Category Archives: Drugs

Another Series of Pharmaceutical Studies in Question

I know I sometimes harp on the pharmaceutical industry and how so many studies that show negative effects or less than positive ones, but a report out of Massachusetts has me very concerned about the validity of many studies out there. If you read this report from MSNBC.com, you can see why I am so disturbed.

It seems that Dr. Scott Reuben was fabricating data about the effectiveness of a number of drugs, including the pain killer Celebrex made by Pfizer and the antidepressant Effexor XR made by Wyeth among others. While this is certainly bad news for the two pharmaceutical companies, it should make us wonder how pervasive this is not only in the pharmaceutical world but also in the nutraceutical community.

I have often times railed against outrageous claims made by the makers of supplements that seem to be heavily anecdotal and curiously non-scientific. One case is the zeolite claims of chelating heavy metals. Still waiting for that study that is due any day showing how great it really is. Been waiting for over three years for something that was supposed to be out already. I’ve heard doctors get on stage and claim super high “cure” rates for autism, only to hear different numbers every conference he spoke at.

Research fraud is more common than you might think which means you need to read the studies with a more critical eye and not to jump on the latest hot drug or supplement. The studies have to make biochemical sense and not just report possible effects that seem too good to be true. There are a lot of Bernie Maddoff’s in science so approach those claims from the pharmaceutical and nutraceutical companies with a grain of salt. The life you save could be your own.

Cutler Interview – Transcript Now Available

Laboratory Medical Update – Dr. Andrew Cutler Interview

Earlier this year, I did an interview with Andrew Cutler, PhD talking about his thoughts on autism, mercury, and porphyrin testing. You can listen to it on my Let’s Talk Real Health podcast site.  Just recently, Michael Ross, did a transcript of the interview that you can download and read for yourself. Thank you Michael for the work.

Another Reason Not To Take Antidepressant Drugs

In an article from Discover Magazine, Ben Harder reports on an important study published in PLoS Medicine by Irving Kirsch, et al that basically says that antidepressant drugs pretty much don’t work any better than placebo. This is just another in a series of papers that suggest that you try other alternative methods like Omega 3 fatty acids, amino acid and nutrient therapies before you try meds.

My suggestion would be to run a plasma amino acid test before even thinking about antidepressant medications and see if a customized amino acid supplement might help. Far fewer side-effects and a lot of positive effects on energy and general well-being might just happen.

Incontinence Drugs Cause Memory Problems

Incontinence drugs like Detrol, have now been linked to memory problems and other psychological ills.  According to this article on MSNBC.com, “The people who took the drugs had a 50 percent faster rate of cognitive decline compared to those who didn’t take any.” That is pretty staggering if you ask me. Other drugs in the same class, known as anticholinergics also have similar effects.

So what does Pfizer, who makes Detrol say? Here is a quote from Ponni Subbiah, Pfizer’s vice president of medical affairs, “Detrol has been on the market since 1998. It has been prescribed more than 100 million times worldwide.” further more he states “the frequency of events and the role of Detrol in their causation cannot be reliably determined,” Huh? So basically they say that despite what the research tells us, lots of people are taking it and there is no way you are ever going to prove that it’s bad. Pfizer’s mind-numbing denial just goes to show how they clearly think money over health of their customers. I guess they must be working on a brain enhancing drug to make up for the brain numbing effect of Detrol. I think that maybe they have the people working at Pfizer on Detrol in order to come up with the kind of nonsensical comments they make.

My favorite part of the article was the following comment – “Our message is to be careful when using these medicines,” said U.S. Navy neurologist Dr. Jack Tsao, who led the study. “It may be better to use diapers and be able to think clearly than the other way around.”  I would add that it might behove you to try some GPC (glycerophosphocholine) or PS (phosphatidyl serine) to boost brain function as well

More Deceit From the Pharmaceutical Industry

It just keeps coming it seems, the pharmaceutical industry has stooped to levels even I didn’t think possible. Merck was just found to have paid academic scientists to put their names on papers they didn’t write. Who wrote the papers? Company hired medical writers of course.

According to Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA’s editor-in-chief, “The manipulation is disgusting. I just didn’t realize the extent.”  I think her use of the word disgusting pretty much sums up my opinion of this revelation. The article about this scandal is in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association. You can read the two articles, one by Ross, Hill, Egilman, and Krumholz and the other by Psaty and Kronmal. 

