Positive Health Online

  “Do you want it in brief? Do you want it in depth? Or totally true?”

– Gore Vidal, 1925 - 2012

When the roof and the foundations of a house begin to collapse, the demolition guys get called in. Likewise, as the foundations of conventional medicine begin to collapse, the medical demolition crews have arrived. Within the last few years in medical science, what has happened is unprecedented: the leaders of mainstream medicine - far more than its critics - have systematically uncovered the rot underneath the edifice of standard medicine, and they are making it public in leading journals and bestselling books. These medical demolition crews admit that they don’t know what will come next, but cleaning up the mess is more important to them than clinging to theories and practices that are, well, rotten to the core.

In August 2005 an article appeared in PLoS, now the world’s largest medical science journal (which does not permit drug advertising and has the most stringent conflict-of-interest rules for authors), entitled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”  The author, John Ioannidis, teaches medicine in Greece and the US and is known to North American medical students from JAMAevidence, the bible for evidence-based clinical practice (his contributions to it explain how to detect research fraud and bias). His 2005 article began: “There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false… claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” Not surprisingly, this fired up the demolition crews.

If Ioannidis is correct, what are professors teaching medical students and do they even know if what they are teaching is true? Can practice guidelines be trusted at all? Has continuing medical education become an oxymoron? What illusory standards of practice are medical regulatory authorities, such as the provincial colleges for physicians, pretending to uphold under the laws governing them? Is it even safe for patients to trust any information doctors provide? What about informed consent, given that those consenting and those providing healthcare are possibly equally clueless? And who is responsible for this mess? Most importantly, what will it take to clean this up?

The usual suspects - Big Pharma and government - have been working hand-in-hand for years to convince the public that pharmaceutical medicine is safe and effective. But now renewed scientific investigation of Big Pharma’s fraudulent claims about their products has appeared in mainstream journals and can no longer be ignored.

The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) staged a mock funeral in July in front of the parliament buildings in Ottawa to draw attention to the “death of evidence” in science - killed, they assert, by government. Some 2,000 Canadian scientists accompanied the coffin. In the UK, such a mock funeral was also held with the dramatic splendour only the land of Shakespeare can produce: magnificently adorned, purple-draped black horses pulled a coffin in a hearse that would have been fit for Queen Victoria’s funeral.

In both countries, scientists accuse their governments of controlling research funds to serve market interests only. CAPE’s list of indictments included the Harper government’s attack on environmental protection which is the same thing as attacking public health. Bill C-38, the infamous Omnibus Budget Bill which recently passed into law, includes exemptions for pest control products so they are no longer listed as “poisonous or harmful.” It also removed the safety requirements that previously limited agricultural chemicals and veterinary drugs to specified safe levels in food. And C-38 also handed Big Pharma a blank cheque by permitting prescription drugs to bypass important regulatory hurdles. With this Bill, the government is obviously sending a message that the health of Canadians should not get in the way of corporate profit.

The Harper government’s worst attack was on scientific integrity when the federal medical research funding agency, the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR), dropped its internationally praised transparency requirement for full public disclosure of the details of drug trial results. The CIHR was merely three months old when the requirement suddenly disappeared, and with it any hope Canadians might have had to find out just how effective and safe our medicines actually are - as opposed to what the marketing hype tells us. This decision caused an uproar around the world. The British Medical Journal called it “tragic” because “clearly the CIHR has decided that it’s going to put the interests of patients behind those of industry.” Thanks to the Harper government, our bodies are now open for business - ready to be plundered for profit, the same as our environment.

Research Data, Scientists, and Politicians - All Bought and Paid For

A May 10, 2012 editorial in Nature identified “the poison of the profit motive” as “corroding public trust.” Almost all research is funded by Big Pharma, which also controls all the data as proprietary information, providing only summaries of trial results to the regulators, e.g. Health Canada and the FDA, who are thus never in full possession of all the facts. Big Pharma also has the right to publish only favourable results. Independent critical review of the original trial data, to verify claimed results, only happens when researchers and clinicians who cannot be bought take extraordinary trouble through freedom-of-information legislation and hunt down the data, or do their own meticulous research into the patterns of medication effects, to ferret out the truth hidden by the spin. This Nature editorial commented that Ioannidis’ 2005 observations had by now become the norm: “Like a magnetic field that pulls iron filings into alignment, a powerful cultural belief is aligning multiple sources of scientific bias in the same direction… [creating] the appearance of progress…. The first step is to face up to the problem - before the cracks undermine the very foundations of science.” (As a side note: The Obama administration passed a stringent conflict-of-interest law, effective since August, affecting bio-medical researchers in an attempt to keep them honest.)

