Keeping Watch: Health Care Topics and New Health Legislation (1)

The Laws of the Pharmaceutical Industry



Posted with permission from my colleague, Dr Arthur Evagelista, formerly with the FDA.

The main principles governing the pharmaceutical "business with disease" are:

..."It is not in the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry to prevent common diseases - 

the maintenance and expansion of diseases is a precondition for the financial growth of this industry.."

1  The pharmaceutical industry is an investment industry <http://qualityassurance.synthasite.com/laws/law01.htm>  driven by the profits of its shareholders. Improving human health is not the driving force of this industry.

2  The pharmaceutical investment industry was artificially created and strategically developed over an entire century by the same investment groups that control the global petrochemical and chemical industries.

3 The huge profits <http://qualityassurance.synthasite.com/laws/law03.htm> of the pharmaceutical industry are based on the patenting of new drugs. These patents essentially allow drug manufacturers to arbitrarily define the profits for their products.

4  The marketplace for the pharmaceutical industry is the human body - but only for as long as the body hosts diseases. Thus, maintaining and expanding diseases  <http://qualityassurance.synthasite.com/laws/law04.htm>  is a precondition for the growth of the pharmaceutical industry.

5  A key strategy to accomplish this goal is the development of drugs that merely mask symptoms
<http://qualityassurance.synthasite.com/laws/law05.htm> while avoiding the curing or elimination of diseases. This explains why most prescription drugs marketed today have no proven efficacy and merely target symptoms.

6  To further expand their pharmaceutical market, the drug companies are continuously looking for new applications <http://qualityassurance.synthasite.com/laws/law06.htm>  (indications) for the use of drugs they already market. For example, Bayer's pain pill Aspirin is now taken by 50 million healthy US citizens under the illusion it will prevent heart attacks.

7  Another key strategy to expand pharmaceutical markets is to cause new diseases with drugs. While merely masking symptoms short term, most of the prescription drugs taken by millions of patients today cause a multitude of new diseases as a result of their known long-term side effects
<http://qualityassurance.synthasite.com/laws/law07.htm> . For example, all cholesterol-lowering drugs currently on the market are known to increase the risk of developing cancer - but only after the patient has been taking the drug for several years.

8  The known deadly side effects of prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the industrialized world, surpassed only by the number of deaths from heart attacks, cancer and strokes (Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998). This fact is no surprise either, because drug patents are primarily issued for new synthetic molecules. All synthetic molecules need to be detoxified and eliminated from the body, a system that frequently fails and results in an epidemic of severe and deadly side effects.

http://qualityassurance.synthasite.com/resources/drugs%20kill%20more%20Ameri
cans.gif?timestamp=1318370943767.circa 1999 statistics

9  While the promotion and expansion of diseases increase the market of the pharmaceutical investment industry - prevention and root cause treatment of diseases decrease long-term profitability; therefore, they are avoided or even obstructed by this industry.

10  Worst of all, the eradication of diseases is by its very nature incompatible with and diametrically opposed to the interests of the pharmaceutical investment industry. The eradication of diseases now
considered as potential drug markets will destroy billions of investment dollars and eventually will eliminate this entire industry.

11  Vitamins and other effective natural health therapies that optimize cellular metabolism threaten the pharmaceutical "business with disease" because they target the cellular cause of today's most common diseases - and these natural substances cannot be patented.

12  Throughout the more than one hundred year existence of the pharmaceutical industry, vitamins and other essential nutrients, with defined functions as cofactors in cellular metabolism, have been the fiercest competition and the greatest threat to the long-term success of the pharmaceutical investment business.

13  Vitamins and other effective natural health therapies that effectively prevent diseases are incompatible with the very nature of the pharmaceutical "business with disease."

14  To protect the strategic development of its investment business against the threat from effective, natural and non-patentable therapies, the pharmaceutical industry has - over an entire century - used the most unscrupulous methods, such as:

(1) Withholding life-saving health information from millions of people. It is simply unacceptable that today so few know that the human body cannot produce vitamin C and lysine, two key molecules for connective tissue stability and disease prevention.