One JAMA report says internal company data showed in 2001 that Vioxx patients in two Alzheimer’s studies had a higher death rate than patients on dummy pills. Merck didn’t publicize that “in a timely fashion” and provided information to federal regulators that downplayed the deaths, the report said. It’s time to reign in the industry through Congressional legislation.

Lest you think that only Merck is guilty of this deception, think again. I am sure that you will see more of this cropping up in the coming months. In my opinion, this type of behavior is driven by executives of pharmaceutical companies need to impress Wall Street and fluff up their balance sheets instead of having patient’s health in mind.

Here is the result of a paper done by Choudry, et al published in JAMA about how pervasive the industry’s hooks into medicine is:

“Eighty-seven percent of authors had some form of interaction with the pharmaceutical industry. Fifty-eight percent had received financial support to perform research and 38% had served as employees or consultants for a pharmaceutical company. On average, CPG authors interacted with 10.5 different companies. Overall, an average of 81% (95% confidence interval, 70%-92%) of authors per CPG had interactions. Similarly, all of the CPGs for 7 of the 10 diseases included in our study had at least 1 author who had some interaction. Fifty-nine percent had relationships with companies whose drugs were considered in the guideline they authored, and of these authors, 96% had relationships that predated the guideline creation process. Fifty-five percent of respondents indicated that the guideline process with which they were involved had no formal process for declaring these relationships. In published versions of the CPGs, specific declarations regarding the personal financial interactions of individual authors with the pharmaceutical industry were made in only 2 cases. Seven percent thought that their own relationships with the pharmaceutical industry influenced the recommendations and 19% thought that their coauthors’ recommendations were influenced by their relationships. “

What is truly sad is how many people have suffered health and financial wise due to the greed and immoral behavior by the pharmaceutical industry.

Why Is Our Health Care is So Expensive? Someone Finally Got It!

In the February 7th, 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, page 549, a perspective written by Robert Kuttner should be mandatory reading for every politician, doctor, patient and anyone else who avails themselves or is involved in the United States health care system. In this brilliantly written article, Mr Kuttner, co-editor of the American Prospect, talks about the real reason our health care system is so ridiculously expensive. 

He writes “The extreme failure of the United States to contain medical costs results primarily from our unique, pervasice commercialization. The dominance of for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies, a new wave of investor-owned specialty hospitals, and profit-maximizing behavior even by nonprofit players raise costs and distort resource allocation.” Basically these profit hungry organizations cost you the patient between a staggering 400-500 billion dollars annually.

His comments and insight into the reasons why market optimization and competition does not mean greater efficiency in delivering health care and does not lower cost as with other industries is a must read. Do whatever you have to, to get a hold of this article.

His last paragraph was so telling. “Sometimes, we Americans do the right thing only after having exhausted all other alternatives. It remains to be seen how much exhaustion the health care system will suffer before we turn to national health insurance.” I have always been against this idea until I read this article. Maybe it is time to stop the greed and redo our failing and overly expensive health care system.

My Book is Out and Available

My book, Achieving Victory Over a Toxic World is now available through multiple outlets. It is the story of a child, my daughter, and her battle with a rare type of epilepsy, given little chance of recovery by the medical world, but through it all she has made it through, not perfectly, with the ability to live a normal life.

It also deals with what I believe caused her disorder, environmental toxicity. We are polluting our world at a staggering ratewhich is causing epidemics of diseases unheard of in human history. Big corporations would want you to believe this is not happening but my book shows you the truth.

The scariest part of my research delved into the effect these toxins are having on our most vunerable citizens, our children, and the up coming generations. In the final two parts of the book, I give you real world ideas on how to cope with the toxins and how you can begin the movement toward changing our world before it is too late. The increase in the rate of autism, asthma, epilepsy, ADHD, childhood cancers, cannot be explained by a “genetic epidemic”. We are poisoning ourselves and we can change that.

To order the book, you can go to either Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com or for faster service my publisher –  AuthorHouse’s web site . This book represents my 20+ years of research along with the passion that comes with fighting for a daughter’s life. I can guarantee one thing about the book and that is it will move you, both emotionally and physically to help us change the world.

