Dangerous Pharmaceutical Drugs. How long does it take the Conventional Medical Establishment to act to protect patients?

The pharmaceutical drug, isotretinoin (which also goes under the alternative names Accutane, Roaccutane, Reticutan, and Rizuderm), in a drug used by conventional medicine for Acne. It is a dangerous drug. Even a single dose is known to cause severe birth defects, or even the death of a baby. The drug is also known to cause chelitis, epistaxis, hypertriglyceridemia, pruritis, xerosis cutis, decreased hel cholesterol, increasing liver enzymes, increased serum triglycerides, musculoskeletal signs and symptoms, dry nose, xeroderma and xerostomia.

Regardless of this harm it is still being used. It would appear that no drug or vaccine is too dangerous for conventional medicine to give to patients. Isotretinoin was first used in the 1930's, although it was developed by the drug company Hoffman-La Roche in the 1980's. The impact on pregnant women was known from the early stages of its development - but it did not stop its development, or indeed its sales. Indeed, it is estimated that over 13 million patients were treated with the drug.

After some 40 years, in November 2020, the UK's drug regulator, the MHRA (the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) called "for information to be considered as part of an expert review". Presumably it had (rather belatedly) recognised the dangers of the drug.

I first heard about this drug in an article in WDDTY (What Doctors Won't Tell You) in March 2002, in which some of the drugs' long-term side effects were outlined. Then, two years later, in August 2004 WDDTY stated in another article that the drug could cause Guillain-Barre paralysis. Then, in October 2005, WDDTY wrote about the drugs 'ability' to cause birth defects. The information was taken from the journal of the AMA (the American Medical Association, 2005; 294: 1481). By this time, the ability of isotretinoin to cause birth defects had already known for over 20 years! Yet the drug was not banned, or withdrawn; but 'restrictions' and 'requirement' were put in place.

            ".. physicians who prescribe the drug to a pregnant woman must first sign a form called 'iPledge', while patients who want to take it while pregnant must sign an informed consent form and also obtain counselling about the risks of taking the drug.  Wholesalers and pharmacies must also comply with special requirements before issuing the drug."

In 2009 Roche Pharmaceuticals discontinued the manufacture and distribution of Accutane, their version of the drug. This was not because of any concern for patients, but owing to the high cost of defending personal-injury lawsuits in the USA. They were okay with harming their patients; but not if the cost of denying the harm caused became too high. This approach encapsulates the business ethics of the pharmaceutical industry.

However, generic versions of the drug, such as Roaccutane, remained in use with patients. If a drug can be sold for profit, it will be sold, quite regardless of patient harm.

So the MHRA is taking action nearly 40 years after this drug was first introduced, but even now, the drug is not being withdrawn or banned - it is merely "a call for information". 

            "This review is being undertaken by the MHRA with advice from the Commission on Human Medicines and the Isotretinoin Expert Working Group due to concerns about the possible association between isotretinoin and suspected psychiatric and sexual disorders."

Suspected psychiatric and sexual disorders? Is this new then? Does conventional medicine give patients drugs like isotretinoin for nearly 40 years blissfully unaware that they cause 'psychiatric and sexual disorders'? It would appear to be so as websites like Drugs.com and RxList, even now, do not mention anything about 'erectile dysfunction' and 'reduced libido'.

Remember - this is the history of just one drug. But this is not untypical of the hundreds of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines that have been withdrawn and banned over the years. And it will certainly not be untypical of the thousands of other pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines currently being prescribed today. The pharmaceutical medical establishment sells drugs, wherever and whenever it can. They are not, and never have been, deterred by evidence of patient harm.

So why should anyone believe that any pharmaceutical drug or vaccines, sold by drug companies today, are any safer or less harmful than these previously banned drugs?

Isotretinoin is just another dangerous drug.

 

Is Homeopathy Dangerous? Or is Conventional Medicine trying to hide from its own failure?