(2) Discrediting natural health therapies. The most common way is through global PR campaigns organized by the Pharma-Cartel that spread lies about the alleged side effects of natural substances - molecules that have been used by Nature for millennia.

(3) Banning by law the dissemination of information about natural health therapies. To that end, the pharmaceutical industry has placed its lobbyists in key political positions in key markets and leading drug export nations.

15  The pharmaceutical "business with disease" is the largest deception and fraud business in human history. The product "health" promised by drug companies is not delivered to millions of patients. Instead, the "products" most often delivered are the opposite: new diseases and frequently, death
<http://qualityassurance.synthasite.com/laws/law15.htm> .

16  The survival of the pharmaceutical industry is dependent on the elimination, 'by any means', of effective natural health therapies. These natural and non-patentable therapies have become the treatment of choice for millions of people despite the combined economic, political and media
opposition of the world's largest investment industry.

Stay INFORMED ..

 

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Creeping Diseases

How we're fooled into using more medicine than we need.

This is a guest post from independent medical investigative journalist Jeanne Lenzer. She is a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow and a frequent contributor to BMJ, and has published works in  The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Discover, The New Republic, and other outlets.

When doctors recommend tests, drugs or surgeries to prevent bad outcomes (think cholesterol-lowering agents to prevent strokes or cardiac stents to prevent heart attacks) they tap into our deepest sense of what constitutes commonsense: An ounce of prevention. Catch it early. A stitch in time.

It can’t be a bad thing to catch problems early, can it?

Unfortunately, one of the toughest things to explain is why detecting some illnesses at their earliest stages can cause more harm than good. Take this example: Since elevated cholesterol is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, doctors often prescribe drugs known as statins to people with elevated cholesterol levels in the hopes of reducing their risk of a heart attack or stroke.

Here comes the part that’s tough to explain – because it is so counterintuitive: Statins only help individuals who already have had a heart attack or stroke (with a few exceptions, and more on that later).

Of course, this makes no sense to most people. Isn’t the whole point of taking cholesterol-lowering agents to prevent a heart attack? Why should anyone wait until after a heart attack or stroke to begin taking a drug designed to prevent a heart attack or stroke?

The answer rests with disease creep and the simple statistical quirks that come with it. In the past, doctors treated diseases that caused symptoms. But now we have tests and imaging machines that can detect risk factors and illnesses in their earliest stages. Like cholesterol. Elevated cholesterol is not a disease. It doesn’t cause symptoms. It is a risk factor. People with high cholesterol levels are somewhat more likely to develop a heart attack or stroke, but they are at far less risk than individuals who already have cardiovascular disease. This is the definition of disease creep: when pre-conditions or risk factors are treated as if they are the same as the actual disease state.

Here’s a thought experiment (with purposefully exaggerated numbers) to help understand this puzzle: Imagine a group of people who have the rare but awful Disease A, which is so terrible that all of its victims will die. Now imagine the discovery of Wonder Drug X, which cures half of the patients with Disease A. Unfortunately, Wonder Drug X does have a pretty bad side effect profile – it’s a very powerful drug, after all – and 10 percent of people who take it will die from liver failure. Despite this worrisome side effect, Wonder Drug X is truly an advance for patients with Disease A: For every 200 patients with the disease who are treated, 100 will now survive and only 10 of the 100 survivors will die of the drug’s side effects. That means 90 more people out of 200 will survive thanks to Wonder Drug X.

But now imagine a different group of 200 people, who don’t actually have disease A, but instead have a genetic marker which “is associated with” Disease A. In this scenario only 1 in a million people in the general population will get disease A. If you have the genetic marker, the risk ismuch higher, such that 2 of these 200 people will develop the disease at some time in the future. The genetic test gets highly promoted – “find out your risk early, because we now have a treatment that works, and the sooner you’re treated, the better!” There is a tiny grain of truth to this – of the 2 people identified by the genetic test, 1 (50%) will now be saved by Wonder Drug A.   This might sound just as good as before; here’s a group of people with 10,000 times (!) the risk of the general population to develop a uniformly fatal disease. Surely it’s worth taking a drug that can cure that disease in half the cases, isn’t it?

Read the complete article here

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