Two sided stories blog

To follow up in the area that is perhaps a lot more serious than any other issue on my blog (possible exception of Child sex abuse by priests but I'm not sure even the Catholic Church has abused as many people as the drug companies have).

There used to be a common link of course - very little or no evidence that could be placed in a court, of the deaths and abuse caused by these two huge institutional power complexes. Now the Catholics have been caught with their pants down just too many times, for too long, to escape featuring in serious in-depth reports, ones that can be found on the web.

Pharmacy that kills however - remarkable how these stories disappear or are not able to be "evidenced". That is mainly because research into these things is expensive - only drug companies could afford to do it, but they are disinclined to do so for some weird reason...

Let's get one little fact out of the way first - yes, some drugs SAVE lives - its true, we may all be grateful at some point for a badly researched drug - they usually have undesired effects as well but they can save a life, at least in the short term - remarkable in the circumstances you might think but some actually do. (but not Tamiflu as pictured below)
Now...
some other recorded facts (from major bodies' undisputed published studies)

* The top 18 drug companies made (net) profits in the year 2008 of between $2billion and $15 billion each. (this is net of tax and funding "put back" into research)
* Adverse Reactions to Drugs Cause Hospitalisation of 1.5 Million Americans Each Year (The UK figures are proportionate).
* 28% of all emergency department visits were prescription drug-related, including a large proportion due to adverse drug reactions and inappropriate prescriptions. Of all of the drug-related visits, the authors (of the study round up) found that 70% were preventable.

According to the FDA, Adverse Drug Reactions cause more than 106,000 deaths annually in the USA making them the 4th leading cause of death.

...I pause to think about the Twin Towers death toll and resulting actions versus this 35 times bigger disaster...

This industry that makes these profits also funds wonderful perks and bonuses for Doctors, Professors, and teachers of medical research. In fact one GP told me that during his training it would have been possible to eat out at the drug companies' expense, mainly to the champagne and foie gras standard, almost every single night for five years of his 6 years in medical training.

It is no coincidence when you study figures provided by epidemiologists and the Primary Care Trusts and see new patterns of drug prescribing spreading from one GP practice to the next, and the next, like a plague. These new drugs are those that have just been pushed by a drugs rep on his rounds, paid to persuade doctors that they need to use them.

"New" isn't really the right word of course, generally these are old drugs that have had a slight redesign, been re-tried out, and discovered, most frequently by accident, to have an effect that might be marketable.

The companies need to keep redesigning "new" drugs because their copyright runs out after 10 years, and so if they didn't get the new ones going, their net profits of billions would start to drop off after ten years as they became available for other companies to copy and produce much more cheaply.

Thalidomide is famous of course for causing deformities (and fatalities) in children of women given the drug during pregnancy - "old news now" the companies will say, drugs are rigorously tested these days...

except they are not.
Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, no lover of homeopathy in his "Bad Science" column, is constantly highlighting just how these companies cheat the research system, draw wrong conclusions, allow inconvenient results from certain tests to be quietly overlooked and others phrased in ways that exaggerate the positive effects of the new drugs.

The list of drug tests being effectively only undertaken by releasing the drug to public prescription is many hundreds long.

The NHS has the "yellow flag" system designed to capture the adverse reaction information from these "gone live trials" in an organised formal way - the authorities EXPECT there to be these problems.

This system does receive hundreds of reports - probably less than half the number that it should because doctors are as inclined to spend time filling these in as they are to listen to you talk about your Children's school report headaches for twenty minutes...
It will probably happen when they spot a repeating pattern of really bad adverse reactions (such as heart attacks) within their own patient group, but then, that is too late for those people.

Just a couple of recent examples: Vioxx, withdrawn 3 years after it should have been shown from research that this was likely to kill a few hundred people by giving them heart attacks - (Guardian and BMJ reports).

I post this one example - merely because the coincidence of the woman's name makes me smile ironically...
"A Texas woman, Carol Ernst, claimed Vioxx was to blame for her husband Robert's death.
Mr Ernst, 59, had been taking the drug for eight months when he died of heart arrhythmia in his sleep in 2001. He was a marathon runner and triathlete who was using the drug to treat pain in his hands.
Merck insisted its drug was not to blame for Mr Ernst's death. It said he had suffered from an irregular heartbeat and clogged arteries and it was these factors which led to his death.
But the jury agreed with his widow, and awarded her huge damages, including a large sum - £229m - specifically in punitive damages." - (BBC)

Going back a bit further we have Opren - the class action law suits on this one drove the drug company into bankruptcy... and please, don't worry about the jobs and their research - a company going bankrupt is often a good way to protect those within it from further loss and embarrassment - they all get to go work for A.N. other drug company afterwards...