Today (28th October 2019) has witnessed yet another full-frontal attack on Homeopath by the conventional medical establishment in the mainstream media. Well, the homeopathic community is used to it. It is a regular occurrence now!

NHS Chief's Blast at 'Dangerous' Homeopathy was the headline in the Daily Mail. On the same day the Daily Telegraph's headline was "NHS Leaders Declare War on Homeopathy', and the Scottish Daily Mail leads with "NHS Chief slams homeopathic remedies". I haven't bothered to read the latter two articles. So how do I know about them? They were referred to in the Daily Mail article, all published on the same day!. So how did they know what other papers were writing about - on the same day?

Might it be that this was a planned, coordinated anti-homeopathy campaign? Again, there are no surprises if this was indeed the case. The mainstream media is funded by pharmaceutical companies to the extent that these papers would not survive if their advertising was withdrawn. So for their own viability they have to stand alongside the conventional medical establishment. And they do - meekly, slavishly, dishonorably.

This epidsode means that there can no longer be any doubt that the UK's NHS (National Health Service) is now totally controlled by the pharmaceutical industry, not just because the treatments it offers to its patients are now almost totally drug-based, but because it routinely and gratuitously attacks any form of alternative medicine, not least homeopathy.

So are these attacks on homeopathy by the mainstream media, and the NHS, based on the fact that conventional medicine is winning the war of sickness and disease?

This is a difficult claim for anyone to argue, not least the NHS!

• The NHS has always failed to cope with the ever rising levels of illness and disease that we have witnessed over the past 70+ years.
• The NHS has never been able to manage patient demand for health care even though its has had an ever-expanding budget.
• And the more pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines the NHS has provided for us, to make us healthier, the sicker we have become.
• Disease is out of control. Allergy, Alzheimers, Arthritis, Asthma, Autism, Cancer, Dementia, Diabetes (and every other chronic disease you might want to add) are all now running at unprecedented levels.
• And the numbers of patients suffering from each of these diseases are not reducing, they are increasing, very rapidly
• And many of these chronic diseases are no longer 'old age' ailments, as they were once considered: younger adults and children now suffer from them. In increasing numbers.

If conventional medicine was ever going to work, if pharmaceutical drugs were ever going to be found effective, we would now be a healthier, not a sicker nation. And the conventional medical establishment would be presenting medical statistics to prove this. Instead we face these epidemics of chronic disease, and a medical system that cannot recruit sufficient doctors to deal with increasing health demands.

So what's the problem? How does the NHS explain these 70+ years of medical failure?

• It's all the fault of homeopathy!

Why do 10% of parents refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated (and probably another 10% are reluctant, but do so because of the constant pressure)?

• Its all the fault of homeopathy! And those dreadful anti-vaxxers, of course!

Only a tiny proportion of the NHS budget has ever been spent on homeopathy (or any other alternative medical treatment). 

Only a tiny proportion of patients use homeopathy for their medical treatment, mostly it is un-subsidised, they have to pay for it themselves, and broadly they are happy to do so.

So is something else going on here? Is the conventional medical establishment beginning to realise that it is failing to deliver good health?

• their drugs are unsafe, and increasingly cannot be used because of their dangerous side effects.
• their drugs are ineffective, they are not capable of dealing with chronic disease epidemics.
• we invest exclusively on a medical system that is exorbitantly expensive
• even when the NHS budget is regularly increased by £billions, and bankrupting the nation, it still cannot cope.

So what to do? Focus on these problems? Investigate its own failure?

Or attack other medical systems?
Rage that some patients won't vaccinate for diseases that are no longer a major problem (and were not major problems when their vaccines were first introduced)?

No! Attack the competition! Insist that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are safe and effective! State that any other medical therapy is unproven, worthless, even dangerous!

A wounded, and cornered animal is a very dangerous animal. It will strike out, randomly, blindly, to defend itself from further harm. And this is what we can see happening.

