Heart Failure. Conventional medicine comes up with another new 'therapeutic standard' - combining 4 pharmaceutical drugs together!

Quadruple therapy should be 'new therapeutic standard' 

for heart failure, say researchers

This is the MIMS headline, heralding a Lancet study that "found significant gains in life expectancy associated with a 'comprehensive contemporary regimen' comprising an angiotensin II receptor antagonist/neprilysin inhibitor (ARNI), beta-blocker, aldosterone antagonist and SGLT2 inhibitor, compared with conventional therapy".

So should patients with heart failure feel reassured that pharmaceutical medicine has found a successful treatment for their condition?

The drugs mentioned by MIMS are well known; and each one of the pharmaceutical drug mentioned has well known and serious adverse reactions; that is, they are potentially very harmful to our health. This, of course, is not mentioned by MIMS.

Angiotensin II receptor antagonists/neprilysin inhibitors (ARNI)

This class of drugs includes valsartan and losartan. The known side effects of these drugs include mental confusion, irregular heartbeat, hypotension, chest pain, and much else (click on the individual drug above to see a full list of harmful side effects that conventional medicine already admits).


Beta-blockers

These drugs have been marketed to patients with heart conditions for decades. They include Acebutolol (Sectral), Atenolol (Tenormin), Bisoprolol (Zebeta), Metoprolol (Lopressor, Toprol XL), Nadolol (Corgard), Nebivolol (Bystolic) and Propranolol (Inderal, InnoPran XL). They all have well known side effects which include fatigue, weight gain, depression, shortness of breath, insomnia, and much much more.

Aldosterone antagonists

These include epleronone and spironolactone, both of which have long list of serious side effects, including irregular heartbeat, seizures, shortness of breath, loss of consciousness, and much else.

SGLT2 inhibitors

These include canaglifozin, empagliflozin and dapagliflozin, which all come with very long lists of serious mental and physical side effects too.

In addition to the known side effects caused by each of these four classes of drug, combining them will inevitably lead to drug interactions, which will add to the already long list of potential side effects of this combined treatment.

MIMS, of course, talks up the prospects of this polypharmaceutical madness. They confirm that the researchers "found that over a lifetime of use, assuming consistent treatment effects, the comprehensive regimen could add up to 8 years of survival free from cardiovascular events and hospitalisation due to heart failure."

Yet notice that the comparator used in this research is not a safer, more effective natural therapy, like  homeopathy, but "with conventional therapy" - that is, treatments that has failed to treat heart failure over many decades, and which has probably added to the epidemic levels of heart failure that we are now experiencing.

The best predictor of future performance is past performance, and if so, MIMS unbridled optimism flies in the face of all experience of pharmaceutical medicine, especially in the last 70 years. There is no doubt this treatment will now be used with hundreds of thousands of patients with heart failure around the world. 

• Let's hope that no patient undertakes this treatment without first being warned by doctors about the long list of serious side effects that will inevitably be involved. 
• Let's hope no-one agrees to this treatment without checking for themselves the appalling track record of each of these drugs.
• Let's hope the outcome for all these patients fulfills the optimism of MIMS rather than past performance of pharmaceutical medicine.

But I, for one, will not be holding my breath -

This is pharmaceutical drug treatment best avoided at all costs.

Radiation Therapy. Is it safe?

My blog often highlights ConMed drugs because they cause disease and kill. But what about other ConMed 'therapies'? Radiation therapy is increasing, for a variety of testing and treatments. Are they safe? I have recently come across this - from the New York Times, giving access to a variety of articles examining the issues that are arising from the increasing use of medical radiation, and the technologies that deliver it. It makes frightening reading. 


http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/us/series/radiation_boom/index.html?ref=health

Topics include:
After stroke scans, patients face serious new health risks
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/health/01radiation.html?_r=1&ref=radiation_boom
Radiation faces new cures, and new way to harm
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html?ref=radiation_boom
As technology surges, radiation safeguards lag
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/27radiation.html?ref=radiation_boom

To support these growing concerns, and to show that they are not new, this is an extract from Kevin Morris's book, called "It's only a disease; how I fought terminal cancer and won" which features the history of the treatment of cancer with radiotherapy.

"The story of radiotherapy's rise to prominence as a cancer treatment is 
a fascinating one. James Douglas of the Phelps-Dodge copper mining 
company, set up the National Radium Institute in 1913. At the same time, 
he made a massive, one hundred thousand- dollar gift to Memorial 
Hospital in the United States. As the hospital was in serious financial 
difficulties, Douglas' gift was most welcome, but it came with several 
strings attached. He insisted that the hospital only treat cancer 
patients, that it routinely offer radium treatment, and he also 
installed his friend as chief pathologist and later as medical director. 
The Memorial went on to become one of the main cancer research and 
treatment centres in the States and radiation treatment was on offer 
there from the beginning. Douglas' shrewd moves placed the Memorial 
Hospital in the position of being a distribution centre for the radium 
produced by his mining interests.

In 1902, the first incidence of a human cancer brought about by 
X-radiation was noted and in 1906 it was suggested that exposure to 
radiation from radium could cause leukaemia. By 1911, 94 cases of 
radiation induced cancer had been reported, more than half of them in 
doctors or technicians. In 1911, 94 cases of cancer caused by radiation 
had been noted. Despite these serious cautions, doctors appeared to be 
swayed into using it by the profit motive. In 1914, one doctor told the 
New York Times that,

"Something is created which kills many patients. I cannot tell, nobody 
can tell, for four or five years just what the results will be. I simply 
feel that I've shoved these patients over a little quicker." /The sting 
in the tail came in the doctor's comment that '/I can double my money in 
a year while charging 4 cents per milligram per hour.' New York Times, 
January 27 1914.


What Kevin suggests here is that the concerns about radiation have been around for a long time - and that ConMed does not seem to learn from its many, regular mistakes that put patients at risk.