Health Roundup: Side effects, generic drugs and glucosamine sleight of hand (satire)

Friday, March 10, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: glucosamine, health news, Natural News

Following the well-publicized fact that anti-inflammatory prescription drugs have killed at least 60,000 Americans, and that NSAIDs (over-the-counter painkillers) kill at least another 16,500 each year, combined with the new realization that ADHD drugs are now killing children, Sidney Taurel, Chief Executive of Eli Lilly & Co., one of the largest drug makers in the world, had this to say: "There's too much talk about the side effects of drugs!"

I'm not making this up. Taurel claims that really good drugs are being delayed in the approval process because -- get this -- too many people are concerned about their side effects. Gee, I suppose if we all just agreed that heart attacks, strokes, muscle wasting, liver damage, kidney failure, brain fog, nutritional deficiencies and death were of no consequences, then we could get all these drugs approved lickity split!

The arrogance of Big Pharma knows no bounds, it seems. The chemical holocaust taking place right now in the United States due to the mass over-consumption of dangerous, medically unnecessary, and fraudulently approved prescription drugs is apparently of no concern to this industry. Its leaders simply want to find more ways to drug more people with fewer regulatory "hassles" such as paying attention to side effects.

Taurel also said he wants tort reform, meaning he wants caps on damages awarded to victims harmed by drug side effects. Why not just throw in blanket legal immunity for all drug companies, too? After all, they ARE trying to find the cure for cancer, aren't they?

(The following paragraph is pure sarcasm...) I agree with Taurel that we should stop talking about these negative side effects. We should also stop hassling auto manufacturers over defective brakes that get people killed. While we're at it, we should stop giving food manufacturers grief over using carcinogenic ingredients in their processed food products, too -- just let 'em use anything they want. We can trust 'em , can't we? Let's face it: Corporate America has your best interests at heart, and we should just let these companies operate with impunity so that they can get down to the business of helping everyone.

Taurel says we should focus more on the BENEFITS of the drugs. Like how much money they make shareholders, for example. Or, perhaps, how prescription drugs are good for the economy because they create new job opportunities for doctors, nurses and surgeons to treat all the dangerous drug side effects.

How much of a better deal does Taurel want than today's industry-friendly FDA, anyway? It's hard to get any more lenient on drug companies than the FDA is right now. That's why some people call the FDA the, "Federal Drug Advocates."

Yet another clever way to boost Big Pharma profits

Always pondering ways to make the drug market more lucrative for large pharmaceutical corporations, the FDA is now floating the idea of charging application fees to manufacturers of generic drugs. This, in turn, would make it more expensive for generic drugs to receive approval, hiking their price and limiting their price advantage vs. brand-name drugs. The end result? Greater brand-name drug sales (which, of course, is what the FDA is ultimately after).

The whole problem with corruption and fraud at the FDA today is largely due to the fact that the agency is largely funded by brand-name drug makers through drug application fees. Thus, drug companies are the FDA's "customers." But the FDA is supposed to be regulating these companies, not serving them like royal guests at a five-star hotel. And this idea of accepting even more money from more drug companies would only compromise the integrity of the agency even further.

The agency, of course, is spinning this whole proposal as a huge benefit to consumers, saying it would help them approve generic drugs more quickly, thereby saving U.S. employers hundreds of millions of dollars in lower drug costs. Of course, those same corporations could save BILLIONS if they invested in nutrition, prevention and natural health instead of drugs and surgery, but that's another story.

Clearly what we need is genuine FDA reform, not making the FDA even more addicted to industry money. But don't expect to see any real reform efforts until there's a changing of the guard in Washington, as the current administration is quite cozy with Big Pharma.

Researchers now try to discredit glucosamine chondroitin sulfate supplements

Always working hard on new ways to discredit nutritional supplements, conventional medical researchers have now found a clever way to attack nutritional supplements used to treat joint pain. In what can only be called a fraudulently designed study, the Glucosamine-chondroitin Arthritis Intervention Trial (GAIT) compared these nutritional supplements with Celebrex, a prescription drug that only treats joint pain symptomatically and does nothing to rebuild cartilage or other tissue.

In other words, the study compared what is essentially a short-term painkiller with nutritional supplements that obviously take time to support the rebuilding of tissue. When Celebrex turned out to produce faster pain-reducing results, the mainstream media essentially declared glucosamine supplements to be useless.

It's nonsense, of course. All smoke and mirrors. Or, in this case, a comparison of apples and oranges. Masking pain with a painkiller is always fast. But if you really want to solve the underlying problem, you need good nutrition, not just dangerous chemicals that also cause heart attacks and strokes as side effects, by the way.

By the way, the study also used a low-dose, cheap version of glucosamine known to have poor assimilation. That's how the majority of so-called "alternative" studies are conducted: Researchers just happen to coincidentally use synthetic, low-dose vitamins or supplements, all the while acting like they're conducting real science.

This isn't real science. It's a charade. And once again, the mainstream media bought the whole thing hook, line and sinker.

If you're going to compare glucosamine with Celebrix, why not run another trial and compare calcium with crack? I can see the results now: "100% of the patients reported feeling better on crack. Therefore, calcium is useless." It's exactly the same stupid logic. I'm convinced many researchers are actually ON crack.