But questions are being asked, even if they are not currently being asked within the NHS, within government, or within the media. The 10% who are refusing vaccines are the one's who are asking questions, with no help from doctors, politicians, or journalists.

• Is what is being offered by the NHS (drugs/vaccines) really safe? 
• Are they effective? Are their reducing or increasing disease? 
• And is the NHS being bankrupted by a medical system that needs ever more money, more resources, with each successive year.

Another 10% of the population will soon be asking questions too.

• Is homeopathy really to blame for medical failure? 
• Why is the NHS obsessing with measles and mumps?
• Why is it so unconcerned about ever-rising levels of autism, dementia, cancer, et al?

When this new 10% joins the present 10% it will be the beginning of everyone becoming aware. The NHS has nothing safe or healthy to offer us. It's drug cabinet is almost bare. We are getting sicker.

But homeopathy is dangerous - isn't it!

Thalidomide. Still alive, kicking, and harming patients around the world to this day!

The magazine 'What Doctors Don't Tell You' (WDDTY) published an article on Thalidomide in its October 2017 edition. It gave the drug's timeline, which I reproduce here in order to draw out some of the salient features of how conventional medicine deals with pharmaceutical drugs that are known to be harmful to patients.

1953. Thalidomide is discovered in a German laboratory.
After the discovery of a new drug they are tested by medical science for both its effectiveness and safety, then approved by drug regulatory agencies. These agencies were not so developed then as they are today, largely as a result of the damage Thalidomide was later to cause.

1956. Thalidomide is launched as a prescription drug for anxiety and insomnia in West Germany.
The drug company conducted all the trials considered necessary at the time, which found that the drug was both effective and safe (they usually do), or they manipulated the trial results to indicate that the drug was effective and safe. In other words, and for whatever reason, medical science was unable to detect that there was anything wrong with Thalidomide.

1957. Thalidomide is made available as an over-the-counter drug (without a prescription) to east morning sickness in pregnant women.
I am aware that many people continue to believe that if a drug is available at the local chemist, or from the supermarket, they are safer than drugs that are available only with a doctors prescription. This is not so, and has never been so. I have blogged about this before. The most disastrous pharmaceutical drug, that was destined to do so much damage to unsuspecting patients, was mostly purchased at the local pharmacy!

1958. Up to 7,000 children in Germany are born with severe birth deformities. In the same year the UK introduced the drug on to the market.
Pharmaceutical drugs spread much quicker across the world than most viruses! Presumably the UK authorities also approved Thalidomide on as an effective and safe drug for patients, including pregnant women, and certainly the drug companies were eager to profit from it as soon as possible.

1961. Thalidomide is taken off the market in most Western countries, with at least 10,000 babies born with severe deformities; unofficial estimates put the figure at 100,000 cases.
It took over four years for medical science, and the drug regulatory authorities, to determine that one of their approved pharmaceutical drugs was causing this devastation. It is important to bear in mind that whilst ALL pharmaceutical drugs are tested for safety, it takes this length of time, sometimes longer, to discover that they are not safe, even when the consequences of taking Thalidomide are so blindingly obvious!

1962. Canada is still prescribing the drug. The drug also remains available in Spain throughout the 1970's and 1980's.
This is an amazing feature of pharmaceutical drugs. They can be banned in one country but continue to be sold in others. It is a regular feature of drug histories, it happens all the time, with lots of unsafe drugs. This suggests that either the drug regulatory agencies do not speak to each other, or that they make their decisions based on some kind of bogus 'benefit-risk' calculation that comes up with a different answer! Thalidomide was as dangerous in Canada and Spain as it was in the UK.

As far as the pharmaceutical industry is concerned, it demonstrates that they are quite willing to sell any drug, however dangerous, anywhere in the world, and despite the damage they know the drug to be causing.

