A Sociological assessment of the 'benefits' of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines

An eminent American sociologist, Donald Light, has weighed in on the debate about pharmaceutical drugs. In fact, he did so in June 2013, four years ago, when his research was published in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics was published (Vol 14, No 3: 590-610), entitled "Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs". This is what he said summarising his devastating findings:

               "Over the past 35 years, patients have suffered from a largely hidden epidemic of side effects from drugs that usually have few offsetting benefits. The pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the practice of medicine through its influence over what drugs are developed, how they are tested, and how medical knowledge is created. Since 1906, heavy commercial influence has compromised Congressional legislation to protect the public from unsafe drugs. The authorization of user fees in 1992 has turned drug companies into the FDA’s prime clients, deepening the regulatory and cultural capture of the agency. Industry has demanded shorter average review times and, with less time to thoroughly review evidence, increased hospitalizations and deaths have resulted. Meeting the needs of the drug companies has taken priority over meeting the needs of patients. Unless this corruption of regulatory intent is reversed, the situation will continue to deteriorate. We offer practical suggestions including: separating the funding of clinical trials from their conduct, analysis, and publication: independent FDA leadership; full public funding for all FDA activities; measures to discourage R&D on drugs with few if any new clinical benefits; and the creation of a National Drug Safety Board."

In the journal 'Footnotes' journal of the American Sociological Association, Light was described as the 2013 recipient of ASA’s Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology, and he said this in his article, 'The Epidemic of Sickness and Death from Prescription Drugs' he had more to say, and it is sufficient here to repeat his words in a series of hard-hitting statements:

               "At the intersection of medical and economic sociology sits prescription drugs. Economically, the strange, government-protected markets for drugs lead to prices largely unrelated to either value or cost, though companies claim they reflect one or the other, or both at the same time." 

               "Epidemiologically, appropriately prescribed, prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death, tied with stroke at about 2,460 deaths each week in the United States. About 330,000 patients die each year from prescription drugs in the United States and Europe. They cause an epidemic of about 20 times more hospitalizations, as well as falls, road accidents, and about 80 million medically minor problems such as pains, discomforts, and dysfunctions that hobble productivity or the ability to care for others. Deaths and adverse effects from overmedication, errors, and self-medication would increase these figures."

               "The Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard is devoted to researching “institutional corruption” in a range of domains, including Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Institutional corruption refers to legal ways in which an institution’s social mission and basic values get distorted, usually by big money. For example, the FDA, developed around a series of drug disasters to protect the public from unsafe and ineffective drugs, devotes only 10 percent of its budget to monitoring for harmful side effects. Further, evidence of serious risks is reviewed by the same committee that approved the drug in the first place as 'safe and effective'. This builds on another institutionally corrupt arrangement - companies testing their own products. They use well-documented techniques to produce evidence that new drugs appear safer and less harmful than they are in actual practice. These practices include randomly sampling from a preselected biased population, using substitute outcome measures, and using a high dose to hasten evidence of benefit while running trials too short to record the resulting adverse side effects.

Light states there hitherto there has been a lack of sociological research into the prevalence of mild and serious harms from prescription drugs.

               "Medical sociologists often concentrate their research on diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease rather than on prescription drugs as major cause of illness and death. Drugs as a major health risk, especially given that few new ones have offsetting advantages compared to their higher risks, unites the two sides of medical sociology because physicians prescribe them to help patients. It’s a field waiting for graduate students and faculty to explore."

The articles goes into detail about the operation of large pharmaceutical companies, which Light studied, and led his to realise that a far worse problem existed.... "the epidemic of harmful side effects from drugs that usually offer few or no new clinical advantages over existing drugs to offset their risks."

Light and his colleague went into many other medically related sociological issues, including evidence that new drugs were no better than old ones, questioning how much benefit drugs conferred, how inadequate testing regularly produced disasters such as those associated with Vioxx, that drug pricing was unjustified, and that American federal law required that Medicare payoff any FDA approved drug at the prices drug companies set. His conclusion was clear.

               "What, then, is going on? We concluded that companies charge unaffordable, impoverishing prices because legal protections in the United States encourage them. Further, we found in the large data set on prescription prices .... that companies keep raising these prices in subsequent years, doubling every five years. Thus the pricing of cancer, cardiovascular, and other specialty drugs can be characterized as 'market spiral pricing'.” 

