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From Drugs to Vaccines

By On · Add Comment · In human papilloma virus (HPV), pharmaceutical, swine flu vaccine, vaccinations

Question: What do you do if you are the pharmaceutical industry and the current health care climate is such that it will be harder to hold long-term patents, and people are getting hip to the dangers of lifestyle drugs?

Answer: Why, step up your development of vaccinations, that’s what.

As I peruse the health news daily, it does not get past me that a very large percentage of stories (30% tonight) are on vaccinations–new ones for swine flu, cervical cancer and other illnesses, as well as finger-wagging at people who choose to not subject themselves or their children to new and untested vaccines. All of it rounded out by stories of the government pushing, pushing, pushing policies and legislation to inoculate us all, against everything. Who’s scared of this scenario, and who’s not? Who is in complete trust and confidence in this latest twist to the, “We the government care about the peoples’ health and well-being,” game?

The latest is the new findings that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is responsible for 50% of all penile cancers.* As a result, the drug-makers that manufacture the vaccine against HPV for girls, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, say the vaccine can be also used in boys. What do you know? First it was 50% of schoolchildren that we can stick, now we get the other half. Who doesn’t see the rationale behind this?

And if that isn’t scary enough, Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, has signed a decree granting vaccine makers total legal immunity from any lawsuits that result from any new “Swine Flu” vaccine. The vaccine is untested and new, and if anything goes wrong–tough titties; suck it up, it’s for the greater good.

It’s simple: You need to know this stuff to understand where we can take control over our own health. If you think the government knows how to best take care of you, be my guest, Patriot. But if mandatory inoculations of your kids scares the crap out of you, better be prepared to say so.

*Penises blamed for 100%–bad penises, bad, bad…

Flu Vaccine Wool Over the Eyes

By On · Add Comment · In elderly, flu shot, flu vaccine, immune response, immunity, influenza virus, pharmaceutical
What do you do when you’re a pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturer, and scientific data shows your product to be useless? You search hard for a rationalization and apply it to your MO in a stepped-up marketing campaign. That’s exactly what flu vaccine maker Sanofi Pasteur is doing right now.

You may remember a story I reported in an earlier post in which elderly people who were given the flu shot did not have a lowered risk of dying from the flu. Well, that study didn’t sit well with Sanofi Pasteur, so what was their recommendation? Give elderly people a massive dose of flu vaccine. Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket. Give grandma four times the usual dose to boost her immunity (four times the standard is what Sanofi now recommends). Think about it: with that much attenuated virus in your system, you’ll no doubt have a measurably high immune response. No doubt. And as an added bonus you’ll quadrupel your profits. That’s called a win situation. Not win-win–just win…for Sanofi.

The reasons the flu vaccine works poorly remains the same: The influenza virus is a rapidly mutating organism. It’s virtually impossible to create a vaccine that will be right-on in any given year. They may get lucky sometimes–every gambler hits paydirt now and again–but there just isn’t now, nor will there ever be, an effective flu vaccine.

What makes this story especially frightening is that it’s simply another example of a greedy pharmaceutical corporation manipulating the truth for their own end. And this public health BS is being perpetuated by our medical and public health industries. The data is there; the flu vaccine doesn’t do much. Instead of making it the poster child of public health marketing, how about more studies? Not only studies done by the manufacturers of the drug itself (preliminary to FDA approval), but third party studies paid for by the manufacturer and regulated by a government agency too. You won’t hear me suggest government getting involved very often, but in this case, I think it’s crucial.

American Kids More Mentally Disturbed Than Euro Kids?

By On · Add Comment · In depression, drugs, medicated, mental health, pharmaceutical, psychotropic, stress

Are Americans more depressed and mentally disturbed than Europeans? How about our kids? Now c’mon…people are people, right? Americans don’t have more stress than Europeans, Asians, or Latin Americans. Everybody has stress. Especially other industrialized countries–we all have to deal with economic issues, crime…traffic! No, no, no…Americans aren’t more mentally disturbed than Euros.

