Roche Must Pay $18 Million to Two Former Accutane Users

Roche Holding AG must pay a total of $18 million in damages to two former users of its Accutane acne drug who blamed the medicine for their bowel disease, a New Jersey jury ruled.
Read article at bloomberg.com

Novartis: Criminal Cover-Ups and Jawbone Damage from Zometa and Aredia

In a devastating blow to Novartis, a federal judge denied a bid to overturn a verdict in which a jury decided the drugmaker failed to adequately warn about the risks that its Zometa and Aredia bone-strengthening meds caused severe jaw bone damage. And in making his decision, he writes that the jury was shown sufficient evidence to conclude a cover-up was undertaken with “the knowledge and approval of high-ranking officials.”
Read article at pharmalot.com

Thousands of Americans die from an overdose of prescription painkillers

U.S. deaths from painkiller overdose surge
Nearly 15,000 Americans died from an overdose of prescription painkillers in 2008, a record rate that has outstripped fatalities from illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin combined, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.
Read article in the Montreal Gazette (Canada)

Painkillers are not harmless. And many of them are addictive. And just because a drug is prescribed by a doctor, it doesn't mean it's safe.

Prescription pain and anxiety drugs now cause more deaths in USA than traffic accidents

The Los Angeles Times reports: "Propelled by an increase in prescription narcotic overdoses, drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States, a Times analysis of government data has found. Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.""

A big part of the problem is that so many of these drugs are highly addictive. And of course when drugs are 'legal' drugs, and when it is legal to advertise them, people are more likely to think of them as 'safe'. But these powerful pharmaceutical drugs, which include OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma, are very clearly not safe. Pharmaceutical drugs have adverse effects/side-effects, one of which can be addiction, and another of which is premature death.

It is best to avoid prescription drugs as far as you can, and if you feel you must take them, then take them at the lowest effective dose and for the shortest necessary time. Always check out the possible side-effects and cautions and look out for these side-effects. Obesity and degenerative health conditions are often side-effects of prescription drugs: see HRT and other prescribed steroids and amitriptyline and other antidepressants.

A safe, drug-free way to reduce pain and anxiety is to optimise your nutrition and, as far as you reasonably can, cut down on salt and salty food. You will feel so much better. - Dieting is a frequent cause of ill-health, pain and depression, so avoid dieting. If you are overweight, lose excess weight the safe, easy way, without drugs or dieting.

Antipsychotics kill five UK dementia sufferers every day

The Telegraph reports that antipsychotics kill five UK dementia sufferers every day and that at last meaningful action is being proposed to instruct doctors to review all antipsychotics prescriptions and to seek to reduce them by finding “therapeutic alternatives” to these harmful drugs.

Too many UK patients are prescribed high-risk drugs

"Findings of a new study suggest that too many patients in the UK are being prescribed high-risk drugs that could potentially cause them harm, and reveals that GP prescribing between practices remains significantly varied. According to the research paper, published in the British Medical Journal online, thousands of patients in Scotland particularly vulnerable to side effects from medicines were dished out 'high-risk' drugs by their GPs."
Read article at pharmatimes.com (UK)

Overall the level of pharmaceutical drug prescribing in the UK continues inexorably to rise, and with it the consequences of harmful side-effects, and the further risks of this abundance of 'legal' drugs getting into the hands of drug-dealers and potential addicts. We need statutory limits on prescribing levels, with serious sanctions, including permanent removal from the Medical Register, for doctors who contravene such limits. - "First do no harm."

Harmful antipsychotic drugs are still being wrongly prescribed to dementia sufferers

BBC News reports that harmful antipsychotic drugs are still being widely and inappropriately prescribed to elderly dementia sufferers. "More than 50 health and social care organisations are calling for fresh action to cut the prescription of "chemical cosh" drugs. Around 180,000 people with dementia are thought to be prescribed antipsychotic drugs in the UK. But 80% of those prescriptions are said by critics to be inappropriate. Long-term use of the drugs can make dementia symptoms worse, reduce the ability to talk and walk and increase the risk of stroke and even death."

Doctors are over-prescribing paracetamol to toddlers

The Telegraph reports that doctors are over-prescribing paracetamol to toddlers. "One-in-four young children are being given too much of the pain relief drug, putting them at risk of liver damage, scientists found. A study of medical records of some youngsters found that a quarter between the ages of one and three were prescribed an "excessive" paracetamol dosage by their doctor."

That is an extremely high proportion of toddlers being overdosed. I have blogged with my views about giving painkillers to babies/toddlers before. No-one wants to risk their child getting liver damage from taking painkillers. Paracetamol, aka Calpol, is not harmless. I advocate comfort and cuddles for little ones, rather than pharmaceutical painkiller drugs with all their risks. Unlike drugs, a kiss and a cuddle have no adverse side-effects:

Give a kiss and a hug,
Not a painkiller drug.