The other factor spiralling out of control is the damage pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are doing to patients throughout the world.

Aspirin causes gastrointestinal bleeding, so the solution is to take PPI drugs which cause .... and so it goes on!

Medical Research scientists at Oxford University have studied over 3,000 patients over 75 years taking anti-platelet drugs, notably aspirin, over a 10-year period. More than 300, that is, 10%, were taken to hospital for gastrointestinal bleeding. They concluded that the overall risk of developing serious bleeding was 10 times higher, which they concluded was "at least as likely to be disabling or fatal" as another stroke. The research was published in the Lancet yesterday, 13th June 2017, "Age-specific risks, severity, time course, and outcome of bleeding on long-term antiplatelet treatment after vascular events: a population-based cohort study".

The research estimated that between 40–66% of adults aged 75 years or older in the USA and Europe take daily aspirin, or another anti platelet drug. Aspirin is known to increase the risk of major gastrointestinal bleeding. Indeed conventional medicine has known this for decades, and this is not the first time medical science has proved it! So what is new? Nothing really. This research proves that aspirin causes more bleeding in more older people than was previously thought!

What this demonstrates is that it takes the conventional medical establishment a long time to work out the damage caused by pharmaceutical drugs! Aspirin was first patented as a drug in 1889, nearly 130 years ago, so it might have been hoped, even expected, that by now they might by now realise the full extent of the damage it is causing to patients. Clearly they do not!

It is proof, if proof is really needed, that conventional medicine is happy to provide patients with dangerous drugs, for a century and more, without fully realising just how dangerous they are to human health!

Worse is the conclusion that the researchers drew from this new evidence. Aspirin may be dangerous, but the solution is not to stop taking it, but to take another pharmaceutical drug instead, PPI's or Proton Pump Inhibitor drugs. So are these drugs safe? Of course not. As my 'Why Homeopathy?' webpage outlines, PPI's are known to cause a host of serious problems - the superbug C.Diff, Pneumonia, Osteoporosis, Heart Attacks, Kidney damage, and dementia. And, of course, all these diseases are suffered particularly by older people!

So, out of the frying pan into the fire? Well, not really. Patients take them together. So they are both in the frying pan and the fire!

It must also be remembered that conventional medicine has been using Aspirin and PPI's together for many years. It is not new advice.  This is how the doctor's e-magazine, Pulse, puts it.

               "Current NICE guidance on NSAID prescribing already recommends co-prescription of PPIs in patients at increased risk of adverse GI effects, which includes those aged 65 or above. Despite this, such treatment is not routine and among the study participants just one third of patients were prescribed a PPI. Experts are now calling for guidance to be updated so that patients aged 75 or above on long-term anti-platelet therapy are routinely co-prescribed a PPI."

So this is another piece of medical science that clearly demonstrates harm but does absolutely nothing about it. Yet there is a further problem. If patients taking Aspirin need to take another drug to stop gastrointestinal bleeding, do they also need to take further drugs to prevent its other known side effects? This is not mentioned! But Aspirin is known to cause a whole host of other serious side effects. My blog "Aspirin. That nice, harmless painkiller, outlines the following information:

• Although used to prevent heart attacks and strokes Aspirin is known that aspirin actually doubles the risk.
• Aspirin is known to cause a variety of eyesight problems, from macular degeneration to blindness.
• Although aspirin is sometimes used to prevent cancer, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that it is actually linked to "a significantly increased risk of developing cancer".
• And one study, undertaken at the University of Florida and reported in the magazine WDDTY (What Doctor's Don't Tell You), showed that patients taking regular doses of aspirin increased their risk of dying by 47%.

So do patients need to guard against these side effects? There is silence on this! And so the conventional medical circus rolls on, apparently learning lots, but understanding little. Conventional medicine is a game of pretence - pretending to care about whether pharmaceutical drugs cause harm to patients, but when they discover that they do, doing little or nothing about it. The charade just carries on.

• "The drugs do more good than harm!" - but with precious little evidence of what good they actually do.
• "All medical treatment has side effects!" - a nonsense statement for anyone who knows about homeopathy, acupuncture and most every other forms of traditional or alternative medicine.

