dangerous drug or vaccine. But the situation is much worse than this. It is still happening today. We have not reached the end of the process that has been going on for over 100 years. Why should today's drug and vaccines be any different?

• Medical science is still telling us that new pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are 'entirely safe'. The Covid-19 vaccines are being pronounced 'safe' right now, even though within days/weeks/months the drug regulators received reports of death, anaphylactic shock, blood clots, and many other serious reactions.
• Some drug regulators have been forced to review these new vaccines; but as usually they have dismissed and discounted the reports; they are 'coincidences', or even if they do harm, the 'benefits outweighed the disadvantages'. The conclusion is always that the vaccines are safe.

So this is the start of the same weary and predictable process, the same lethal game of damaged patients having to prove the latest pharmaceutical wonder drug/vaccine is NOT safe, and to do so against the formidable might of the CHE, and the government and MSM supporters, who insist that they are safe - and will no doubt continue to do so for as long as they can. 

How many deaths will the Covid-19 vaccines be allowed to kill? And for how many years? Before they too are either banned?

The saga continues...... watch this space!

IF PHARMACEUTICAL VACCINES & DRUGS ARE SO SAFE - why don't they pay their own indemnity insurance against causing patient harm?

Do pharmaceutical drug/vaccine companies take out indemnity insurance to safeguard themselves from causing harm to patients?

Do conventional doctors have indemnity insurance to compensate patients who are harmed by the pharmaceutical drugs/vaccines they prescribe?

If we drive a car, or live in a house, we buy car and house insurance. It costs us an annual premium. The benefit is that it ensures us if anything happens that hurts us, or causes harm to other people we are compensated. It also acts as a reminder; that we need to ensure that we keep ourselves safe because if we claim on the policy too often we know that the annual premium is likely to go up, and eventually, we might even make ourselves ‘uninsurable’. 

Both these elements are part of any insurance deal. Insurers ensure us against harm; but we agree to minimise their financial risk through sensible, careful and responsible behaviour. This reduces the risk to insurers; and reduces the size of the premiums we have to pay.

Every company has to take out insurance in case they cause harm or damage either to people or property. In return businesses are obliged to take every necessary precaution in the way it works with its customers; and when they do it helps keep their premiums at reasonable levels. 

This contract between insurers and the ensured has become part and parcel of living in a world that increasingly wants to be minimise risk. Health and safety has become more important now than it has ever been before; the precautionary principle is universally applied.

Except, of course, that the precautionary principle does NOT apply to the pharmaceutical industry, or the world of conventional medicine!

Doctors have always had to pay indemnity insurance, but in the UK over 50% of insurance premiums are now paid by government. I have written about this in 2016 and 2017, when doctors were complaining that their indemnity insurance premiums had become too high for them to pay, and government stepped in to pay them. For more details click on these links.

• What happens when doctors harm patients?
• What happens when doctors harm patients? (2)
• Indemnity. What happens when doctors harm patients? (3)

             "Indemnity insurance enables doctors to harm patients without facing the full financial consequences of doing so. For the conventional medical establishment this is important; after all, they are dealing with dangerous drugs and vaccines every day. Doctors give them to patients on the basis that they are safe, in the full knowledge that they are not only unsafe, but cause diseases far worse than the conditions for which they are prescribed, and will actually kill a certain percentage."

Pharmaceutical drug companies, too, try to ensure themselves against the harm their drugs and vaccines cause, and increasingly their ‘premiums’ are now being paid by governments too. This is the situation in the USA, for instance, particularly for vaccine damaged patients. What this means is that when pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines cause serious patient harm it is the government who pays the compensation!

As patients it is important that we all recognise this. It means that drug companies, and conventional medicine generally, are being absolved from much of the financial liability for the harm they cause to us. They no longer have to worry about increased insurance premiums as they do not pay them.

What this means is that the medical profession no longer has to be as careful about our safety, like when you or I are driving our cars!

If the government started to pay for our car insurance, would this ‘absolve’ us from causing a road accidents, or injuring, harming and killing other people? Of course not! But at least we would not have to worry about paying increased insurance premiums! This is the position of doctors, and drug companies now; they do not have to worry about the safety of what they are doing to us.

The situation is actually worse than this! Conventional medicine is the only industry (tell me if you know another) that does not have to worry about the precautionary principle. If you refused to wear a hard-hat, or proper footwear on a construction site, if you did not sit on an ergonomic officer chair in an office, if you were regularly subjected to loud noises with ear protection, if you worked on a roof without suitable safety measures - etc., etc., - these matters would be a problem in most industry. The company would take action against the employee. The H&S executive would take action against the company.

The company remains liable for any harm caused to us.

Yet pharmaceutical companies have no such worries. They can bring out drug after drug, vaccine after vaccine, all known to have serious side effects; and they can profit from them without fear of any financial penalty. Similarly, doctors can prescribe these same drugs to patients even when they are aware of the serious adverse drug reactions they can cause.