Then why are more American kids being heavily medicated with psychotropic medications than European kids? According to a recent study, children in the U.S. are significantly more likely to be prescribed drugs for mental conditions than their European counterparts. Psychotropic drugs include stimulants (Ritalin), antidepressants (Prozac, Zoloft), and antipsychotics (Risperdal). The research showed that American kids were more than two times as likely as Dutch children and more than three times as likely as German children to be medicated with a psychotropic drugs. American children were also substantially more likely to be on multiple psychotropic drugs. So I ask the question again, are our kids more mentally disturbed?

You know the real answer: Hell no! Our kids are more medicated for one simple reason–America is a gold mine for pharmaceutical sales. The reason is three-fold:

  1. Americans believe in magic bullets
  2. Americans worship medicine and put their doctors on pedestals
  3. American doctors are given financial incentives (like trips, cruises, and other gifts) to prescribe particular meds

What else would you expect? The current mental health paradigm in this country is that the cause of mental illness (depression?) is biochemical. What a bunch of horseshot. I cover this subject extensively in my book, The Six Keys To Optimal Health; but suffice it to say there isn’t one shred of evidence making this paradigm a fact. It is all theory. And a poor one at that.

All this in light of another recent study that shows psychotherapy to be better than meds in treating complex psychiatric problems. Time to cut the crap and get your kids off the psychotropics.

A Strange Double Standard

By On · Add Comment · In antidepressants, ephedra, GlaxoSmithKline, Metabolife, Paxil, pharmaceutical, weight loss drugs
So let’s say there is a supplement company selling a weight loss product that has ephedra in it. Ephedra, as you may know, was banned by the FDA in 2004 due to a high rate of serious side effects and ephedra-related deaths. Now let’s say that said supplement company, full well knowing the adverse health risk of ephedra, goes ahead to manufacture and sell this product to the public anyway. Should this company be held liable for any harm done to the public health? Should they be fined, punished, or shut down? What are the necessary measures to be taken to assure this doesn’t happen again?

If you believe that the supplement company acted out of negligence and greed, and compromised public health, then you probably also believe that the company should be punished to the full extent possible. Now what if it wasn’t a supplement company at all, but a pharmaceutical manufacturer instead. And let’s say the compound in question wasn’t ephedra but Paxil, the popular antidepressant, what would you say then?

Well that’s exactly what happened to ephedra–can anyone say Metabolife?–and it’s happening now with Paxil. In the Metabolife fiasco, Metabolife International Inc. the manufacturer of Metabolife 356, at its height a several hundred million dollar a year product, pled guilty to filing fraudulent tax returns and was sentenced to pay a criminal fine of $600,000, and more than a billion dollars in personal injury claims. Along with the banning of its most popular product, the monetary penalties buried the company which filed for bankruptcy in 2005.

So what will happen to GlaxoSmithKline PLC, makers of the mega best-selling antidepressant Paxil, which was the fifth-most prescribed antidepressant in the United States as early as 2006? A U.S. Department of Justice investigation is being conducted into whether the drug maker withheld data about the suicide risks of Paxil. Just another day at the office for antidepressant manufacturers. I’ve already reported on this and similar stories in earlier posts (and here, and here)–seems to be par the course with these massive money making meds. According to recent reports, the Justice Department is looking into GlaxoSmithKline’s marketing practices, pushing their product despite having information that the antidepressant increased the risk of suicidal tendencies in its takers.

So what will happen to GlaxoSmithKline? My guess, probably not much. They’ll fight the allegations professing the high road. They’ll lie and say they didn’t know about the risks. And when they eventually found out, they’ll say, they then took appropriate measures. I mean, what else could they possibly say? They’ll get slapped with a fine and warning. For a multi million dollar company like Metabolife that might cause ruin. But for a multi billion dollar company like Glaxo, well…it won’t do much. And I’m sure GlaxoSmithKline will be just fine. They’ll go on, business as usual.

Thalidomide’s Gift to Public Policy

By On · Add Comment · In antidepressants, birth defects, drugs, Frances Oldham Kelsey, pharmaceutical, Thalidomide
Rah, rah, rah! Three cheers for Thalidomide! Three cheers for the morning sickness pill of the 1950’s that led to thousands of birth defects.