Antidepressant Drugs and Depression. Another sign of the failure of conventional medicine

A doctor, writing in the GP's magazine 'Pulse' has said that doctors "need to stop prescribing antidepressants".  These medications, he says, are overprescribed and prescribed for too long. He is, of course, talking against the perceived wisdom of the conventional medical establishment, that has been stating for several years that mental health, and depression in particular, has been under-diagnosed and under-treated, and more drug treatment is needed. Dr Des Spence, a GP in Glasgow, and a tutor at the University of Glasgow, says this:

               "The ‘Defeat Depression’ campaign in adults in the 1990s was an unmitigated disaster for society. It led to vast numbers of prescriptions, lifelong treatment and side effects. Antidepressant prescribing rates have since doubled in a decade, to an eye watering 61 million prescriptions in 2015."

This campaign was orchestrated by the pharmaceutical industry, to promote and sell its antidepressant drugs which were based on the 'chemical imbalance' theory of depression. Drug companies believed (or at least they wanted us to believe) that antidepressant drugs could rectify this imbalance. But, as Spence states, the chemical imbalance theory "has limited science to support it", and cites this study, Lacasse JR, Leo J. Serotonin and depression: a disconnect between the advertisements and the scientific literature. PLoS Med 2005; 12: e392, to support this. Certainly, the use of antidepressant like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, SSRI (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor) antidepressants that were designed to increase Serotonin levels in the brain, have been spectacularly unsuccessful!

Spence mentions that there is "much evidence suggesting antidepressants are completely ineffective". He quotes two studies to support his statement,

               Fournier JC et al. Antidepressant drug effects and depression severity: a patient-level meta-analysis. JAMA 2010; 303: 47-53

               Kirsch I et al. Initial severity and antidepressant benefits: a meta-analysis of data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. PLoS Med 2008; 5:e45 

He also mentioned studies that I have already mentioned in my blogs, namely "that even by the most optimistic calculations 85% of patients get no benefit from medication at all".

               Arroll B et al. Antidepressants versus placebo for depression in primary care. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2009; 3: CD007954

               Haddad PM, Anderson IM. Recognising and managing antidepressant discontinuation symptoms. Adv Psychiatr Treat 2007; 13: 447–57

Spence also mention the withdrawal symptoms when patients have to stop taking the drugs, causing agitation, insomnia and mood swings "which many construe as a return of their low mood".

Yet he does not mention how spectacularly dangerous antidepressant drugs have been. I have written about this extensively on this page of my 'Why Homeopathy? website. There is now convincing evidence that these drugs have become a major cause of violence and suicide. The dangers of antidepressants is well-enough This does not prevent the conventional medical establishment promoting such drugs. It never has! And Spence himself knows that amongst his peers he is a voice in the wilderness.

               "Most people in primary care have reactive depression or adjustment disorders. But challenging this prevailing wisdom of course means I am stigmatising and dismissing mental illness and should be shouted down. But we all suffer mental illness at times, be it anxiety or depression, I know that I certainly have. The issue is how we manage mental illness."

                "Clearly psychological pain, just like physical pain, has a purpose - it is an evolutionary response. Psychological pain is the catalyst of change, acceptance and moving on. Talking it through, addressing social stresses, changing lifestyle and perhaps ending unhappy relationships is the solution. Antidepressants are not the answer for the vast, vast majority of people. We should aim to normalise, not medicalise."

                "Of course this will be dismissed as simplistic drivel, as life ‘is more complex than this’. But in my view it isn't, it really is as simple as that." 

Presumably Spence realises that his colleagues will prescribe antidepressant drugs quite regardless of how ineffective they are, or how dangerous they can be. This is what happens within the NHS. He calls for more use of, and improved access to counselling as a top priority. But he probably realises that 'talking therapies' are not profitable to the pharmaceutical industry, and so are unlikely to be promoted as he wants.

Yet Spence's article does indicate that there are doctors out there, no doubt too few, who are beginning to realise that conventional, drug-based medicine, is failing. So far (at the time of writing) there have been 43 responses to his article. I have looked through these, and perhaps 5 are critical of his article. Most responses seem resigned in hopelessness - doctors have to respond somehow - prescribing antibiotic drugs is 'pragmatic' -  they may not work, but they are effective as 'placebo'. A few responses suggest that if this is true of the prescription of antidepressant drugs, it is also true of antibiotics, and many other areas of conventional medical practice.

