Why the attack on Doctor Oz was such a farce: 600 million prescriptions a year are backed by no scientific evidence at all

Wednesday, April 29, 2015
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: off-label prescribing, evidence-based medicine, quack science

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(NaturalNews) Hilariously, the Washington Post, USA Today, NPR, Fox News and even the Associated Press often get their science talking points from convicted felons, fraudsters and hucksters who claim to have a monopoly on "science."

In one of the most laughable examples of modern-day abandonment of journalistic ethics, all these mainstream media players helped spread a contrived smear campaign against Doctor Oz that was organized by a group of doctors who operate as part of the so-called "Monsanto Discredit Bureau," a shady group of biotech operatives whose primary goal is to discredit and destroy those who raise legitimate questions over the safety of glyphosate or GMOs.

The attack on Oz was predicated on the accusation that Doctor Oz's recommended protocols were "not backed by scientific evidence."

The assumption in that statement is that all doctors practicing pharmaceutical medicine solely restrict their own decisions and prescriptions to nothing but evidence-based medicine. In other words, Oz was being singled out by accusing him of departing from the world of pharmaceutical medicine where we are all assured that 100% of all the medicines prescribed by doctors are backed by strict scientific evidence.

But that's a total farce, it turns out. More than 600 million prescriptions are written each year that are backed by no scientific evidence at all.

How's that? Welcome to the pharmaceutical industry's big, dirty loophole: "off-label prescribing."

Off-label prescribing means drugs are prescribed even when there's no scientific evidence that they actually work

Off-label prescribing means a doctor can prescribe any FDA-approved drug for any health condition at all; including health conditions for which the drug has never been approved and has no scientific evidence of efficacy.

A doctor can prescribe a blood pressure drug, for example, as an antidepressant if he wants to. He can prescribe an antidepressant drug as a skin rash "treatment" if he wants. And hundreds of millions of times each year, this is precisely what doctors do in America. They abandon the principle of evidence-based medicine and prescribe off-label drugs to patients, even though the drugs have never been clinically tested or approved for the conditions the doctor is hoping to treat.

As Consumer Reports explains in this must-read document:

"When a doctor writes a prescription to treat your ailment, you probably assume that the drug has been approved for that use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). That's a reasonable assumption, but it is not always true. One in five prescriptions in the U.S. is for a use not approved by the FDA. And most of those (about 75 percent) are for a use that lacks any evidence or rigorous studies to back it up..."

In other words, out of more than 4 billion prescriptions written each year in the United States, over 600 million are "off-label" prescriptions that utterly lack FDA-approved efficacy and scientific proof.

Of course, the entire pharma-controlled medical profession doesn't want you to realize this. The mainstream media almost never covers this. And all those attacking Doctor Oz don't want you to look into the fact that their own drug prescriptions are often based on sheer quackery.

Nope, you're not supposed to apply the rules of scientific evidence to the pharmaceutical industry and its deadly chemicals that kill over 100,000 Americans each year. You're supposed to instead focus on Doctor Oz and the few times he used the word "miracle" to describe some pretty amazing natural remedies or metabolism boosters.

Meanwhile, the very same "science" editors who write for mainstream media publishers and are attacking Doctor Oz refuse to apply the same level of scrutiny to the total quackery of off-label prescribing of pharmaceuticals. Somehow, Big Pharma's medications and vaccines get a free pass. No evidence needed! They are all ASSUMED to be safe by default; it is this assumption that makes the entire industry a mockery of real science.

Why does anyone still believe the words of criminal corporations that admit to committing an endless series of felony crimes?

Between the faked studies, the widespread bribery of doctors, the felony crimes of drug companies and the chicanery of the FDA itself, the pharmaceutical industry is the poster child for the utter abandonment of evidence-based medicine.

As I wrote in July of 2012 in this Natural News article:

Those of us who have long been describing the pharmaceutical industry as a "criminal racket" over the last few years have been wholly vindicated by recent news. Drug and vaccine manufacturer Merck was caught red-handed by two of its own scientists faking vaccine efficacy data by spiking blood samples with animal antibodies. GlaxoSmithKline has just been fined a whopping $3 billion for bribing doctors, lying to the FDA, hiding clinical trial data and fraudulent marketing. Pfizer, meanwhile has been sued by the nation's pharmacy retailers for what is alleged as an "overarching anticompetitive scheme" to keep generic cholesterol drugs off the market and thereby boost its own profits.

