The Financial Consequences of Sodium Valproate

Sodium Valproate is a demonstration that our medical system is failing. It has given pregnant women a drug that has caused an estimated 20,000 children born with serious birth defects, that is, 20,000 people who will require medical intervention and support for the rest of their lives. Compensation and damages will add to the cost of the NHS, the demand on taxpayers money, in a health service, and a national economy that is already under serious pressure.

I have written about these "secondary costs" of a failed medical system (pharmaceutical medicine) before, see these links. They explain why conventional medicine has always demanded more and more resources, and why it will always do so.

• The Secondary Costs of Conventional Medicine (October 2018)
• The Secondary Costs of a Failing Medical System (January 2019)
• The Economic Crisis. A self-inflicted wound resulting from a failed medical system. The secondary cost of a failed medical system (November 2020)

The scandal of Sodium Valproate starts, but does not end, with the damaged lives of young children, their families, or even the compensation/damages claims that will be forthcoming. It is the ongoing, or secondary costs that will stretch long into the future. Parents cannot work because they have to care for their children. Children lose their potential to develop into full citizens who can contribute to society as otherwise they would have done. As they grow older many will depend on benefits and other support. And, of course, the ongoing medical treatment needed to deal with the consequences of the harm done by Sodium Valproate.

The Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review’s (IMMDSR) report, ‘First do no harm’, referred to in yesterday's blog, outlined some of the harm caused by this dangerous drug. The report makes it clear that the babies are born with birth defects that include spina bifida, autism, malformations of the brain, heart, and kidneys, and in severe cases, death.

Yet when conventional medicine talks about what has caused these diseases they rarely mention that they might be cause by prescribed pharmaceutical drugs.

• Spina Bifida. The NHS says that "It's not known what causes spina bifida but a number of things can increase the risk of a baby developing the condition". They mention lack of folic acid, family history, genetics, obesity and diabetes; and they mention epileptic drugs, including Valproate; but discount this by emphasising that doctors will not prescribe them "if there's a chance you could get pregnant while taking them, but they may be needed if the alternatives are not effective".
• Autism. The NHS says that "nobody knows what causes autism, or if it has a cause". It does know, however, that it is "not caused by vaccines, such as the MMR vaccine". However, although it is clear from the IMMDSR report that they do know it is caused by Sodium Valproate they fail to mention it!

Conventional medicine never admits culpability, even when they know they are culpable!

The cost of Conventional Medicine around the world is rising exponentially, and it has been for the last 80 to 100 years. The UK's NHS has always demanded, year by year, resources, to cope with more and more sickness and disease.  

Why does it need more more money? Why is there epidemic levels of sickness and disease, regardless of how much is spent on treatment?

The Sodium Valproate scandal suggests that iotragenic (or doctor-induced) disease plays a very large part in this increased demand.

People get sick, and they are given pharmaceutical drugs that make them sicker. And then they are given more drugs to treat increased levels of sickness, leading to chronic disease, and the need for more medical care. It is these 'secondary' costs of medical failure, rarely if ever mentioned, that are fundamental to the funding of the conventional medicine. 

The problem of NHS funding not "an ageing population"; nor is it the increased sophistication (or even the increased cost) of medical treatment; or any of the other reasons routinely trotted out for medical failure. 

The problem is iatrogenic. 

It is the result of a medical system that is inherently harmful, dangerous to our health.

NHS in Crisis (Winter 2017)

The British NHS is in constant crisis.

• It is consistently unable to cope with the demand for health services. 
• It is continually asking for more money.
• Governments always gives in, and gives them more money.
• But any new money is spent quickly, with no apparent improvement it its ability to cope with demand.

I have looked back at my previous blogs, and I have regularly discussed this ongoing problem. "Health Spending brings down Governments, and bankrupts the Nation" was written in 2012, and outlines the long history from 1947 to 2010 of how successive governments have been increasing expenditure on the NHS - but never enough to enable it to cope. Since then, I have been commenting on the the regular NHS crisis, see these blogs, although there are others!

The NHS Debate (The NHS in Crisis 2011) published in May 2011
Our doctors in crisis (NHS in Crisis 2015) published in March 2015.
Britain's NHS in crisis (2016) published in February 2016.
NHS in Crisis (2016) published in March 2016.

Yet the reason for this monotonous repeated failure has never been ascertained.

The media never ask the right questions, questions that would be asked if the issue concerned any other sphere of human activity. Instead, they are happy to discuss the problem in accordance with the agenda set by the conventional medical establishment, the excuses, the self-justifications. Journalists never challenge that agenda, they invariably go along with it.

• The NHS is inadequately resourced.
• The NHS needs to be restructured, re-organised.
• The patient population is ageing, and this is why there is increased demand.
• More sick patients, with more and more illnesses, are being treated every year.

The problem is non of these things. The problem with the NHS is not financial, it is not organisational, IT IS MEDICAL!