Three cheers? Yes, because if it were not for the tragedy of Thalidomide, we wouldn’t have the regulations we have today for new pharmaceutical drugs. And we certainly wouldn’t be aware of the practice of withholding relevant and crucial information by pharmaceutical drug companies trying to pass their products off at any and all costs. Please take the time to read the history of Thalidomide here, and of the lone voice who refused to approve the drug for sale in the United States, FDA reviewer Frances Oldham Kelsey. When you do, you’ll see how lax our earlier laws were concerning drug approval.

At that time, pharmaceutical companies needed only to show that a drug was safe, and with a little trickery, it was easy to get things through. After the Thalidomide tragedy, though, the FDA changed the rules and required drugs to be both safe and effective. That means that manufacturers had to show that the drug actually did something beneficial–this prevented drugs from being “tried” on the public, as Thalidomide was in the U.S. Although it was never approved for sale, about 20,000 Americans received Thalidomide on a trial basis, including several pregnant women. Most birth defects were seen in Europe, but there were seventeen Americans born with birth defects caused by this drug.

We also have to thank Thalidomide for keeping us on our toes today. It’s exactly what I think about when I hear of antidepressant manufacturers hiding results. If you’ve got to hide ’em, there has got to be something terribly wrong. As I’ve said a thousand times over–when there’s big money involved, don’t count on human decency to make right decisions. And if it weren’t for Thalidomide…we might not know the full extent of that statement. So thank you Thalidomide for opening our eyes.

Antidepressants Don’t Work

By On · Add Comment · In antidepressants, biochemical theory, depression, freedom of information, Hull University, mental health, mental illness, pharmaceutical, placebos chemical
Yes, it’s true: The mega best-selling pharmaceutical mental health panacea called antidepressants just don’t work. When speaking about antidepressant therapy I usually try to be fair and say, “antidepressants might work for some people,” but frankly, that’s a bunch of horse shot. Study after study after study comes out exposing these most over-prescribed meds for the frauds they actually are; so I just can’t bear to keep perpetuating the lie. Antidepressants don’t work! At least not for what they’re supposed to work for, that’s for sure.

Take this latest study out of Great Britain which looked at previously undisclosed data of 47 clinical trials conducted by the drug companies themselves. The data became available through the U.S. freedom of information laws. I pointed out in an earlier post that many drug companies hide relevant information to make their product appear beneficial. Lots of money is made as a result of this practice, even if the information only stays hidden for a brief time.

But what makes the antidepressant sham so shameful is that, as a treatment option for depression, it has been treated as the holy grail of the biochemical theory of mental illness. I discuss this fallacy in detail in my upcoming book, The Six Keys To Optimal Health. It is one of the most faulty scientific theories to ever be unleashed upon the public. And it has been heavily propagandized for one reason only: Antidepressant therapy brings big bucks.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: people who take antidepressants feel something. Most of these drugs simulate speed, so lots of people get high from them. But since it’s a medically prescribed substance, they wouldn’t call it high. Oh no, instead they might say evened-out; calm; or “balanced”. Yeah right, balanced. You’ve got to check out this article on parents requesting drugs to give their college kids an “edge”. Nice, Dad; hook Junior–he’s worth it.

Here’s the truth as stated by research team leader Professor Irving Kirsch of Hull University, in northern England, who conducted the study, “The difference in improvement between patients taking placebos and patients taking anti-depressants is not very great. This means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments.”

He goes on to say, “Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients unless alternative treatments have failed to provide a benefit.” And I tell you, like me before him, he’s just being nice. It’s only a matter of time before the good professor gets fed up and proclaims the truth to the world as I have: Antidepressants don’t work! Time to give them up.