The picture that's emerging is one of a criminal drug industry that has turned to mafia tactics in the absence of any real science that would prove their products to be safe or effective. The emergence of this extraordinary evidence of bribery, scientific fraud, lying to regulators and monopolistic practices that harm consumers is also making all those doctors and "skeptics" who defended Big Pharma and vaccines eat their words.

To defend Big Pharma today is to defend a cabal of criminal corporations that have proven they will do anything -- absolutely anything -- to keep their profits rolling in. It makes no difference who they have to bribe, what studies they have to falsify, or who has to be threatened into silence. They will stop at nothing to expand their profit base, even if it means harming (or killing) countless innocents.

See the specifics of Big Pharma's on-the-record crimes and scientific misconduct at this article link.

FDA admits off-label medication use causes injury and death

Even the FDA openly admits that off-label drug use may cause injuries and death among patients. On its own drug safety page, the FDA says:

FACT: Improper medication use increases the risk of harm from medication, often resulting in hundreds of thousands of injuries or deaths each year.

...The Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimates that at least 1.5 million preventable adverse drug events occur within the healthcare system each year. The costs of these preventable adverse drug events has been estimated to exceed $4 billion annually.

...FACT: All medications have inherent risks and when a person decides to use medication, he or she is agreeing to take certain risks.

Although the FDA never admits this, many of these risks come from the fact that the practice of off-label drug prescribing violates the very foundation of "evidence-based medicine." It makes a mockery of the claim that all medications are based on "good science," in other words.

But you see, when the pharmaceutical industry and its paid-off drug pushers (conventional physicians) abandon evidence-based medicine and write high-profit prescriptions backed by nothing, that's perfectly okay with all the doctors. Somehow, their lack of scientific evidence doesn't count. It's only when Doctor Oz gets excited about a South American herb that these people lose their minds and go bonkers with accusations that Oz's topics "lack scientific evidence" even when their own drug prescribing habits are arguably far worse.

Perhaps it's time they looked in the mirror and examined their own practices for a change.

Why real medicine is an art just as much as it's a science

Real medicine, it turns out, can't be captured by the reductionist Western thinking that dominates the modern medical "sick care" industry. As any genuine doctors knows, real medicine is where art and science meet. Real doctors, similarly, have much more at their disposal than FDA-approved chemicals, radiation and surgery. They have compassion, empathy, intuition and experience as key tools that often can't be strictly defined in the language of clinical trials.

Real doctors have a sense of humility and awe for the natural world. They have a deep respect for the genuine miracles of Mother Nature and the extraordinary self-healing capabilities of a properly nourished human body. Even more, real doctors understand that the body is not the boundary of the domain of medicine -- it also includes the mind and spirit of the patient. A real doctor knows that the so-called "Placebo effect" -- something discarded by Western science as an annoying artifact -- is itself a healing tool which can be invoked by physicians to create an expectation of healing that the patient's mind makes real.

Real doctors understand the power of intention, the power of the mind and even the power of laughter and love. Real doctors like Patch Adams understood that healing is first sparked in the body and mind of the patient, not merely through an invasive intervention of doctors who should more aptly be called "pharmaceutical mechanics." Doctors who merely treat symptoms and push drugs aren't real doctors at all. They're Big Pharma sales reps and arrogant drug pushers who know nothing of healing.

Doctor Oz, you see, is a generation more advanced than what's taught in mainstream medical schools. He's teaching America what can only be called "advanced medicine" while the paranoid clingers to Big Pharma's medical monopoly are trying to drag Oz backwards into the past where they can drown out his message with pharmaceutical ads and scientist-for-hire corporate front groups like the ACSH.

What America really needs is not more corporate-funded front groups and "science" shills condemning the healing arts but rather a revolution in the practice of medicine that finally recognizes the advanced modalities of healing and health that are systematically ridiculed by the pharma-controlled "sick care" industry. What we really need, in other words, is to embrace and even exploit the ready potential of the healing arts such as massage therapy, nutritional therapies, herbal medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, chiropractic care and even homeopathy.

For daring to seek to raise America's consciousness about these important healing modalities, Doctor Oz should be celebrated, not condemned. All condemnation should be reserved for those narrow-minded, stuck-in-the-past doctors, "science" writers and corporate sellouts who want to keep us all stuck in the failed era of chemical medicine because that's what makes their bosses the most money. Sickness, after all, is a multi-billion-dollar industry. No wonder the companies that profit from it are so desperate to destroy anyone who threatens to interfere with it.

And yes, that includes Forbes.com, the Washington Post, USA Today and all the other quack science propaganda publishers that push the drug industry's propaganda disguised as journalism.