Sadly, few doctors seem to be aware of the serious side effects of antidepressant drugs. But the realisation that conventional medicine is failing is slowly progressing, and this article, and the responses, show that even the soldiers, the ground troops of conventional medicine, are realising that the game is up.

A case of Phlebitis, cured with Homeopathy, but then denied by conventional doctors

This is a story of homeopathy successfully treating an illness, Phlebitis, which had been formally diagnosed by conventional medical staff, but who were not treating is successfully. Once the condition had improved with homeopathy, a doctor and a specialist refused to accept that homeopathy could have any affect on the condition, so the answer must be that she never had the condition - it had been wrong diagnosed! Such is the denial of the conventional medical establishment.

It was July 2004 when Catherine (not her real name) came to see me. She was 79 years old. The condition she wanted me to treat had been diagnosed as Phlebitis, and her doctor was treating it, but she said without much success. She was going to see the practice nurse after our appointment. She was having her leg bandaged.

Catherine showed me her problem left leg. It had a thick dark mark running down it from several inches below her knee to her ankle. She complained of shooting pains, upwards from her ankle to her calf, which led to an aching pain. Her ankles were swollen ankles. Although in the morning she could be free of pain the shooting pain could happen any time, and the aching gets worse as day goes by. By the evening they became unbearable, and she had to sit with her feet up, which she did dislike as she  enjoys being active. She also complained of itching. Her leg generated heat. There was no ulceration. Walking was painful, but the pain tended to ease with exercise. Her other leg was not painful, although she had varicose veins in both legs for 25-30 years.

Catherine was also on conventional drugs, Losatin (for high blood pressure) and Pesentin (for a mini-stroke she had 2-3 years earlier). She also took aspirin for the arthritis in her right knee, and had regular flu vaccinations. But it was the pain that she wanted me to treat. It was becoming unbearable.

I saw Catherine again on 5th August 2004. The condition had not improved but she said that she was beginning to feel better "within herself". One thing that homeopathy teaches you is that feeling better, or stronger, or having more energy is often a precursor to the body getting stronger, and so getting more able to cope with physical conditions like phlebitis. So I decided to stick with the remedy I had been giving her - Hamamelis (made from Witch Hazel). I also looked at the side effects of one of the drug she was taking, Losartan, and wondered whether this might be causing or aggravating the condition. I decided to make a potentized remedy from the drug to see if this helped.

On 17th August 2004 Cathering phone me to say she had been given new drug, Arthrotec. She had taken a few of these, but had stopped as they gave her indigestion. But she was unsure whether this was making her leg better, or whether it was the homeopathic remedies. She said that the leg was looking better, and there was less pain. I asked her to continue taking the remedies as I had asked.

On 16th September 2004 we met again. Her leg was feeling much better, there was only a slight residual pain now. She also said her arthritis was a little better too, and wondered whether I had treated this too. I told her that I was treating her, and not any specific condition.

Ten days later, on 26th September 2004, Catherine phoned again. She has been to her hospital appointment, but the specialist told her that it could not have been Phlebitis, it had been something else. She had also told them that I had given her a homeopathic Losartin, but they said that this had no connection with her conditionHe had given it a name, but she could not remember what it was. Her leg, she said, was "not too bad, not much pain, but she still knows it is there".

Our next meeting was on 18th November 2004, Catherine confirmed that both her doctor, and her specialist had told  her that it was not Phlebitis that she had! She reflected that she had always been well, until she turned 75, when she started taking pharmaceutical drugs for high blood pressure. It was shortly after this that she had a mini-stroke. And then she began to suffer from a series of conditions.

Catherine had no pain at all, except for an occasional twinge. She wondered what the condition was that had caused so much pain. I asked her whether it mattered. Her doctor had called it phlebitis. Her specialist had contradicted the diagnosis. But the real point was, surely, that she was now free of pain, however the pain was diagnosed. I told her that the main remedy she had used, Hamamelis, was a well known, and often used remedy for Phlebitis, but if conventional medicine wanted to diagnose it with some other name, it made little difference.

Driving home I smiled, and shook my head. Conventional medicine had proved ineffective. Homeopathy had worked. So, faced with this, two doctors had preferred to admit that their diagnosis had been wrong rather than to acknowledge that homeopathy had worked.

