Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, for example, greatly interfere with Coenzyme Q10 production (a nutrient essential for cellular energy), but instead of being told to take supplemental CoQ10, many patients suffering from fatigue and exhaustion on statin drugs are simply diagnosed with another disease and given yet another prescription drug to take.
Antidepressant drugs, as another example, interfere with the metabolism of carbohydrates. Most people taking antidepressants are deficient in the B vitamins (especially folic acid). |
Melody Petersen
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 The sales reps and the companies that employed them had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues to protect. prescription drug costs were consuming more and more tax dollars in Iowa and every state in the country, a trend the pharmaceutical companies were working hard to extend.
The year 2003 marked the first time that states spent more to pay the medical bills of the poor and the disabled covered by Medicaid than they spent on elementary and secondary education. |
| He said he was not finding that many prescription drug deaths among the certificates. In fact, by the time Iowa's death certificates were logged in the final statistics kept by the federal Centers for Disease Control, the adverse effects of medications were said to have killed only five Iowans in 2002.
What's more, in all of the United States in 2002, officials attributed just 247 deaths to the side effects of medications. Where were the other
100,000 Americans that the Toronto researchers had conservatively estimated to be dying from medications taken as prescribed? |
| This is a book about a great transformation in the prescription drug industry over the last twenty-five years. Once the most successful pharmaceutical companies were those with the brightest scientists searching for cures. Now the most profitable and powerful drugmakers are those with the most creative and aggressive marketers. The drug companies have become marketing machines, selling antidepressants like Paxil, pain pills like Celebrex, and heart medications like Lipitor with the same methods that Coca-Cola uses to sell Sprite and Procter 8c Gamble uses to sell Tide. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 For example, if I were in an accident and needed a drug to deal with trauma or pain I would avail myself of that prescription drug. But I would never take a prescription drug long term. And it is long term use that the pharmaceutical industry is promoting to the general public. They want everyone in the world to take prescription drugs every day for the rest of their lives. Statin drugs certainly fall into that category. One of the primary marketing messages about statin drugs is that you need them to reduce your cholesterol level and bring it into a healthy range. |
Melody Petersen
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| Merck spent $ 160 million to advertise Vioxx to consumers in 2000, more than any company had ever spent to advertise a prescription drug. It was also more than was spent that year to advertise either Budweiser or Pepsi. Many of the Vioxx ads featured Dorothy Hamill skating on a frozen pond in the snow-covered woods to the Rascals' song "A Beautiful Morning."
"With all the great memories has come another thing I thought I'd never experience—the pain of osteoarthritis," Ms. Hamill said in the ad. "Vioxx is here," an announcer chimed in. "With one little pill a day . . . |
| Patients and the nation's medical system would have saved billions of dollars in prescription drug costs if it had not been for the magical power of Forest's corporate science, which had turned three failed studies into a blockbuster of a success.
Nothing made it clearer that marketers had invaded medical science than when the global advertising agencies on Madison Avenue decided to jump into the work of performing drug experiments on humans. |
| In 2001, a company called Celltech was the first to use consumer advertisements to promote a prescription drug that had been classified as a Schedule II substance by drug enforcement officials. Drugs on Schedule II are the nation's most addictive drugs that also have a medical purpose. Only Schedule I drugs, which include cocaine, heroin, and other drugs with no legal purpose, are more tightly controlled by the Drug Enforcement Administration. |
Greg Critser
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 Yet as most of us who have cared for older loved ones know, the prescription drug cabinet can be a mixed blessing at best. Clinicians who specialize in the diseases of the elderly are increasingly concerned with the impact of extended pharmaceutical use. Note: That's use, not abuse or even overuse, that they're concerned about.
Of course, audiences for anything — drugs, movies, or even fast food — no longer just "happen" around a great performance or a great product; audiences, as any good marketing person will tell you, are created. And so it is with America's pharmaceutical tribes. |
David Brownstein M.D.
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 Approximately 45% of Americans use at least one prescription drug.1 2 The Kaiser Family Foundation reports 2.1 billion prescriptions were written in 1994 and 3.5 billion prescriptions were written in 2004—a 68% increase. Spending for U.S. prescription drugs was 188.5 billion dollars in 2004, a 450% increase since 1990.3 Unbelievably, it is projected that in 2015, prescription drug spending will exceed 446.2 billion dollars. We spend more money on health care than any other country. Are we healthier for this increased use in prescription medications? The answer is no. |
H. Winter Griffith, M.D.
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 Don't buy from sites that offer to prescribe a prescription drug for the first time without a physical exam, sell a prescription drug without a prescription, or sell drugs not approved by the FDA.
• Don't purchase from foreign websites at this time, because generally it will be illegal to import the drugs bought from these sites, the risks are greater, and there is very little the U.S. Government can do if you get ripped off.
• Avoid sites that do not identify themselves and do not provide a U.S. address and phone number to contact if there's a problem. |
| Continued next column
OVERDOSE
Don't take with:
Any other prescription drug, nonprescription drug or alcohol without first checking with your doctor or pharmacist.
0
POSSIBLE
ADVERSE REACTIONS OR SIDE EFFECTS
SYMPTOMS
WHAT TO DO
Life-threatening:
High fever, rapid pulse, profuse sweating, muscle rigidity, confusion and irritability, seizures; fever, chills, mouth sores.