Book Cover Picture

The Deceit Just Keeps Getting Deeper

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any lower, it does. A report published on the Nature magazine website claims that Dr. Steven M. Haffner of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, forwarded a report to drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline warning them about a paper that was about to be published by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) critical of their blockbuster (blockbuster meaning big money maker) drug Avandia. He was supposed to be reviewing the paper and it is highly unethical and against NEJM rules to let anyone else see a paper being reviewed.

To see the full extent of the problem, go to this link at the New York Times. My question is, when do we put a stop to this unbridled greed and deceit?

Antidepressants – Hidden Drug Trials Show Negative Results

It almost seems to be an everyday issue, but more and more we see how drug trials that don’t show benefits are being either ignored, hidden or modified by the pharmaceutical industry. In a review of the studies on 12 antidepressant drugs, researchers led by Erick H. Turner found that 31% of the studies on these drugs went unpublished and the majority were negative or were conveyed to have a positive outcome which was contrary to the data. The paper was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, in their January 17, 2008 issue. What was truly remarkable was how much the perceived benefits of the drugs were changed because of the lack of publication of all of the data. According to the authors, if you looked at the published research, the antidepressant drugs had positive outcomes 94% of the time. If you include the unpublished research that number drops to a mere 51%. This is a huge difference and should make everyone think twice before agreeing to be put on the medications or at least safer, alternatives should be investigated first.

According to the papers conclusion, “We cannot determine whether the bias observed resulted from a failure to submit manuscripts on the part of authors and sponsors, from decisions by journal editors and reviewers not to publish, or both. Selective reporting of clinical trial results may have adverse consequences for researchers, study participants, health care professionals, and patients.” In my opinion, it is the sponsors who are probably most likely to apply pressure to stop publication. This would mean that the pharmaceutical industry is to blame. We need to take research on drug efficacy out of their hands and into the hands of real researchers without the onus of pressure and conflict of interest.

Why is this so damaging? When you do a search on meta-analysis of antidepressant drugs, you find a number that show how beneficial the drugs are, like the one by Drs. Dubika, Hadley and Roberts entitled, “Suicidal behaviour in youths with depression treated with new-generation antidepressants” published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2006. Would that study’s conclusion, which is that “Antidepressants may cause a small short-term risk of self-harm or suicidal events in children and adolescents with major depressive disorder” have changed to a large short-term risk or a small long-term risk or maybe worst case scenario, a large long-term risk? Chances are, based on the Turner paper that the answer is yes, the results would have changed but by how much, we cannot tell.

What we can say is that there is a major problem that needs a solution and it has to come sooner than later. How many of us are on medications that may not be helping us or maybe damaging our health and that of our loved ones?
So what do we do about it? Determine biochemical imbalances and toxicity influences on behavior as well as inflammatory processes that have been shown to cause depression in people for decades. The research exists but it is being downplayed by greedy pharmaceutical giants whose obvious intention is to make money at all costs and deflect criticism and downgrade safe alternatives.

Tomorrow, I will discuss a few tests I think are extremely helpful in working with mild to moderate depression in both adults and children.

Does Ethics Play a Role in Drug Trials Anymore?

In the January 19, 2008 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, author Samuel Lowenberg brings up a number of serious questions relating to ethics and drug trials done by the pharmaceutical industry. After reading his brief two page review, it is apparent that a major overhaul in the way clinical trials are done is in order. The trail of abuse is international in scope and has possibly caused the deaths of innocent children.

According to Tikki Pang, the World Health Organization’s director of Research Policy and Cooperation, “The trials that are being done overseas by drug companies are in a sense secret, because they do not share the information, they site confidentiality and patient protection.” He further goes on to say “Anecdotally, we have heard many, many instances in India, China and other countries of the possibility of ethical safeguards not being followed.” In Nigeria, a number of children died of an experimental anti-meningitis drug Trovan and Pfizer, according to a lawsuit, destroyed data from the trial and gave some of the children a dangerously low dose of Rocephin, a known treatment for meningitis.

It is time for Congress to enact a bill demanding that all drug trial, in the U.S. or abroad, be registered and the results must be shared with the FDA regardless of outcome. The data then must be shared with the public without prejudice and in a timely manner. The nonsense that is pharmaceutical research has got to change. People’s health is at risk and lives are at stake. They are treating third world people like lab rats and this has got to stop.