Drug Dealing is Lucrative Business

By On · Add Comment · In Carrie Smith Cox, cholesterol, cholesterol lowering drug, endogenous, Enhance, exogenous, ezetimibe, Merck and Co Inc, patent, pharmaceutical, Schering-Plough Corp, simvastatin, Vytorin, Zetia, Zocor
Everyone knows that there are big bucks to be made in the pusher game. From slinging crack to Prozac, profits proliferate when the product promises a miracle cure, or a great way to get high. The risks in the game are a’plenty, but when laws can be loopholed, then all kinds of funny stuff can happen. Take, for instance, the latest in the cholesterol lowering drug racket. Recent reports show that pharmaceutical giants Merck & Co Inc and Schering-Plough Corp may have been up to some funny business regarding published results of their combined drug Vytorin, as well as their marketing and advertising practices. Hold onto your hats because this one’s a doozy.
According to reports, U.S. regulators are contemplating action against Merck and Schering-Plough, the makers of Vytorin, for not releasing the results of a two year study titled Enhance, which sought to study the effectiveness of Vytorin versus the cholesterol lowering drug simvastatin. Let me explain: Vytorin is a combination of the statin drug simvastatin and a drug that blocks cholesterol from entering through the gut called ezetimibe. The idea is that the statin blocks the production of cholesterol from the liver, what we call endogenous cholesterol, while the cholesterol blocker prevents the uptake of cholesterol found in food, or exogenous cholesterol.

You know–you’ve seen the commercials: “A series of split-screen images of a person and a food item to make the point that cholesterol comes from two sources and can be absorbed from food or manufactured by the body, and that heredity plays a role in the latter. This point is a departure from the commonly held belief that high cholesterol only comes from the food that you eat. In each commercial, the person is dressed, and the food plated, to emphasize the resemblance between the person and the food.” (from Wikipedia)

Here’s the problem: the results of the Enhance test showed that Vytorin, the combo drug, worked no better than simvastatin (brand name Zocor) alone. Get it? The exogenous cholesterol blocker didn’t do squat.

So what! What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that the pharmaceutical companies neglected to publish the results–for 18 months! Whoa. Now why would they do that? Well, let’s see. Uh…big ducketts? Wait, it gets better: Schering-Plough president, Carrie Smith Cox, it turns out, dumps 900,000 shares of company stock, worth $28 million, seven months before the results are published! Woohoo! Even better is that as of two weeks ago, the stocks started sinking like a led zeppelin. You see, once the news got out that Vytorin is no better than generic simvastatin, a much cheaper drug, doctors will stop prescribing it. They haven’t yet, as one report has prescriptions up at 800,000; but I assure you, now that the results are public, prescriptions will have to drop, because everybody knows now, right? You sure do.

How and why does something like this happen? First, you have to understand the pharmaceutical patent game. To get a patent on a drug, a company much go through rigorous testing that can take up to twelve years. Once the government approves the drug, the company gets the patent for twenty years. That means, only they can manufacture and sell that drug during the life of the patent, which means lots of money. Once the patent expires, any drug company can make a copycat drug–same ingredients, same dose–and sell it as a generic brand. That drives prices way down.

In this case, the patent on Zocor–remember the brand name of the statin simvastatin–ran out in 2006. That was Merck’s baby. Schering-Plough had the drug ezetimbe–brand name Zetia–the one that supposedly blocked incoming cholesterol; clearly, it doesn’t do much. Perhaps, somebody upstairs at the two companies knew this, as they decided to combine the Zetia with Zocor to make Vytorin. Great, now they can get a new patent. At least they know the Zocor works. Hopefully, the results of the Enhance test will look good, and then it’s money in the bank.

But it didn’t look good. Bummer. So they started messing with how they would present the results. Cooking books. Then they couldn’t get it to look quite right, so they delayed publication. Buy some time, buy some time. Finally, shares got dumped, and the house of cards crumbled. Now the House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce is investigating. Interestingly, the Committee “actually began investigating Vytorin in December 2007, after the drug makers’ announced a second ENHANCE delay and tried to change the study’s endpoint.”

So there you have it. That’s how business is done in the world of pharmaceuticals. I can’t say I’m all that appalled–c’mon, all kinds of crazy stuff happens in business. But what gets me is the corruption within the scientific community. Isn’t science supposed to be the last corruptible institution. Oy vey; Galileo must be spinning in his grave.

Copyright © 2013 Dr. Nick Campos - All Rights Reserved.