For a comparison between the homeopathic and conventional treatment of Phlebitis, please go to this 'Why Homeopathy?' link.

Protelos. Another Big Pharma drug bites the dust! Osteoporosis sufferers beware!

The doctor's E-Magazine, Pulse, announced yesterday (5th June 2017) that GP's will have to review any osteoporisis patients treated with the drug Protelos, or Strontium Ranelate, as it "ceases to be available in the UK from August".

     Why is this?

The pharmaceutical company, Servier, said it was due to "decreasing numbers of prescriptions".

     Why the decrease in prescriptions?

Pulse says that this is due to evidence of a "heightened risk of cardiovascular events in 2014" so that it is now "only prescribed to patients who cannot use other approved treatments for the condition, and under careful monitoring."

In other words, Protelos is yet another drug that medical science, and drug regulators has passed as effective and safe has proven to be neither - certainly not safe!

The Pulse article says that Strontium ranelate has been used to treat severe osteoporosis in postmenopausal women, and adult men, who were unable to tolerate other osteoporosis drugs. Yet the history of the drug is more interesting than this!

First, reviewing the clinical trials that led to the drug's use, the evidence appears to show the most marginal improvement in bone fracture. Read about the two main trials on this Drug.com website.

               "When looking at results of the two studies taken together, fewer women in the Protelos group developed breaks at any site outside the spine (including the hip) than in the placebo group (331 out of 3,295 with Protelos compared with 389 out of 3,256 for placebo). This showed that the risk of breaking a bone is reduced."

For this marginal benefit, the Drug.com article goes on to outline the side effects - ischaemic heart disease (such as angina or a heart attack), peripheral arterial disease (obstruction of the blood flow in the arteries, usually in the legs), cerebrovascular disease (diseases affecting the blood vessels in the brain, such as stroke). Actually, there are many more serious side effects, see this NetDoctor website. But despite the (at best) marginal benefits, and the serious potential side effects, this conclusion was reached.

               "The CHMP (Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use) decided that Protelos’s benefits are greater than its risks and recommended that it be given marketing authorisation."

Clearly they were wrong! Yet this is not unusual in the history of pharmaceutical drugs. Risks are measured in grams, benefits in kilograms! It is more profitable for the drug companies that way!

Second, whilst the drug has been approved in Europe, it was not approved by the FDA in the USA! Clearly, conventional medicine concluded, as it often does, that the was 'safe' for Europeans, but not safe for Americans! I have no explanation for why this should be - but it happens quite frequently, one way or another!

So now patients on this unsafe drug have to be called in, and the Pulse article makes it clear that doctors do not have too many alternative treatments for them. So perhaps osteoporosis patients need to look seriously to alternative therapies for a solution to their condition!

Yet the most serious feature of this news is the conventional medicine has used an unsafe drug for osteoporosis patients for over a decade, on the basis that it was safe. Again, this is not unusual for the pharmaceutical industry, and the supine drug regulatory agencies.

• Protelos was approved in Europe in 2004 for the treatment of osteoporosis.
• In 2012, this approval was extended to men with an increased fracture risk.
• In April 2013 there was a recommendation to restrict the use of Protelos because of the risk of serious heart problems (including heart attacks), blood clots, and a range of other conditions such as serious skin reactions, disturbances in consciousness, seizures, liver inflammation and reduced number of blood cells.
• In January 2014 the EDA, the European drug regulator, 'following an in-depth review' decided that that Protelos should no longer be used to treat osteoporosis. The European Medicines Agency's Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee should not be available anymore as "the drug's risks outweigh its benefits".

So over three years have elapsed before Pulse has given this information to the doctor's who have been prescribing it.

• How many osteoporosis patients have been taking this dangerous pharmaceutical drug since 2004 on the basis of wrong information?
• How many osteoporosis patients have been taking this dangerous pharmaceutical drug since the EMA decided that the drug should be withdrawn?
• How many patients of conventional medicine are taking other dangerous pharmaceutical drugs that have not been banned AT THIS VERY MOMENT?

These appear to be unanswered questions. Indeed, they are questions that are never asked! The pharmaceutical industry cannot be trusted. The conventional medical establishment cannot be trusted to regulate the powerful drugs industry. 