No other industry would be allowed to get away making excuses, stating that the drug is "safe" or "well tolerated", or that the ‘benefits outweigh the risk’. The amount of illness, disease and death caused by conventional medical treatment would not be accepted by any other industry. We regularly hear about new discovered and harmful ‘side effects’ caused by drugs and vaccines that conventional medicine has been using for years, decades - and yet still nothing is done to protect patients from the harm they are known to cause.

This is not only extraordinary, it is an unparalleled situation. No other industry is absolved from doing harm in the same way that conventional medicine is. And we are all paying for it by levels of chronic illness, often the result of side effects, that have never been known before.

This is why going to see a doctor, or to the hospital, is now one the most dangerous thing we ever do in our lives.

• Take this pharmaceutical drug - just be careful and report any side effects.
• You don’t need to wear a hard hat - so long as you are careful (?!!?)
  

If conventional medicine will not look after us, we must look after ourselves. This is why I no longer see a doctor, and keep well clear of hospitals. I am thankful that I discovered homeopathy, 40 years ago; I don’t need them any more. 

But be warned!

We are told that the solution to coronavirus COVID-19 is a vaccine. So, supported by government funding, lots of drug companies are rushing to produce a new vaccine. And they are all eager to discount any risk to themselves if this rushed vaccine proves to be harmful to patients.  

So governments around the world have indemnified them from this threat. If patients are harmed by these new vaccines they will not have to pay the compensation - the government will - the taxpayer will - and that's you and me!

SO ANY INCENTIVE DRUG COMPANIES MIGHT HAVE HAD TO ENSURE THAT THESE NEW VACCINES ARE SAFE IS SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED! WILL YOU TRUST THEM?

More antibiotic drugs have been banned. They have been used since the 1960's! How many patients have been damaged by them? Do doctors know? Do they care? Have you been damaged by them?

Quinolone and Fluoroquinolone antibiotics have been suspended by the EMA (The European Drug's Agency). They were first introduced in the 1960's. In June 2018, after over 50 years, conventional medicine has discovered that they cause "disabling and potentially permanent side effects". On 16th November 2018, the EMA suspended them. Their findings will now be forwarded to the European Commission "which will issue a final legally binding decision applicable in all EU countries".

The machinations of the conventional medical establishment are long and convoluted. 

The suffering and patient harm they have caused are lengthy and enduring.

Yesterday patients were told that these drugs were safe.

Tomorrow they will be told that they are unsafe.

These antibiotic drugs are the latest of a long line of pharmaceutical drugs doctors have given to patients over the years - safe, wonder drugs - that have eventually had to be banned. Over the years I have constructed a long, but probably incomplete list of banned pharmaceutical drugs and published them in my ebook, "The Failure of Conventional Medicine". They are all drugs that have been

• 'scientifically' tested
• approved by drug regulators as safe and effective
• given to patients
• caused patient harm over many years
• and were all, rather belatedly, banned

Even so, not all fluoroquinolone antibiotics have been suspended - their use has just been restricted, and will no longer be used:

• to treat infections that might get better without treatment or are not severe (such as throat infections);
• to treat non-bacterial infections, e.g. non-bacterial (chronic) prostatitis;
• for preventing traveller’s diarrhoea or recurring lower urinary tract infections (urine infections that do not extend beyond the bladder);
• to treat mild or moderate bacterial infections unless other antibacterial medicines commonly recommended for these infections cannot be used.

And the EMA says that they should be used only "with special caution" in the elderly, patients with kidney disease and those who have had an organ transplantation because these patients are at a higher risk of tendon injury.

I suggest that patients, all patients, might want to take even greater precautions, and say NO, not only to these drugs, but to all pharmaceutical drugs. This situation demonstrates that the conventional medical establishment is prepared to continue prescribing drugs long after they are known to be dangerous for patients.

The side-effects website has said this about these antibiotics - long before this rather belated suspension.

               "The newer Quinolone Antibiotics are considered 'safe' in most studies.... But this can be deceiving and the incidence of problems are often MUCH higher than the industry-sponsored drug trials say. Quinolone antibiotics have an VERY DARK history, and many of the problems people experience are disabling, long-term effects- and even death from these 'safe' drugs."

They went on to make the point I have now been making for many years, emphasising that all the serious and dangerous side effects of these (and other) drugs, were found 'post-marketing'.

               "What this means that these reactions occur AFTER the drug is on the market and is being taken by YOU. What this says is that they KNOW that quinolone antibiotics are dangerous and have side effects that could be disabling or deadly and yet they keep developing new ones in the hope that THIS one won't have those problems."

They went on to say that Quinolone Antibiotics were too dangerous to use, something that European drug regulators are only now prepared to accept. They said that medical science have shown them to be safe enough for FDA approval. I have no information yet about whether the FDA believe they are still safe enough for Americans to take. At this very moment, in the USA, a doctor may be telling one of his patients.

               "Take these antibiotics. They have been proven to be safe. They won't hurt you"

And that is the way with conventional medicine. Doctors are prepared to give their patients anything, harmful as the drug might be. They might change their mind in 50 years time. They might not. But even if they do they will give you another drugs that medical science has proven to be 'entirely safe'.