1965. Thalidomide is licensed in Brazil for erytherma nodosum leprosum (ENL).
Most people assume that when a pharmaceutical drug has been found to be harmful to patients, and has been banned because it has caused the kind of horrendous damage to human life as Thalidomide, drug companies are still quite happy to sell it, and find other reasons for selling it.

Of course, the drug was not sold as 'Thalidomide'. The name was changed, presumably so that patients were not aware of what they were taking. It is a diabolical corruption!

1998. Thalidomide is approved in the USA for treating ENL.
If dangerous drugs can be approved in the USA, where pride is taken in their drug regulatory system (perhaps inappropriately) they can be approved as safe and effective just about anywhere. Again, the drug is not called Thalidomide, even though the drug regulators would have known that what they were approving. It must be supposed that they were happy to go along with the deception!

The use of dangerous pharmaceutical drugs is allowed throughout the world, with drug regulatory agencies apparently keener to assist drug company with their profitability rather than performing their primary statutory function - to keep patients safe!

2008. Thalidomide is approved for use in the UK as a treatment for multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood.
There is no-where in the world safe from the exploitation of patients by the pharmaceutical industry, or the willingness of drug regulators to connive in that exploitation. No doubt medical science, and the drug regulation agencies, placed many restrictions on the use of the drug, although with what success is harder to fathom.

2010. The World Health Organisation pronounces that Thalidomide should not be used for any condition, as its use cannot be properly controlled.
For an agency that has also been so heavily infiltrated by the pharmaceutical industry this was a surprising and unusual decision. However, its advice was completely ignored!

2017. The UK approves the third spin-off drug from Thalidomide for treating multiple myeloma. Today, 48 countries actively use the drug.
Ask anyone whether they know about Thalidomide. Most people will know that it caused untold harm to thousands of children. Ask anyone whether they think that Thalidomide is still prescribed by doctors for their patients. Most people will say 'No'! So the moral of this timeline is clear.

• Patients are NOT protected from dangerous pharmaceutical drugs by medical science, or by the Drug Regulatory system. 
• The Pharmaceutical industry will sell their drugs to anyone, anywhere in the world, in the full knowledge that they are dangerous, but caring more about their profits than patients.
• Doctors are willing to prescribe these drugs, whether in ignorance, or on the 'evidence' produced by medical science, or just with the authority given by a drug regulator.
• The entire conventional medical establishment - governments, national health services, doctors, nurses - just go along with it.

So are you taking Thalidomide? Probably not, although it is now used for a wide variety of conditions, ranging from cancer, multiple melanoma, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis and ENL (leprosy).

But if you are taking Thalidomide, it will be called something else, perhaps an 'analogue' of thalidomide (not thalidomide, but something so damned similar as to make little difference). It will be called Lenalidomide, or Pomalidomide, or Apremilast, or Otezla, and no doubt a host of other names.

The conventional medical establishment should not be allowed to play these games with our safety. But they are! And they do!

We all need to search for safer and more effective treatments, practiced by more honest practitioners.

Doctors. Damned if they do, damned if they don't

I am critical of conventional doctors. It is pharmaceutical companies who produce and sell dangerous drugs and vaccines. It is drug regulators who fail to protect patients from them. It is governments around the world that connive with the profits made by the conventional medical establishment. It is the mainstream media that censors information about medical harm, and pharmaceutical corruption.

Yet it is doctors who are at the end of this line, and it is our doctors who prescribe them to us!

Do they know that pharmaceutical drugs are dangerous? If not, why not? If so, why do they prescribe them? Do they care that the drugs and vaccines they prescribe to us harm us?

Yet two articles published by the News Target website demonstrates that doctors find themselves in a cleft stick. They are damned if the do prescribe them, and damned if they do not!