Not only do North American regulators not regulate in the public interest, they assist Big Pharma against the public interest. The latest amazing revelation is that the US FDA systematically spied on its own staff, lawyers, members of Congress, and the media to identify those critical of a pharmaceutical compound and in danger of going public. When the agency’s 80,000 espionage documents were accidentally published on the Internet, those spied-upon FDA scientists started legal action against their employer. This case is going to become very interesting because it is likely to put the spotlight on a lot of drugs and vaccines that have killed a lot of unsuspecting people already.

The Battle of Light versus Dark Forces in Medicine

Consider the following list of recent developments in medicine, all of which, significantly, came to light because of outrage in the mainstream medical world:

• As reported in March, a team of 100 scientists tried to “replicate the results of 53 of the most widely cited landmark cancer research papers.” This re-analysis resulted in only 6 research studies being validated - the rest are bogus. Shockingly, this was not Pharma-generated junk science, but came from university researchers who misled companies wanting to use their research for new cancer drugs. Indeed, there is no honour among thieves.
• Lancet Oncology reported that cancer incidence is predicted to rise by at least 75% by 2030 wherever “westernized lifestyles prevail,” as measured by the Human Development Index (i.e. the more developed, the more cancer). The steady rise in breast cancer is well known, as are its major causes: pesticides and chemical hormone replacement therapy. And another cause of profitable abuse of women, known since the mid-1990s, comes from breast screening programs that supposedly provide the benefit of early detection - a myth which is no longer even supported by the Radiology Society of North America. In fact, the more screening done by mammography, the more radiation-related cancer incidence and the more false-positive results leading to unnecessary surgery.  One big surprise is that even the ultra-conservative Institute of Medicine (IOM) acknowledges the increased risk of cancer caused by unnecessary mammography. The IOM went further and launched a frontal attack on Big Pharma. In the spirit of its motto, “Advising the nation – improving health,” the IOM published a position paper in May that outlines how the US FDA should proceed to make drugs safer before approval, and monitor them after getting to market, so new drugs don’t continue being lucrative human toxicity trials.
• The most reliable and truly independent watchdog of medical research is the International Cochrane Collaboration. One of its members, Dr Peter Gøtzsche, published a book this year exposing fraudulent claims about the benefits of mammography, which became evident after 10 years of research analyzing the data involving millions of women. He concludes: “The collective denial and misrepresentation of facts … and the little benefit there is of screening, if any, coupled with the disregard of the principles for informed consent and national laws, may be the biggest ethical scandal ever in healthcare. Hundreds of millions of women have been seduced into attending [mammography] screening without knowing it could harm them. This violation of their human rights is the main reason we have done so much research on mammography screening and also why I have written this book.”
• After a two-year delay, Dr Nicholas Gonzalez’ amazing book, What Went Wrong: The Truth Behind the Clinical Trial of the Enzyme Treatment of Cancer, is now available. It shows how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) systematically torpedoed the clinical trial of Gonzalez’ enzyme therapy, which was already previously documented to be successful even for pancreatic cancer. Enzyme therapy is healing and thereby proves that chemo is unnecessary; chemo drugs, while apparently at first effective because tumours shrink, are themselves carcinogenic and as such cancer promoting time bombs in the patient's body. This book is of great value to cancer patients, enabling them to understand why and how enzyme therapy works. Readers will also learn how the NIH sabotaged the potentially healing enzyme protocols (which resulted in death for dozens of trial participants), to ensure the appearance of failure for enzyme therapy. An investigation later revealed that the NIH members involved had personal financial interests in chemotherapy drugs. Enzyme therapy proves chemo to be ineffective in the long run because these drugs are themselves future carcinogenic time bombs in the patient’s body.
• For many years, being sued for drug damages was simply an additional business expense for Big Pharma. No longer! This year, GlaxoSmithKline has to pay out $3 billion for the harm caused by antidepressants Paxil, Seroxat, Wellbutrin, and the diabetes drug Avinda; injured patients and families of those who died are now also able to sue individually.
• Merck, still recovering from the multi-billion dollar Vioxx scandal that cost hundreds of thousand of lives, is being sued by whistleblowers from among their scientists for deceiving the FDA about the mumps vaccine which was falsely alleged to be 95% effective. In fact, health authorities in North America are reporting increasingly higher incidence of mumps only in vaccinated children.
• At Roche, a whole product line hit the fan in Europe this July: Avastin, Farceva, Rituxan, Alteplase, Actemra, Pegasys, Lucentis, Raptiva, and also Herceptin, which is supposed to prevent recurrence of breast cancer. Roche failed to report and deal with more than 15,000 deaths and over 65,000 adverse event reports related to all of the above, along with their hep B vaccine, one side effect of which can be liver cell death.
• Pfizer has to pay out $45 million for damage done by its menopause drug Pempro. This drug was prescribed to six million women even though the Women’s Health Initiative study of 2002 proved that Primarin (the estrogenic HRT) and synthetic progesterone alone or in combination increase the risk of cancer and blood clots.
• Medical rights activist in India, Anand Rai, found that 2,061 deaths were caused in clinical trials, between 2008 and 2011, but only 22 were compensated. Big Pharma outsources its trials increasingly to reduce costs and avoid scrutiny. India also halted a Gardasil vaccine study after six children died.
• In a striking parallel to the way Big Tobacco finally became vulnerable to legal challenge, patients have launched a class action suit, with the support of the UK government, against various medical authorities for making them into lifelong addicts to Valium.
• This veritable hailstorm of protest and legal action is beginning to be matched by positive work also coming from mainstream medicine. The World Health Organization announced that the use of mercury in vaccines, dental restoration, and all other medicines must be phased out - over the fervent objections by dental associations and worst of all, from the American Pediatric Association which continues to insist that mercury in vaccines is just fine.
• Similarly, the European Union is about to pass legislation requiring an unprecedented cleanup of Europe’s water supply from contamination by birth control pills, at the estimated starting cost of 30 billion Euros. Canadian research in 2001 showed that, at 5 parts per trillion, these drug residues cause fish stock collapse in lakes. The safe limit the EU must achieved is 0.035 parts per trillion.
• Prominent doctors are increasingly objecting to redefining patients as “customers.” Drs Gropman and Hartzband of Harvard wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that “reducing medicine to economics makes a mockery of the bond between the healer and the sick. For centuries, doctors who were mercenary were publicly castigated. Such doctors betrayed their calling. Should we now be celebrating the doctor whose practice, like a successful business, maximizes profits from customers?”

