 |
A Public Drug Registry Would Bring Honesty to Pharmaceutical
Research, But the Idea Terrifies Drug Companies
A new idea has surfaced in the medical community -- to publish the results
of all medical studies on a publicly accessible website that would include
results from both positive and negative studies. This proposal has been
floated in response to the recent discovery by regulatory authorities
and various members of the press that drug companies routinely hide or
suppress the publication of studies showing undesirable results.
For example, we are now learning that the use of anti-depressant drugs
promotes violent behavior among children and can even include suicidal
behavior, and that even though there was clear clinical evidence of this
link, the drug companies chose to hide this information from the FDA
and the public, making sure it never saw the light of day. It only came
out in state lawsuits filed by New York State Attorney General Eliot
Spitzer, a person I consider a law enforcement hero for his courage and
determination in rooting out the corruption of drug companies.
The fact is that for decades, drug companies have been cherry-picking
studies that would highlight only the positive, desired outcomes that
they wanted to forward to the FDA and share with the public. In this
way, drug companies could initiate 100 clinical trials for a particular
drug, then throw out all the trials showing negative results, producing
only trials for FDA review that showed positive results. This is one
of the primary reasons why today's popular pharmaceuticals simply don't
work -- the science has all been distorted. There are no people who are
made healthier by taking multiple prescription drugs for life, and the
vast majority of prescription drugs have undergone this fraudulent process
of selective clinical trials that were designed, from the very beginning,
to stumble across a few selected studies that might show positive results.
This is all very interesting to me, because I find that defenders of
modern medicine and pharmaceuticals often say that only their medicine
is "scientifically proven." Everything else, including alternative
medicine, medicinal herbs, nutritional therapies, and so on are not scientifically
proven according to these people. And yet, their own so-called scientific
method is anything but scientific. A scientific method would require
looking at all of the study results, and drawing a conclusion from all
the available data. What is extremely non-scientific is picking and choosing
the data you wish to view, and then forwarding that data to the regulatory
officials who will approve drugs for widespread public use based on those
selected positive results. That's not science. That's quackery.
Even worse, by designing a study in a certain way, you can take almost
any chemical, including highly toxic chemicals, and tweak out some sort
of positive claim by using enough people with enough studies and approaching
it with a carefully chosen study design. For example, one of the tricks
drug companies play with clinical trials is to remove individuals from
the trial who aren't showing the desired positive results. A trial might
start out with 200 people, but after 3 months, if certain individuals
aren't showing the desired results, such as lower cholesterol or stabilized
blood sugar levels, they can simply be dismissed from the trial for a
variety of reasons. That leaves the 100 people or so who were for some
reason showing a positive result, and yet that positive result could
be from something completely unrelated to the drug. It could have been
lifestyle changes, it could have been the placebo effect, or even new
exercise routines taken up by patients who are suddenly interested in
their health.
So, the bottom line is that if you initiate a large enough number of
studies and you dismiss all the people who don't respond in the way you
want them to respond, and then you cherry-pick those few studies that
showed precisely the results you want, you end up with a seriously distorted
view of what the pharmaceutical or chemical actually causes in the human
body. But you also end up with a data set that you can promote to the
FDA, the press, and physicians as being "scientifically proven." And
this process is precisely what goes on for the vast majority of prescription
drugs offered today by pharmaceutical companies that are approved by
the FDA, prescribed by physicians, and taken by tens of millions of Americans.
The cold, hard truth about pharmaceuticals is that by and large they
are not scientifically proven -- they are based on fraudulent clinical
studies, and they simply don't work to make people healthier. In time,
the American public will come to realize this, and this idea of having
a publicly accessible database of all clinical trials might be one way
in which the public begins to learn the truth about prescription drugs.
But I doubt that we're going to see such a public database anytime soon.
For one thing, the pharmaceutical industry is terrified by the idea.
They certainly don't want the actual scientific results of their studies
to be made public, because that would quite readily show how ineffective
and toxic their prescription drug products really are.
So you can expect Big Pharma to delay this idea for as long as possible,
and even if it does become a reality, you can expect there to be loopholes
put in place so that not all trials have to be published. That would
once again return the system to the cherry-picking protocol, where drug
companies could selectively choose which studies they wish to publish,
and by doing that, they could of course present a distorted view of the
data.
If such a publicly accessible database existed today, you'd be shocked
to learn the number of deaths and harmful side effects that have been
caused by clinical drug trials conducted over the last 20 years. Without
a doubt, the pharmaceutical industry depends on the fact that they can
bury negative results and make them disappear. If those results were
to suddenly be made public, and if stringent rules were put in place
which required all such studies to be made public in the future, you
can bet the pharmaceutical industry would experience a meltdown caused
by the widespread realization that pharmaceuticals really aren't good
for people after all. |
 |
Herbal Weight Loss Supplements - Hoodia Gordonii Appetite Suppressants. Sale. Buy drugs at discount prices in Pharmacy Online Hot Pharmacy News |
 |