The consequences of that scandal (800 deaths directly attributed) led to this one strongly worded letter published in the British Medical Journal..

Sir, Has it not been convincingly shown that inordinately lavish marketing campaigns thrust on doctors must be curtailed? Payments to persuade each general practitioner to increase his prescription rate for a new drug cannot be beneficial to his patient or his profession. Indeed, it must also subvert the value of unsubsidised research. - Februrary 1983

On the same page there were groups of learned doctors writing on many other subjects such as ventilation in operating rooms - but in the whole journal series, just the one doctor on this... a lone voice.

A lone voice brave enough not to want to be liked by drug company funding decision makers. They are of course, 25 years later, despite his strongly worded letter, still companies bribing GPs to prescribe - have been doing ever since. And they are still supporting colleges in their research projects (just so long as all criticisms can be quietly muted or transferred over to those highly dangerous Quack medicines that don't kill, maim or make sick, errr I mean that can't be proven to work all the time...)

So you see, all you potential blog hijackers...

I do not have to go into the bowels of the earth to satisfy your lust for the last word on this subject - I am a blogger not a research scientist, this is opinion, the facts are out there - just out of reach much of the time, but truth is what is born out by experience. (Einstein)

Unlike the drug company supporters I do not have any vested interest in promoting substances that risk causing death to make profits... drug companies use their amazing and far reaching $influence$ to persuade millions of people that everything is alright and all scientific.
It isn't.

The proof of all these poison puddings has been and is in the eating, and millions of deaths and acute illnesses worldwide each year are the price we are swallowing or having injected into us...
and, via our tax and insurance premiums, for which we are paying $billions into drug company profits every year.

Libelous?
I think not.
Scandal? - definitely.

Today we see yet another article in which (Professor) Edzard Ernst, one of the junior staff within the smaller branch (of complementary medicine) within the world renowned (cough splutter) Peninsular medical and dentistry school near Exeter, continues his long
running campaign against Homeopathy, there is a give away to which readers who saw the headline and skimmed the article need to pay particular attention.

This line in the penultimate paragraph of the Guardian article (title linked) reveals that the reason the lobbyists want to have this cost effective form of treatment removed from any NHS connections is because it, "undermines the credibility of pharmacists and the government's regulatory body".

Whilst homeopaths have to spend much of their time defending a practice that research continually proves safe, efficacious and value for money, very little critical study is centred on the oft-revealed as biased drug company research,
and these same critics' glib assumptions of "safe" and "scientifically proven" pharmaceutical products.
It is a given that medical research in this country is expensive - and this money by and large comes from Pharmaceutical company profits. These funds support many schools and colleges, the industry has a turn over larger than several small countries - and a few large ones too. It does not fund anything that might undermine its grasp of the NHS market share. It does fund those who support its position...

and yet...
The evidence of efficacy of many drugs is constantly being undermined by the harsh facts of death and iatrogenic illness - the very things that originally prompted pioneering doctors to become homeopaths to search for treatments that didn't kill or make their patients suffer worse health.

Mr Ernst complains that £12 million was spent on homeopathic remedies in 3 years - and doesn't mention that The NHS is spending nearly £2BILLION a year treating patients who have had an adverse reaction to drugs prescribed for them by doctors...

The credibility of pharmaceutical products is already undermined by the ever growing lists of many "side effects" for virtually every one of their products. I have one that has a list of thirty potential effects that, presumably, different patients have suffered because not all people react to the one drug in the same way.

Homeopathy treats different people differently, becasue hey - guess what.. we are different in these crucial ways - otherwise we would all get the same side effects wouldn't we? Pharmaceutical champions demand that we are, and we treat everyone, all the same... even when their own evidence proves that this is a nonsense.

Accepting homeopathy on the NHS is common sense - the credibility of the pharmaceutical companies is already undermined enough, by their own evidence.