Counterfeit medicine fraud: man jailed

I must confess this BBC News report caused me a double-take. "A man has been jailed for eight years for his part in what has been described as the most serious fake medicine fraud in the European Union. Peter Gillespie, 64, from Hertfordshire, was part of a £4.7m plot to bring two million doses of counterfeit drugs from China to the UK. He was convicted of conspiring to defraud pharmaceutical wholesalers, pharmacists and members of the public." The fake drugs "contained only a fraction of the correct dosage. They included Zyprexa, a medicine to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder."

The prosecution claimed that patients had been put at risk by this fraud. - I seriously wonder about this. - Zyprexa is such a dangerous drug. See Drug information about Zyprexa. And, perhaps more pertinently, read this damning Bloomberg report about the criminally fraudulent claims made about Zyprexa by the drug's manufacturers and the great harm (including death) the drug caused to unfortunate patients who took it. Maybe patients would have been a great deal less at risk from counterfeit Zyprexa than from the real thing...

I believe that the only health in which drug companies are interested is the health of their own financial profits.

Prescribed steroids are dangerous. Most doctors do not appreciate how dangerous they are.

Read here about the permanent and terrible harm, including death, some people have suffered from taking steroids prescribed by their doctor. And read here about how to lessen that harm if you are a steroid victim trying to cope with living the shattered life that prescribed steroids have left you with. If you are a parent, be aware that steroids are particularly harmful to children.

If steroids HAVE to be taken, make sure they are taken in the lowest effective dose and for the shortest necessary time. And insist on careful monitoring. And check out side-effects, etc on reference pages on the internet. Avoid eating salt or food containing added salt while taking steroid medication. - COMPLETELY.

Steroid victims say GPs gave no warning: archived article from 1995

Very occasionally, I come across sad evidence of the long, long years prescribed steroids have been harming patients, and the comprehensive lack of any effective measures being taken to STOP doctors catastrophically harming their patients. I came across one yesterday.

In this archived article from The Herald, Scotland, we read:

"HUNDREDS of Scots suffering from the side-effects of steroids have claimed they were never warned by their GPs about the drug's dangers.

They claim steroids have caused them to endure crippling illnesses like the bone-crumbling disease osteoporosis, as well as angina, diabetes, cataracts, weight gains, and skin disorders."

In 2011, this is still the situation. The medical profession's ignorance/negligence in the matter of prescribing powerful, potentially harmful/dangerous drugs, including steroids, but many other classes of prescribed drugs too - antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-epileptics, and more - is staggering and scandalous.

If you are a steroid victim, or know someone who is a steroid victim, or victim of some other prescribed drug, there is helpful information on these pages:

• Steroids and HRT

• Amitriptyline and other antidepressants
  

Scandal of many deaths from Diabetes drug, Mediator, approved and subsidised by French health service for 33 years

Scandal of many deaths from Diabetes drug, Mediator, approved and subsidised by French health service for 33 years. "President Nicolas Sarkozy has promised "the most complete transparency" on how a drug which is now suspected to have killed up to 2,000 people was officially approved, and subsidised, for 33 years by the French health service." - Read article in The Independent.

This is what Dr Rath's website has to say about the matter: " Despite repeated warnings from scientists around the world, a deadly pharmaceutical drug, Mediator, was prescribed to 5 million French people. Successive French health ministers ignored scientific advice that the drug – produced by the French pharmaceutical giant, Servier, a company well known for its cult of secrecy and close relations with French politicians – was at best useless, and at worst highly dangerous. In all, the drug is now suspected to have killed 2,000 people. Notably, therefore, it has emerged that French President Nicolas Sarkozy – who, in 2004, coerced the marriage between French pharmaceutical dwarf Sanofi and Swiss/German drug giant Aventis/Hoechst – previously worked for Servier as a lawyer."

Here is the back story.
Read article at pharmalot.com

Avoid pharmaceutical drugs if you possibly can. Remember you cannot trust the pharmaceutical industry: it is mired in false claims and in corruption.

Study: Ineffective, harmful antipsychotic drugs are being prescribed more and more, without good reason

Study finds that ineffective, harmful antipsychotic drugs are being prescribed more and more, without good reason, as reported here. Increasingly these powerful drugs, with their many ghastly adverse side-effects, have been prescribed 'off-label', even to children! (Off-label drugs are those prescribed by doctors for purposes not approved by the FDA.) This damnable pharmaceutical junk causes terrible physical, emotional and mental suffering and it destroys lives!

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, is chairman of the department of psychiatry at Columbia University, and was not involved in the study. But he tells us the reason for this off-label prescribing: “Off-label prescribing is an important component of practice,” Lieberman says. “The reason is that it really takes a lot of money for a drug company to jump through all the hoops to get an FDA indication. There may be good evidence that a drug is effective in a given condition, but the company doesn’t see enough of a market there to get it approved.”