Anyone for natural medical therapies which actually believe in "first do no harm"?

Patient harm? Medical blunders are bankrupting the NHS! Or is it just dangerous medicine?

Homeopaths, who are members of the Alliance of Registered Homeopaths, are obliged to take out indemnity insurance. It costs them less that £50 per year.

Conventional medical doctors are complaining that they cannot afford to pay for their indemnity insurance, so the NHS is helping them pay for it. For more on this see my blog, "Indemnity. What happens when doctors harm patients?"

These two facts should indicate, to anyone who is looking for such an indication, that homeopathy is a considerably safer medical therapy than conventional medicine.

Now, we are told, pay-outs for 'medical blunders' have reached such a peak that they represent around 60% of the UK's annual spend on healthcare, and that the BMA and the AMRC have warned that if the full £65 billion compensation is paid to damaged patients, the NHS could be bankrupted!

A WDDTY article states that negligence and malpractice claims have risen alarmingly in the past few years: in 2014, the total liability stood at £29 billion, and so it has more than doubled in a couple of years. As it says, the NHS costs UK taxpayers around £105 billion a year.

So quite amazingly the NHS will soon be paying out more for the outcomes of conventional medical treatment than the treatment itself!

WDDTY says that patient groups are worried that the spiralling payments could result in cases being 'brushed under the carpet,' or creating a wall of silence and denial in NHS hospitals. Actually, this is already happening - and indeed it has been happening for decades. This is why patients still do not know about the full horror of the harm that is caused by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines!

This story has even reached the UK's national press - unusual for them to publish anything 'negative' about conventional medicine!

          The Mail's headline was "Justice Secretary is warned to cut 'staggering' payouts for NHS blunders or the health service will go bankrupt". The article manages to place the blame entirely on 'medical mistakes', 'negligence' or 'blunders', rather than the inevitable outcome of practicing medicine that is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS! Indeed, the article manages to make no mention whatsoever of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines!

               At least the Telegraph article, "Cutting compensation for those maimed by the NHS would be 'hideously unfair'" seems more concerned about damaged patients than the finances of the NHS. But it also manages to make no mention of the harm caused by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines!

We all know the reason for this media silence (or is it censorship)! The pharmaceutical industry funds the mainstream press, some estimates say to the tune of 70%. Clearly, it is unwise to bite the hand that feeds you!

So patients are harmed, but led to believe that they are being harmed because of medical negligence, mistakes, or blunders. So it is individual doctors who have to pay the price and not the medical system they operate. The pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, take the profits, and pay little or nothing in compensation to patients. Their drugs and vaccines have been used "in error" by these doctors. Apparently it is not the fault of the drugs!

Yet doctors don't pay the price or their errors either. Or when they do, as in the current case of a junior doctor at a Leicester hospital being struck off the register, there is an outcry. "Unfair", is the message. Why should the doctor be blamed?

Which leaves the question - who is to blame for the levels of patient harm that is now threatening to bankrupt the NHS? It's not the blunders of doctors! It's not the pressure doctors have to work under within the NHS! It is not an underfunded or badly organised NHS!

It is the drug-dominated medical system that dominates the NHS!

If the conventional medical establishment could admit this a solution would be readily available. Move away from pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, and bring in more homeopathy, and other safer, more effective medical therapies. So what is the NHS doing? It is proposing to ban homeopathy!

UPDATE 13th July 2018
Cost of NHS Clinical negligence payouts continue to soar
The GP magazine, Pulse has reported that NHS Resolution, the organisation that handles legal claims of 'clinical negligence' spent an extra £404m on last year. The total cost of payouts was up by close to one-third, to £2.23bn in 2017/18, from £1.71bn in 2016/17.

Dr Christine Tomkins, Medical Defence Union (MDU) chief executive, is quoted as saying

               "The cost of clinical negligence claims continues to spiral out of control and it is no surprise that, while NHS Resolution has seen claims numbers stabilise, in 2017/8 it paid out a record £2.23 billion compensating patients through its clinical negligence schemes..."

This situation is not only bankrupting the NHS, our doctors are now claiming that they are now unable to pay their indemnity insurance premiums. As reported several times on this blog the Department of Health and Social Care is introducing "a state-backed indemnity solution for GPs" from April 2019.

               "The DHSC announced the scheme last year, after acknowledging that high costs of medical negligence cover were impacting GPs' ability to work."

So basically this is the current situation.

• The NHS is totally committed to conventional medical treatment, based on pharmaceutical drugs, and excluding all other (safer) medical therapies.
• These pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are causing patient harm, and some of the more seriously damaged patients are claiming damages.
• As our doctors can no longer afford to pay the resulting indemnity insurance premiums, the government has agreed to pay them for the doctors.
• Where does the government get the money? From taxpayers, some of whom are patients who have been damaged by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.

So, basically, we go to the doctors, they give us dangerous drugs which harm us, and they do so without even having to pay the insurance costs.

And so it goes on!

For more information on how conventional doctors persuaded government to pay their indemnity insurance, click on the search bar (top left hand corner of this webpage) and type 'indemnity insurance'.