The title linked article is on about working women who can't let go of responsibility in the kitchen - I reckon the researchers and writers should be much more emphasising the stereotypical roles that we find persist no matter what ...
for example, when I clean the kitchen or tidy away, it is possible I might miss the odd cup on the side, or a crumb here or there... this is pounced on by my wife - its as if only she can do it properly.
...and she is not the only one, all previous relationships with a domestic life together - the same role emerges.

While it is perfectly OK for a woman to decide to leave those dishes for later, and I can do them without any comment - it is not cool for me to leave any part uncleaned or non pristine - and even if it is pristine - there will always need to be that one last, female, surface wipe or movement of the condiments...

I don't mean this as a criticism -its just a fact of how we are programmed. Some may escape it, sure, but not the majority.

Has anyone else noticed that women tend to keep their cars messy while men keep theirs clean and tidy? This is something I have seen many times, and never the opposite way round...
I believe this is all part of the same dominant separation of roles - women interior/domestic, men exterior/hunter-gatherer...
and generally (with some honorable exceptions) we tend to try hard to retain control in these particular contexts, even when we profess to believe otherwise.

"It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban".

"When will they ever learn" is the song lyric that springs to mind.
Rumsfeld's cronies funded the Mujahadeen to the tune of many millions to try and help hurt the Russians. When the Russians withdrew and the USA had other fish to fry, they let the Taliban (the Mujahadeen's governmental face) turn the country into a haven for ancient text corrupting, backward, misanthropic assholes.
Then, after 9/11 (not the first time the terrorists had let it be known how much they despised western interference in their area) persuaded the old enemy, the UK to join in the renewed attempt to turn this non-country into somewhere that terrorism would not be sheltered - just wildly encouraged by seeing invading forces adding to the local corruption...

and this (title linked) story reveals exactly how this happens today...
meanwhile Obama worries about committing more cannon fodder, and Gordon Brown is sending out his secret weapon - the Ainsworth emissary (good luck mate) to persuade other European members to join in this charade and have some of their soldiers needlessly killed promoting terrorism and corruption...

wonder how easy that job will be..?

Even the Guardian editor daren't...
this morning on 'Today' he derided the press complaints commission for being weak, lazy, ineffectual and hopelessly self defeating - but when questioned as to whether this meant that self regulation was no longer working, he said, No - he wanted self regulation...
Well others can say what he would not.

The Press Complaints commission is a fig leaf that editors want to keep - all of them - even if they privately believe its chair, Paul Dacre, to be somewhere below Gary Glitter and Robert Mugabe in the sainthood queue...

...because they fear not only State, as in government, regulation of their improper behaviours, they cannot stand the idea that someone might sit in judgement upon their freedom to publish and be damned.

The press regularly campaign against the libel laws, believing the rich can use these laws to silence them - or worse, can claim huge damages for stories that should have been allowed in the "Public interest".

Of course the press are the ultimate arbiters of what the public interest really is...as in the massively publicised criticism of Gordon's poor handwriting and spelling (see below). Much as though I support the Guardian's general principles of left leaning equality and fairness - I part company with them over their failure to confront the C**t - as Mr Dacre is known amongst his staff for his frequent use of the word to describe them...

The PCC is not just a harmless, toothless, promoter of press freedom - it is a failure at its main task of making the press respond to public criticism. i.e. they are in no position to be the arbiter of public interest because they deny it at every turn when it comes to complaints about their columnists such as Jan Moir.

Alan Rusbridger cannot bear to go it alone - and attack the body with this monstrous idiot at its head, because he wants to stay in that club of self regulation they all depend upon, and he wouldn't get voted to its head by the majority membership of slobbering self serving editors that comprise the commission.

The bread is buttered that way - and the closest he can get to criticism of the body is where he stretched today...
not far enough Alan - to avoid the need for independent scrutiny is self serving and won't do...

Quite frankly I really don't want to hear any more public complaints or expressions of deep sadness over the loss of one of "our boys" in Afghanistan.
Not that I don't have some sympathy for the parents, I do, I just don't have any sympathy with the idea that it should be aired in our national media.

The fact that our Prime Minister hand writes letters to dead soldiers' families is probably the best way we have of trying to motivate him to get us the hell out of that stupid war. Can you imagine what the Prime minister of 1917 would have said at this demand? - he would still be writing them today!

I have expressed before the need to properly support soldiers once they have been committed to a war zone and this is, I maintain, a wholly different matter to the sentimental publicity that saturates our media and of which I have had enough...

