Medical Science. It does not test new pharmaceutical drugs for side effects that can harm patients!

Since the Thalidomide tragedy of the 1950's and 1960's new drug testing regimes were introduced that would test all new pharmaceutical drugs their efficacy, and their safety. Never again, we were told, would such a tragedy be perpetrated on patients by the drug industry. Drug regulation was to be tightened, and medical science was to be our safeguard against harmful and dangerous drugs.

So since that time all new drugs have been tested, and we have been told that they are both safe and effective. Yet it is undeniably true that many new drugs and vaccines, that have gone through this process of testing, and subsequently prescribed by doctors to patients, have eventually been withdrawn BECAUSE they proved to be ineffective, or harmful and dangerous to patients.

Why should this be? This new evidence should provide one of the answers.

Researchers from the University of York reported in January 2019 that only about 65% of medical drug trial recognise the possibility of side effects, and included them in their reviews.

So conventional medicine is not as safe, and is even more dangerous, than we have been led to believe. The study reviewed 187 research papers undertaken in 2017-2018 and found that only one-third of harmful drug side effects were recorded in medical trials. About 35% of research studies, which are supposed to investigate the safety and effectiveness of pharmaceutical drugs, actually do so. In 8% of the trials they were not set up to study side effects at all, and a further 27% did so only partially.

What this means is that any new pharmaceutical drug coming on to the market cannot be assumed to be safe. Medical science may not even bother to find out. Although patientws have been led to believe that conventional medicine is based on a 'scientific evidence base' this is not necessarily so. Medical science has failed in its primary purpose - to protect patients from harmful drugs.

So when doctors tell us that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are safe they may believe this to be true, but they have been misinformed.

So patients have to be weary - to say the least! Pharmaceutical drugs harm patients through their side effects, and conventional medicine has not even bothered to ensure that medical science has tested new drugs properly.

The Health Debate (6). Why pharmaceutical drug testing & regulation fails to protect us

Both Drug Testing, and Drug Regulation regimes have been established around the world now for many decades, introduced to protect patients from pharmaceutical drugs that were a threat to our health - drugs like Thalidomide, which caused such havoc to the lives of so many families in the late 1960s, early 1970s.

Both Testing and Regulatory regimes came into being in recognition of the simple, and undeniable fact that conventional medicine, and pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, in particular, were inherently unsafe, and that the public needed to be safeguarded from them.

However, one notable feature of both Testing and Regulatory regimes over the last 40 years and more, and throughout the world, has been their apparent inability and failure to protect us from useless and dangerous drugs, vaccines and other treatments.

Drug testing has allowed new drugs to be introduced to patients on a regular basis, pronouncing each one to be both effective and safe, often proclaiming them to be 'wonder drugs' , or 'magic bullets. They are marketed, prescribed to patients for many years, usually producing enormous profits for the pharmaceutical drug companies, but one-by-one these same drugs have been found to be dangerous, or ineffective, or both, and they have had to be progressively restricted in their use before eventually being withdrawn or banned.

Drug Regulation was established to verify that new drugs have been properly tested for both safety and effectiveness, prior to giving them approval for use with patients. After this, drug regulatory agencies were supposed to monitor the performance of drugs when patients use them, monitoring side effects and adverse drug reactions. However, in far too many instances, drug regulators have allowed pharmaceutical drugs to be used many years, long after they were found to be unsafe or dangerous.

The Health Debate should concern itself with these issues. It should investigate the performance, and even the basic integrity and honesty of both these processes. Indeed, if the mainstream media had any compassion for their readers, listeners or viewers, all of whom are also patients and consumers of these drugs, they would have been asking several key questions many, many years ago - questions that could have saved lives.

• Why is medical science unable to ensure that all pharmaceutical drugs are safe and effective, and why can't they do so before, rather than after, they have been given to patients, causing serious, detrimental and even lethal effects on our health?

• Why does drug testing regularly fail to reflect the later outcomes - when pharmaceutical drugs are prescribed to patients - and found to be useless or dangerous or both?

• Is the process of drug testing sufficiently independent from the influence of the pharmaceutical companies? When drug companies fund medical science to test their drugs is this not a conflict of interest? And if not, why not?

• Are 'negative' drug trial results routinely publicised, and made available to the drug regulatory agencies? Are key conventional medical bodies routinely made aware of negative testing results, and if so, do they inform doctors or patients?

• Why does drug regulation fail to pick up the regular and ongoing inadequacy of the drug testing of medical science? Why do they continue to approve drugs that are ineffective and unsafe?

• Why do drug regulatory agencies fail to monitoring the performance of pharmaceutical drugs, and pick up and take action when their serious adverse reactions, and disease-inducing effects (DIEs) become apparent?

• Are drug regulatory agencies around the world sufficiently independent from the influence of the pharmaceutical industry? And if not, why not?

• Why is it that only an estimated 10% of the 'side effects' and 'adverse reactions' to pharmaceutical drugs ever reported by patients through their doctors? And does this minimal reporting mean that these drugs are 10 times more harmful than we are told?

• Why are drug regulators so slow to restrict and ban pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines? Why do they ignore problems with drugs when they first become known, and wait, sometimes for decades, before taking action against them?

• Does the precautionary principle not apply to matters relating to health?

• Does the hippocratic principle of 'First do no harm' not apply to conventional medicine?

• Why are pharmaceutical drugs banned in one country, by one regulator, still allowed to be sold in another country by another regulator? Why, for instance, are drugs banned in the USA, but are still allowed to be sold in this country? And vice versa?

• Is drug testing, and drug regulation failing because conventional medicine is an inherently dangerous and ineffective medical system?

• And are there safer, more effective medical therapies available to patients that do not afflicted with such serious dangers?

Statistics are readily available about the dangers of pharmaceutical drugs, for instance, the number of hospital admissions arising from taking them, and the number of fatalities known to be caused by taking them. These statistics demonstrate clearly that medical science, drug testing, and drug regulation is failing. Unfortunately, these statistic are routinely ignored by the mainstream media.

The seventh part of this series concerns the issue of Patient Choice, and the monopoly of conventional medical treatment within the NHS, and most national health services around the world.

If you would like to join the health debate you can follow this blog, and receive email notification of new issues, as they arise.

THE HEALTH DEBATE 
These are the links to other blogs in this series

(1) WHY DOES THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA REFUSE TO TAKE PART?

(2) HOW EFFECTIVE ARE PHARMACEUTICAL DRUGS?

(3) THE SAFETY OF CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE

(4) THE COST OF CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE

(5) THE EPIDEMIC RISE OF CHRONIC DISEASE

(6) WHY DOES MEDICAL SCIENCE, DRUG TESTING & REGULATION, FAIL PATIENTS?

(7) HEALTH FREEDOM, PATIENT CHOICE & THE CONVENTIONAL MEDICAL MONOPOLY