The “total truth” has perhaps never before been spoken so forcefully. This can only be good.

Resources and Resources

JPA. Ioannidis, “Why most Published Research Findings are False”, PLoS, Aug. 1, 2005. This is one of the first research efforts to expose the underlying fraud or massaging of date or absence of data in medicine. Dr. Ioannidis is also a key author and co-editor of the latest version of  the Manual of Evidence Based Medicine published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMAevidence, used in North American medical schools. JAMAevidence: Users’ Guide to the Medical Literature – A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, Second Edition, McGraw Hill, current edition.

On www.GreenMedInfo.com  and Best Pills Worst Pills you get the full information on the known safety and effectiveness on any drug currently in use. These sites are the ultimate “No Bull” zones; the first gives direct access to all the published literature - no summaries, only facts.

The National Post reported the changes to the transparency regulations of the CIHR on May 29, 2011 by Tom Blackwell. Go to NHPPA’s Discussion Paper on Bill C-38, June 21, 2012, showing how the Harper government snuck into the Omnibus Bill Big Pharma-friendly provisions scrapping accountability.

NJ Gonzalez MD, What Went Wrong: The Truth behind the Clinical Trial of the Enzyme Treatment of Cancer, New Spring Press, 2012.

The sources for the mammography facts are: “How a charity oversells mammography” by S. Woloshin and L. M. Schwartz, British Medical Journal, Vol. 345, 8/2/12, August 2, 2012. The book by the Cochrane Collaboration member Peter Gøtzsche, Mammography Screening: Truth, Lies and Controversy, appeared in March 2012, published in the UK by Radcliffe; available on www.amazon.com . More detailed information on radiation from mammography causing cancer is found in S. Epstein, The Breast Cancer Prevention Program, Macmillan, 1997. The cautions expressed about mammography by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)were published in ScienceDaily on  December 10,  2010, following the RSNA expert panel resolutions of December 2. For  more reliable and non-invasive methods of early cancer detection check out thermography and ultrasound screening clinics in Canada on Google.

M Guarneri MD, The Science of Natural Healing,  2012, a 24-hour lecture series on audio CD by The Teaching Company (1-800-832-2412) on nutritional medicine by the founder of the prestigious Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine. Highly recommended!