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, straight from the mouth of a psychiatrist: all that prescribing of drugs that cause such great suffering to innocent patients, including children, is in order that drug companies cover the costs of jumping through "all the hoops" to get FDA approval!

But the most important hoop should be that a drug is safe. And the next most important hoop is that a drug is effective - that it 'does what it says on the tin'.

Periodically, these evil drug companies and their complicit stooges, the medically qualified prescribers of these toxic drugs, get some sort of punishment following court cases, and usually it is that the companies have to pay money - fines and/or damages. Sadly, the money they have to pay is insignificant in comparison to the huge profits they have raked in from selling the drugs, and so the punishment for their wrongdoing does not deter them from repetition of the wrongdoing.

The CEOs of the companies should be punished personally, with the full rigour of the Law. A long spell in prison is more likely to deter them from continuing to harm people for company profits. - OR - and here is a radical suggestion! - since they favour off-label prescribing for conditions not covered by their licence to use the drug - why not inflict the drug on them while they are in the prison? - I have a firm belief that by themselves suffering the adverse side-effects, they would be completely cured of encouraging off-label drug use again, provided it were to be made clear to them that they would receive the same punishment again if they re-offended.

America’s mental illness: it is the drugs that are the problem

Tens of millions of innocent, unsuspecting Americans, who are mired deeply in the mental “health” system, have actually been made crazy by the use of or the withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering, brain-disabling, indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy - often in untested and therefore unapproved combinations of drugs -- to trusting and unaware patients by equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians who have been under the mesmerizing influence of slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical drug companies.
Read article by Gary G. Kohls, MD, at onlinejournal.com

Chemo drugs are harming, causing cancer to, and killing some of the healthcare workers who handle them.

See this article.

Criticism mounts on GSK re Avandia, its diabetes drug widely regarded as unsafe

See the Telegraph article. Incredibly Glaxo's response has been, ""Since 2007 we have seen results from six controlled clinical trials looking at the cardiovascular safety of Avandia. Together they show that this medicine does not increase the overall risk of heart attack, stroke or death."" - And the band played believe it if you like...

Glaxo playing the wide-eyed innocent sits oddly with the ghastly history of the usage of this drug, and the tactics, including intimidation, GSK have employed to try to suppress the facts about its adverse effects. You can read some of that history here: http://wildeaboutobesity.blogspot.com/search/label/Avandia.

AstraZenica, its drug, Seroquel, its illegal marketing of antipsychotic drugs,

and its misleading of doctors and patients, and the serious harm Seroquel does to the unfortunate patients/victims who take or have taken it, reported here by the New York Times.

I urge you to read the article in full. It contains a resumé of other pharmaceutical companies who have similarly poisoned the people who have taken their dangerous antipsychotic and painkiller junk. Some of the damaged people are children, their lives and health now permanently blighted by massive weight gain, diabetes and other attendant ill-health. Some victims have actually died from the adverse effects.

Yes, the evil pharmaceutical industry pays out huge sums of money in a sort of system of fines, though these huge sums are insignificant set against their colossal profits, but they don't seem to go to prison for these crimes against humanity, including what many would regard as torture and murder, do they? Why? Why don't they go to prison? They knowingly lie about the results of drug trials. They knowingly supply products they know will do grave harm. - Why does the judicial system not protect the citizens? Should the members of the judiciary be held to account? Should they themselves go to prison?

In a fierce and deadly irony, I see that on the same webpage as the report to which I refer, there is an advertisement to recruit volunteers to take part in drug trials! - Not me, guv!

If you, or anyone you know - maybe one of those poor, damaged children - gained weight from taking any of these ghastly drugs, or gained weight from taking any other prescription drugs, please be aware that that weight gain can be reduced by cutting down on salt and salty food. - It makes a great difference, believe me. Please tell these victims. Do not have it on your conscience that you failed to tell them about this safe, fast, effective way to lose excess weight and improve their health and happiness. Don't pass by on the other side and leave them to suffer needlessly.

See Sodium in foods.

Lose weight

vulnerable groups

Fat Retention

Premarin causes weight gain unless you seriously cut down on salt/sodium

Premarin causes weight gain unless you seriously cut down on salt/sodium. Read about the prescribed steroids and HRT and amitriptyline and other prescribed drugs that cause fluid retention/weight gain. Read how to prevent/reduce this water weight.

And see Sodium in foods

Unintentional poisoning by prescription drugs is increasing

Poisoning is now the second leading cause of unintentional injury death in the U.S. The rates of unintentional poisoning deaths have been on the rise for more than 15 years, and unintentional poisoning has surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of unintentional injury death among people 35-54 years of age. In a study published in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that hospitalizations for poisoning by prescription opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers in the U.S. have increased by 65% from 1999 to 2006.
Read article at physorg.com

Off-label marketing of drugs: damages patients and corrupts healthcare

I STRONGLY URGE you to read the whole of this article about repeated law-breaking by drug companies:
Read article in the Washington Post (USA)