The first is entitled "Paediatricians receive thousands in bonus money tied to percentage of vaccinated patients". This is the carrot! The fact that pharmaceutical bribe doctors to prescribe their drugs and vaccines is not new news. It has been known for decades. Patients should not think that the advice of their doctor is done purely in the interests of patients, or free from personal financial gain. Doctors who wish to can receive lots of 'incentives' from the pharmaceutical companies, free computers, free lunches, anything that can sway a doctor to prescribe their drugs rather than the drugs of competitors. And this revelation is just one of many, and no doubt one of many that the mainstream media will omit to tell us.

The second is entitled "Medical boards threaten the careers of doctors that question Big Pharma propaganda". This is the stick! And the stick is getting bigger. The reason is that the conventional medical establishment is under threat. It's drugs and vaccines don't work. They cause serious side effects, and they are causing epidemic levels of chronic disease and death. And they are extremely expensive. All this combined is leading to more sickness, and more costly treatment, to the extent that they threaten the very existence of national health services throughout the world.

(Shortly after writing this article, I became aware of this situation. Dr Daniel Kalb, a doctor in Pittsburgh, posted on his blog and Facebook page that he would not longer administer vaccines as he believed that there was a link between vaccines, Autism, and other neuro-immune problems. His situation has been outlined here.

          "Less than 72 hours later, the Board initiated their investigation and currently shows no signs of stopping. They are not only questioning Dr. Kalb about his statement regarding vaccines and autism, but they are investigating his treatments of patients with other immune dysfunction disorders including PANDAS/PANS, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Lyme Disease."

So as a result of his questioning of pharmaceutical orthodoxy Dr Kolb is now facing huge legal fees. This is not an isolated example of conventional medical bullying.

The most dangerous animal is a cornered animal. Conventional medicine has a future only if it can keep the truth about the harm it causes from the public. The government, the drug regulators, the media have been bought. They know better than to question. But some doctors have a conscience, and some of these are prepared to speak up.

If and when they do they place their medical careers in jeopardy.

It is easier to accept the bribes, and maintain a career that has been hard won. And in addition, of course, it is always difficult for anyone, in any profession, to admit that they have been wrong, that what they have done, and have often been doing for decades, is based on a terrible mistake.

Conventional medicine, based on pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines will eventually be found out for what it has always been - an ineffective and dangerous form of medicine. It is based on a science that understands the working of the body, in minute detail, but has no understanding of the principles of cure. In the not-too distant future historian will look back at this century of pharmaceutical dominance as a massive mistake.

But in the meantime, it is up to all of us to say "No", no more drugs, no more vaccines. Just medical therapies that support and utilise our own body's ability to heal itself.

Why do GPs prescribe dangerous treatments?

Are GPs as much to blame as the NHS and the Big Pharma companies for putting our health at risk by prescribing dangerous drugs and vaccines? Most people seem to trust their GPs. I stopped doing so several years ago when a GP, and a hospital registrar, both told me that Beta Blockers were 'well tolerated' (they aren't)!

Well, look at this piece from Child Health Safety.
http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/gmc-fraud-for-bonuses/

It describes why GPs may be keen to push drugs and vaccines on their patients - there are financial incentives for them to do so. And not only that, the GMC (the GPs statutory body, established to protect, promote and maintain the health and safety of the public by ensuring proper standards of practice) apparently advised GPs to remove unvaccinated children from their list in order to reach their 'targets', and thus, receive their incentive payments.

I have no doubt that the GMC, and most GPs, support vaccination, and that they do so despite all the evidence in front of them of the widespread tragedy caused to some people. But the picture of GPs recommending vaccination to their patients in order to reach their targets, and for the GMC to recommend their GPs de-register people who did not want to be vaccinated, takes this situation a long way from being 'ethical' medical practice.

It means that just as the Big Pharma companies pursue profits by selling dangerous drugs, GPs are prepared to pass them on to you, with the full support of their governing body.

So next time your GP tells you something, work out why he is telling you. Is it in the best interests of your health? Or does he/she have a financial motive?

Read the article, and make up your own mind.