Free from www.mercola.com  the 2011 report “The FDA Exposed”; FDA drug approvals automatically apply to Canada and both are, by law, responsible to the drug companies, not to the citizens of their countries.

The World Health Organization’s press release on the phase-out of mercury dental amalgam and all uses of mercury in medicine was dated October 11, 2011. For dentists trained in non-toxic dentistry Google International Academy for Oral and Medical Toxicology. For the details on how the dental and paediatric associations vehemently support mercury in dentistry and vaccines and fought to WHO, got to the website called JuriMed run by Tim Bolen.

The Institute of Medicine’s report on the lack of safety in drug approvals was published May 2012 on their website and is entitled “Ethical and Scientific Issues in Studying the safety of Approved Drugs.” On the mock funerals held for science in Canada and the UK see Nature, August 2, 2012 editorial and article by A. Bhattacharya. For details on the Canadian mock funeral before Ottawa’s parliament buildings go to the website of CAPE (Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment).

R. Owen & S. Jobling, “The hidden costs of flexibility” on the multi-billion dollar cleanup of water from birth control pills, Nature, May 24, 2012. The research showing how birth control pills compromise water quality and make it deadly for fish is at K. A. Kidd et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, vol. 104, pp. 8897 ff, 2007.

On the FDA spying on its own scientists and the legal action taken by them see editorial in Nature, July 26, 2012 and article by M. Wadman page 416. On September 6, 2012, Nature’s editorial demanded that the new conflict-of-interest rules, which became law in August 2012 in the US for bio-medical researchers, must be available for public scrutiny on the internet to be meaningful. J Neuman et al., Prevalence of financial conflicts of interest among panel members producing clinical practice guidelines in Canada and the United States: cross sectional study, British Medical Journal, vol. 343, 2011. The Nature editorial on how all of science has become undermined by “the poison of profit motive” was published May 10, 2012 p. 149. Nature, August 2, 2012, has two editorials on the need for transparency of all industry-generated data.

For the story about the fraud pertaining to Alzheimers research by Harvard Medical School researchers now being criminally prosecuted see www.omsj.org , May 2012.

The $3 billion fine imposed on GlaxoSmithKline for fraud involving deaths and harm from antidepressants Paxil, Seroxat, Wellburin and the diabetes drug Avinda was reported in many places; my source was the Daily Mail, UK online version in July 2012. A detailed analysis is found on Dr Mercola’s website.

The story of the whistleblower scientists from Merck on the fraudulent claims made for the mumps vaccine and the legal action initiated by the insurance company Chatom Primary Care, see Natural News June 28, 2012 where the relevant links are provided.

The story about Roche hiding some 15,000 deaths and more than 65,000 adverse events from various drugs manufactured by Roche see Daily Mail, UK online July 9, 2012. The drugs involved are: the cancer drug Herceptin, the eye medication Lucentis, the hepatitis B vaccine, Avastin, Tarceva, Rituxan, Alteplase, Actemra, Pegasys, Raptiva. To find out if you are taking the North American version of any of these, Google this British drug name and the Canadian / US brand name will come up too. See Dr. Mercola’s website, September 2,2012, on the thousands of deaths during clinical trial outsourced to India.

See One Click Group with sources from Bloomberg, January 9, 2012 on the court ordering Pfizer to pay out $ 45 million for its drug Prempro for having caused cancer in many women; it is a combination of the original Premarin and synthetic progesterone Provera; Primarin is known since the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative study to be carcinogenic; the protective claims originally made for Premarin were fraudulent. NOTE: only bio-identical hormones are safe - google for literature.

The class action suite against doctors who kept prescribing Valium, which made tens of thousands of people addicts, began in December 2011.  See One Click Group Dec. 30, 2011.

Regarding the Hep B vaccine killing liver cells making it potentially very toxic, see the studies published and referenced at www.vaccineliberationarmy.com 

On cancer incidence expected to rise by 75% by 2030 due to lifestyle and environmental problems, see the online edition of the Lancet Oncology, May 31, 2012. See One Click Group for the info and sources (including Nature, March 28, 2012) on the fact that only 6 of the currently most important 53 cancer research papers could be reproduced; the rest are unreliable and probably based on fraud.

The New England Journal of Medicine, October 12, 2011, had an excellent article by Dr Jerome Groopman on how medicine has become reduced to economics. See his excellent book How Doctors Think. Houghton Mifflin. 2007.

Acknowledgement Citation

This article was originally published in Vitality Magazine October 2012 -

http://vitalitymagazine.com/article/medical-fraud-exposed/