What needs to be learnt from this situation is that patients who accept conventional medical treatment are just not safe. And remember, patients on Protelos still do not know about the risks they face, and have been facing, courtesy of this drug, for many years.

The failure of pharmaceutical drugs, but patients are kept in the dark.

The failure of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines should have been quite apparent to everyone now: except, of course, for the equally disgraceful failure of the conventional news media to report on the evidence for it! Evidence about the ineffectiveness of drugs, and their dangers, emerge regularly. Doctors and the conventional medical establishment does not tell us. And they are rarely publicised in the national media.

Three recent studies demonstrate how patients are being kept in the dark. All three point to the ineffectiveness and dangerousness of prescription drugs, all three have largely been published without patients being given to opportunity to know about them.

Useless Medicine
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has published an article that discussed the issue of 'useless' conventional medical treatment. It is called "Choosing Wisely in the UK: the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges’ initiative to reduce the harms of too much medicine". BMJ 2015;350:h2308.

The article indicates that it is not just the effectiveness of pharmaceutical drugs that is being discussed, but also the cost and the value to patients of the treatment, and its dangers. However, the conclusion it reaches is, to say the least, a mild one, merely that we are being offered too much of it! The article says that dozens of common medical treatments and procedures, routinely given to patients by doctors, are effectively pointless". The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AMRC) says that "scores of treatments which can be given to patients for various ailments ranging from grazes to cancer frequently do little more or the same as doing nothing at all, while also potentially incurring side effects".

It has been estimated that in Britain alone, the NHS is spending £2 billion on what are, in effect, "useless or harmful treatment”.

Harmful Medicine
Another study, published in May 2017 by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 2017; doi: 10.1001, has been reported by WDDTY. It looked at what has happened to FDA approved drugs since their approval. Remarkably, it found that one third of all FDA approved drugs subsequently turned out to have serious safety problems!

               "The dangers of the new drugs often don't come to light until four years after they have been licensed, which means that many thousands of patients may have been affected. But in every case, doctors and patients believed the drugs were safe because they had passed all the usual tests for safety and effectiveness."

So much for the ability of drug regulators to keep us all free from unsafe and dangerous medical drugs and vaccines!

NSAID Painkillers
Yet the situation is actually far worse even than this! It can take much more than 4 years for the dangers of pharmaceutical drugs to become known, and then accepted - a a lot longer for patients to be told!

For instance, conventional medicine has been feeding us painkilling drugs, in huge quantities, for over 100 years now. Ibuprofen is one of the 'younger' ones, and has become one of the stawlwarts of conventional medicine. It has been known about since the 1950's, its history summarised here and taken from the Prezi website.

     1958 First clinical trial of ibupeofen - it was found to be no better than aspirin!

     1961 A patent is filed for ibuprofen, and in 1964 Ibuprofen is selected for further development.

     1966 Clinical trials of ibuprofen take place at the Northern General Hospital in Edinburgh and show its anti-inflammatory effect in patients.

     1969 Ibuprofen launched in the UK on prescription only.

     1983 Because of its safety record, ibuprofen is made available without prescription.

So after such a long period of time, it might have been expected the conventional medicine were fully aware of the dangers of this type of painkiller. But this is not so!

A recent analysis, by a team at Bern University, evaluated 31 studies, involving over 116,000 patient,s who had taken the painkillers regularly, mostly for arthritis pain. Its findings were published in the British Medical Journal. As well as ibuprofen, naproxen, diclofenac, celecoxib, etoricoxib, rofecoxib or Vioxx, and lumiracoxib were also implicated in the findings.

               "It was found that compared with placebo, rofecoxib and lumiracoxib were associated with twice the risk of heart attack, while ibuprofen was associated with more than three times the risk of stroke. Etoricoxib and diclofenac were associated a fourfold risk of death from a heart attack or stroke."

Indeed, the study found that these painkillers could significantly increase the chances of having a heart attack within a week or a month, especially if high doses were taken. The research team found that more than 90% of all painkillers assessed were tied to a significant increased risk of heart attack.

Will Patients be told?
Yet it is unlikely that patients will be told about any of this, either by their doctors, or by the mainstream media. The ineffectiveness and dangers of conventional drugs have been frequently discovered in studies, but the information never seems to reach anyone outside a small group of academics. Certainly, the dangers of painkillers has been known about for decades. There are considerable constraints placed on doctors prescribing painkillers because of their known dangers. But patients are not told.