• Conventional medicine does not work. It is not effective. It rarely, if ever, has successful or effective treatments available that actually cure sick people. They ameliorate, they provide temporary fixes. But patients are seldom completely well again.

• Indeed, the pharmaceutical drugs that form the basis of conventional medical treatment make patients sicker. Doctors call them 'side effects'. They are really 'disease-inducing-effects', in other words, they actually cause disease. More disease, that is, for the NHS to treat! More cost. More work. More pressure.

• When conventional medicine tries to prevent disease (often benign illnesses) its main weapon is vaccines. And vaccines also cause disease, especially to children, who then become long-term NHS patients, with long-term needs, long-term sickness, such as ADHD, Autism, Asthma, and many others. More disease for the NHS to treat. More cost for the NHS. More work and pressure for staff.

• These doctor-induced (iatrogenic) diseases are now running at epidemic levels. And conventional medicine has no effective treatment for these illnesses, most of them, at least in part, caused by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. These epidemic diseases are at the heart of the ongoing NHS crisis, and they always have been.

The government will almost certainly provide the NHS with more resources, given sufficient pressure from doctors and patients, from patient support groups, supported (in the background) by the pharmaceutical industry, and unchallenged by the mainstream media, by politicians, and by governments, who ask no questions, and fail to challenge the conventional medical establishment about its failure to cope.

So what good will this new funding do? There will be more money for largely ineffective treatments that will fail to reduce the sick population and so fail to reduce workload. There will be more more money to spend on more pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines which, through their 'side effects', will increase levels of sickness and disease, adding to the future workload of the NHS. And with increased demand on NHS resources, there will be another funding crisis.

And this will continue until proper, pertinent, challenging questions are asked of the conventional medical establishment about the performance they are achieving from the money they are already spending, and the outcome of this expenditure on patient outcomes.

To keep yourself regularly informed about the failings of the conventional medial system, and to search for safer, more effective medical treatment, click on 'follow this blog' to the right of this blog. This will notify you whenever new blogs are published.

Iatrogenic Disease. A warning from a doctor

I am usually critical of doctors, not least because they are the people who give patients ineffective and unsafe pharmaceutical drugs. However, occasionally a doctor is prepared to raise his head above the parapet. Dr Des Spence is a GP in Glasgow, and a tutor at Glasgow University, and he published a blog, "Gabapentinoids - the new diazepam?" in the Pulse magazine (9 September 2016). He talks of the advice of 'experts' and 'media doctors', who tell doctors what to think "however mindless it might be".

          "We GPs are ‘seen’ to take on this advice, but then systematically ignore it. We won’t prescribe statins to everyone because it is irrational and stupid. We don’t accept that ‘pain is what the patients says it is’, because common sense dictates that it isn’t. Regrettably the infallibility of NICE and the deference shown to the ‘expert’ is creating overtreatment, medicalisation and iatrogenic harm. And iatrogenic harm is the worst of all  harms, for doctors are responsible and it is wholly preventable." (My emphasis).

A doctor who recognises the enormity of iatrogenic harm is an unusual doctor. This blog continually points out that the so-called 'side effects' of pharmaceutical drugs are for the patient new diseases, often diseases worse than the condition for which the drug is taken. My e-book, 'DIE's: The "Disease Inducing Effects" of Drugs and Vaccines' is looking at specific illnesses and diseases and examining the pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines known to cause the condition.

Dr Spence continues by comparing the use of the drug, Diazepam, and other benzodiazepine drugs (of which Valium and Librium are perhaps best known) "... peddled as a safe and effective treatment for anxiety by companies and experts alike", with Gabapentinoid drugs. He describes how, when he started work in the 1990s, he had struggled with the "consequences of ... thoughtless advice" that produced "herds of middle-aged patients zonked out and dependent on benzodiazepines", and that his surgeries were dominated with "dealing with the fall out of dependence and abuse", including "drug seeking behaviours, lies, confrontation, rebound agitation, insomnia  and withdrawal seizures. Just chaos".

Dr Spence says that it took the medical establishment decades to realise the psychological and physical harm that was caused (but fails to mention that Benzodiazipine drugs are still prescribed today)! He does mention, however, that doctors are still dealing with the 'radioactive consequences' of the "rapid, widespread and poorly controlled prescribing of benzodiazepines in the 1970s and 1980s".

And Dr Spence abhors the thought that the medical establishment has not learnt a lesson from the Benzodiazepine scandal. I have written about Benzodiazepine drugs elsewhere. But Dr Spence brings us up to date with what is happening in the doctors surgeries today with another class of drug, Gabapentinoids, which he thinks are equally harmful.

          "In the last five years my sensor has been off the scale with the gabapentinoids (gabapentin and pregabalin). Patients are actively seeking gabapentinoids using the familiar crude acting skills, that I had witnessed with benzodiazepines 20 years earlier. A cocktail of anger, tears and threats in equal measure. Constant requests for dose increases, fanciful stories of lost scripts and a tag team approach with friends who ‘corroborate’ stories. The signs and symptoms of a drug of abuse and stigmata of iatrogenic harm."