The soldiers I met in various off guard moments all told of their desire for combat - almost universally they joined up in the hope of being "in a real war". Their families may not have heard some of the gruesome details of the pleasure they took in raiding a suspected Taliban camp or shooting the rags off the heads of targets on the distant road. Perhaps they should have thought about this - and the payback that is the subject of this piece - before allowing their son to become some seeker of blood?

The conscripted soldiers of the two world wars had not the choice and, by all the evidence, not the blood lust either. War is a filthy horror to be avoided at all costs, I cannot have sympathy for those who desire it when they suffer the consequences. Neither can I feel it right that their relatives get to shout in public about what is or isn't proper in a letter saying, "sorry your son got killed". The families are, perhaps understandably, making the most of this but shouldn't and the tabloid media are again playing into this agenda with a mawkish prurience that makes me nauseous...

And unfortunately at any one time a quarter of the western population is either crazy or about to be.
That definition of crazy is disputable of course, in my book there are more crazy people than would be described as such by a psychiatrist - but then psychiatrists have one of the highest rates of insanity of any professional group - and I don't just mean American Army psychiatrists.

There are those who really don't like being cut up on the freeway/motorway.
In this country they can be very dangerous, using their cars as a weapon. In the USA they can get a gun out of the glove compartment and be a tad more dangerous.

There was a famous incident when someone who had been told to stop smoking at a non smoking restaurant patio area in L.A. came back with a gun and shot dead the person who had told her...

Was she crazy?
Not according to psychiatrists. Of course it goes without saying that it is possible that all these deaths might have been caused by the same people with a knife or other alternate weapon - but it is unlikely that even half of the deliberate killings would have occurred, never mind all the accidental ones.

Gun deaths in America generally fall into some standard categories:-
suicide, accidental self shooting, accidental shooting of a family member, (by owner, of owner by a child or parent etc.) shooting of a fellow hunter, shooting by a cop, (justified or not), shooting by a gang member, shooting in an armed robbery, shooting by a schoolboy of his classmates, shooting of colleagues by an embittered worker, shooting because someone "deserves it" (as the rabid anti-abortionists might claim) shooting a love rival, shooting parents for the inheritance...

but in the past 100 years not one incident where someone picked up their 2nd amendment protected gun to form a regular militia in order to protect their country against the imposition of another state's force...

funny old amendment then isn't it.

Simon Mann is being pardoned very early in his 34 year sentence for coup plotting, in a manner that suggests the dictatorial leader of Equatorial Guinea can positively taste the bread being buttered for him...
Imagine the furore if The Lockerbie Bomber had been released on humanitarian grounds because, despite being only unwell for a short time and now perfectly fit, "he conducted himself well at the trial".

There was someone else's shadow hanging over this plot - failed business man, failed car driver, failed romancer and apple of the eye of a failed prime minister, Mark Thatcher...

His South African courtroom admission to guilt of "unwitting" involvement, in order to just pay a fine and receive only a suspended prison term -and more pertinently not face a trial in Guinea where he would almost certainly have been found as guilty as was Mr Mann, rings of traditional corrupt international justice.

Much like Simon Mann's latest amazingly early release of course...except Mann at least admitted to the conspiracy in court.
The president was rumoured to be thinking of emulating the American practice of extraordinary rendition to get the Thatcher boy into his clutches - hence the so called businessman's effective total disappearance from view - even from the paparazzi's prying lenses.

It is said that Thatcher junior once asked the grumpy old Maggie fan and press secretary, Bernard Ingham, what he could do to help his PM mother, Ingham said, "Leave the country".
He did of course.
There are obviously plenty of nation states out there that will accept large amounts of money to allow residence even to one man disaster zones like Mark. One cannot help feeling however, that it would be nice if the well known anagram and not at all corrupt president, Teodoro Obiang, (Boo Derogation? Boogie Donator?) would pay them more to have him mysteriously delivered into his court system...

but I suspect the plotters who rescued honest Simon have also got their lucre behind the young desert rally deserter who provides such an apt living legacy of the Thatcher years...

Long live back door international "diplomacy" - or how the rich ensure only the poor really cop it in the courts...

let's get real...
a girl called McCann is probably in the same place as 100,000 Palestinian children who have been murdered but never featured in a newspaper story other than as horror picture entertainment...