If doctors told patients about these dangers, if the mainstream media were prepared to publicise the dangers, patients would make their own decisions, an informed choice, about taking them and risking the serious dangers.

But patients are not told. Studies about the ineffectiveness of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines come and go without any impact on what doctors prescribe to to. Ask people about painkillers, and what they know about the dangers, and most would declare that they are fairly safe! After all, their doctors can prescribe them; anyone can buy them, openly, over-the-counter, without a doctor's prescription. And taking painkillers is something they, and their parents and grand-parents have done for years.

Medical science is a game without outcome, without consequence. Pharmaceutical drugs may be useless. They may be dangerous. If might not even be known how useless or dangerous they are! But patients are told only about the 'positive' science: the new 'wonder' drugs. The negative stuff remains an insiders secret, something doctors dare not tell us, and the mainstream will not tell us!

Pets? We love them. We do our best for them. And vets? Do they take advantage of our compassion?

It is difficult being ill! It is even more difficult when we see someone else is ill. We want to help. So we go to the doctor. And readers of this blog will know that doctors often give us drugs, vaccines, and other treatments that do not make us better, and too often make us worse. We think we are consulting experts when actually we are consulting representatives of an industry devoted to a highly profitable, and often a highly devious and dishonest business.

How much worse is this when it is our animals, our pets, who are ill?

They cannot speak. They cannot tell us what is wrong. We often fear the worst, so we consult with an expert, a vet, who we believe will tell us what is wrong, and give us something to make it right. We assume this is what they do. Most animal owners rely on their vet to give impartial, ethical and evidence-based advise for the animals we care for. Yet, is this so?

               "Vets4InformedChoice has been set up to raise awareness of the evidence base (or lack of) for many current veterinary practices, enabling animal owners and guardians to make considered responsible choices without undue pressure from the Veterinary Industry."

All animal owners, whether pets or farm animals, should look at this new website if they want to make an 'informed choice'. Click here to join up, and get regular updates from them. This is what they say.

               "Vets have always had conflicts of interest that they have to try and resolve while at the same time earning enough to provide for themselves, their staff, and maintaining the ever more demanding level of service provision clients expect in this information fuelled age."

               "The vets governing body, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, requires them to be open, transparent in their business practices, and that they must give clients all the options available to them for treatment. This engagement should result in  fully informed consent with understanding from the Animal Owner as to risks, benefits, and actual need for any intervention."

However, 'Vets4informed choice' are telling us that this is not the situation, that the veterinary profession, like the medical profession, is being taken over by corporate interests.

               "..... its business models are based on practices which many now question, and its information sources and evidence are often provided by the pharmaceutical industry. Its societies, academic institutions, much of its ongoing clinical development are sponsored by and linked with major companies such that it is hard to find a truly independent source of advice and assistance."

               "Concerns over frequent and unnecessary re-vaccination, pressure selling of products and services etc. are widespread and growing."

Vets4informedchoice believes this to be a problem, and that the veterinary profession is rapidly losing the trust of the public. As far as I am concerned, a pet owner with an 8-year old Labrador who has never seen a vet, and is fit and healthy, this is certainly so. Moreover, vets themselves (at least those with animal health rather than corporate profit as their primary motivation) are facing serious problems.

                "Anyone who puts their head above the parapet within the profession risks their career, with just one example being the current campaign to ban Vets from prescribing Homeopathy, and to restrict Complementary and Alternative Medicines (CAM). How much of this, I wonder, is the result of these Vets being right; that there is no need to annually revaccinate pets for life, the scientific evidence is there for this practice to be stopped now. Why hasn't it been? It has been noted in the Veterinary media that "the profession gives close consideration in the debate to the importance of total practice income and the significance of driving other product sales" (Helps J. Extending DOI for Canine and Feline Vaccines. Veterinary Review March 2006)

I would urge anyone who reads this to sign up to the group via their vets4informedchoice website. The group states that it has been created "to independently examine these concerns and put the case - both for and against - many current practices". This is something that all animal lovers need, if we are to protect our loved-ones from illness, from unnecessary medication, and from corporate profit.

And please tell everyone you know, who loves animals, about this new group