Gabapentinoids, of which the brand name Neurontin, is perhaps best known, is a drug used to treat epilepsy, neuropathic pain, hot flashes, restless leg syndrome, epilepsy, neuropathic pain, post-herpetic neuralgia, and central neuropathic pain. It has a considerable number of known side effects, including sleepiness, dizziness, drowsiness, ataxia, peripheral oedema, tremor, sexual dysfunction, suicide, and aggressive behaviour. It was first approved in 1993.

We live in a society in which conventional medicine encourages us to take drugs for our health. The difference between taking drugs for health, and taking drugs for recreation is small. Gabapentinoids have been described as the ‘ideal psychotropic drug’, producing ‘great euphoria’, ‘disassociation’, ‘opiate buzz’, and other mind enhancing effects so loved by those who crave to such mind-changing, but addictive effects. So prescriptions for these drugs are apparently soaring, doubling in just three years. De Spence says that many doctors prescribe them 'freely and loosely' on the basis of specialist endorsement, even though he claims there are more effective and less harmful alternatives.

Pregabalin is already a controlled medication in the USA (and there is debate about controls in the UK), the research base for the benefits of gabapentinoids is of a short duration and in a small, defined population where as few as one in 10 benefit [7].

Dr Spence ends his blog with an important question, do we want "another benzodiazepines-style disaster all over again?" The answer is, of course, 'NO'. Yet will we get suffer another one? The answer, from past experience, is that if pharmaceutical companies can profit from selling a drug, they will pressurise governments, health authorities, and drug regulators to approve it, and the medical establishment will press doctors to prescribe it. And they will continue to do so until it harms so many people that the media can no longer ignore it, and its dangerousness can not longer be kept from us. It is the way that the conventional medical establishment works!

And it is not just Gabapentinoids that will cause such disasters, iatrogenic disease is being caused daily by a multitude of pharmaceutical drugs.

When doctors strike, mortality decreases

Without doctors we would all be safer! 

I have heard this for some time,  but now some research appears to have supported the idea. This is the abstract from a piece of recent research.

               "A paradoxical pattern has been suggested in the literature on doctors' strikes: when health workers go on strike, mortality stays level or decreases. We performed a review of the literature during the past forty years to assess this paradox. We used PubMed, EconLit and Jstor to locate all peer-reviewed English-language articles presenting data analysis on mortality associated with doctors' strikes. We identified 156 articles, seven of which met our search criteria. The articles analyzed five strikes around the world, all between 1976 and 2003. The strikes lasted between nine days and seventeen weeks. All reported that mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. None found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods. The paradoxical finding that physician strikes are associated with reduced mortality may be explained by several factors. Most importantly, elective surgeries are curtailed during strikes. Further, hospitals often re-assign scarce staff and emergency care was available during all of the strikes. Finally, none of the strikes may have lasted long enough to assess the effects of long-term reduced access to a physician. Nonetheless, the literature suggests that reductions in mortality may result from these strikes.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VBF-4TN2FGB-3&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2008&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=gateway&_origin=gateway&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=97198db42c787141d98d3b0f49915b61&searchtype=a

It is not paradoxical! Striking doctors mean that patients cannot get hold of the pharmaceutical drugs that have become the leading cause of death. Iatrogenic disease is avoided. Conventional medicine is a medical system we should all be avoiding, including our GPs, if all they can do is to prescribe drugs, and their side effects and DIEs.

Conventional Medicine now the leading cause of death?

It has been estimated that 28,000 die, and there are almost 700,000 emergencies, arising from pharmaceutical drug poisoning in the USA.

http://hiddenhealthscience.com/2011/03/28000-people-die-from-pharmaceutical-poisining-annually/

These statistics were released recently by the American College of Emergency Physicians. The article says that conventional medicine is the 2nd largest cause of injury-related deaths in the USA. But the situation is actually worse than this.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed.htm

This feature states that the American Health System is the leading cause of death and injury in the USA. It uses similar figures, but the analysis of the horrific scale of iatrogenic (doctor-induced) disease. It asks whether American medicine is working, and calls for 'complete and total reform'.

Actually, the conventional medical system cannot be reformed, it cannot be safe - for two reasons. First, the whole premise on which conventional medicine drugs are based makes them unsafe - inherently unsafe. The second is that Big Pharma companies seem to show little or no interest in admitting that it is causing such dreadful carnage, leave alone reforming itself.

The details of the carnage are even more revealing. When you examine the details of how people are killed by the medical system, the full enormity of the problem, and the enormous financial costs it generates, strikes home.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed/deaths.htm

If there was ever evidence needed for a 'safe medicine' blog, these three web pages provides it. The solution is not reform, even if it is 'complete and total'. It is abandonment, an admission that conventional medicine, based on Big Pharma drugs is not sustainable. We need homeopathy, and other CAM medical therapies to come to the rescue.