Discontinue. emergency treatment.
Seek
Common:
Dry mouth, blurred vision, constipation, difficulty urinating; sedation, low blood pressure, dizziness.
Continue. Call doctor when convenient. |
Greg Critser
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| There's another number to consider: In 2004, almost half of all Americans used at least one prescription drug on a daily basis,-amazingly, about one in six take three or more a day. That represents a substantial rise from the early 1980s, when Americans — patients and physicians alike — seemed much more leery about using new drugs. Such is no longer the case. Today, Americans are more willing than ever to experiment, or, more precisely, to be experimented upon. |
| Their peephole was the Medicare prescription drug Act, which the industry was able to rewrite to forbid the federal government from negotiating for lower drug prices — something citizens of every other industrialized democracy (and many undeveloped ones as well) take for granted. That the congressman who shepherded the bill is now the $2-miUion-a-year president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the industry's big lobbying group, takes no one by surprise.
The new pharma money also encourages regulatory permissiveness, both here and abroad. |
| The business question was: How could you convince a lot of people — and a lot of physicians and insurers — to pay for an expensive prescription drug when most people saw heartburn in a benign way and treated it with a 49-cent roll of Turns? Worse, from the perspective of the CEO, much of the resistance to any anti-GERD medication was populist, the outgrowth of long-held folk wisdom: people felt that heartburn was, at least in part, their own fault, either from eating too much or from eating the wrong foods at the wrong time. How could you sell around that? |
| Off-label promotion" is the term used for a pharmaceutical company's advocacy of a prescription drug for a use that the FDA has not specifically approved. Often, this type of advertising involves the distribution of medical journal articles that discuss such uses — Paxil for shyness, for example — with the intent of subtly encouraging physicians to, let's just say it, experiment. Off-label prescribing, particularly in the last-ditch treatment of acute diseases, like cancer, can often hold tremendous promise, but when it comes to chronic diseases, it often causes more pain than relief. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
| But I would never take a prescription drug long term. And it is long term use that the pharmaceutical industry is promoting to the general public. They want everyone in the world to take prescription drugs every day for the rest of their lives. Statin drugs certainly fall into that category. One of the primary marketing messages about statin drugs is that you need them to reduce your cholesterol level and bring it into a healthy range. But you don't need statin drugs in order to achieve a healthy level of cholesterol, as has been demonstrated right here. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 It allows us to shift control of our lives from our own conscious intentions to a prescription drug handed out to us by doctors. It is in this very mythology that the danger to Americans hides. Not in the drug itself -- it is the mythology that’s dangerous, not the chemical. The seductive qualities of this drug encourage people to release themselves from responsibility. They encourage people to disempower themselves, to shift their power to external influences. |
| A chemical cannot reverse decades of being sedentary and refusing to get off your ass and go work out once in a while. A prescription drug cannot reverse the toxicity of the foods that you have been buying and consuming from grocery stores each and every day of your life.
As people take Acomplia in a desperate effort to pursue the mythology of this drug, they are only going to do themselves more harm. They are going to wind up in a situation where they are still obese, they still have body fat, they still have high cholesterol, they still have diabetes and heart disease and cancer. |
H. Winter Griffith, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
| Don't buy from sites that offer to prescribe a prescription drug for the first time without a physical exam, sell a prescription drug without a prescription, or sell drugs not approved by the FDA.
• Don't purchase from foreign websites at this time, because generally it will be illegal to import the drugs bought from these sites, the risks are greater, and there is very little the U.S. Government can do if you get ripped off.
• Avoid sites that do not identify themselves and do not provide a U.S. address and phone number to contact if there's a problem. |
Greg Critser
See book keywords and concepts |
| But do we know the full price for today's spiraling prescription drug culture? At one level, we know something about the immediate benefits of specific drugs. Pfizer's blockbuster, Lipitor, seems consistently to lower cholesterol levels and hence reduce cardiovascular risks, although there is still relatively little evidence that it prevents premature deaths, which might be something we want to know before we routinely prescribe it for everyone over fifty — itself a serious proposal by some of the world's top cardiologists. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 Legalize hemp and make long-term prescription drug use illegal
Now, if we had honest leaders in this country, prescription drugs would be illegal, at least for long-term use, and hemp would be legal. We could grow hemp for industrial use. Create new revenues streams for farmers. Grow our own biodiesel and reduce our need to import foreign oil.
At the same time, we need to outlaw many prescription drugs, especially for long-term use. We need to outlaw, for one thing, the use of these drugs in children. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 In the United States, the physician orders at least one diagnostic or screening test in three-quarters of all visits, a therapeutic service one-third of the time, and a prescription drug two-thirds of the time. We'll assess the worth of diagnostic and screening tests in a few pages; in chapter 5, we'll assess the efficacy of common prescription drugs
Of all maladies that bring patients to the office, the most common one is the common cold. Its treatment is where we begin.
THE COMMON COLD
In 1994, about one of every ten visits to a primary care physician was for treatment of this malady. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Recently the American Heart Association, along with a panel of board members with ties to prescription drug companies, lowered that number to 100. They now say the optimum number to shoot for is 70, although anything under 100 is still considered very good. My own LDL cholesterol is 67. To see a person with an LDL level of 67 is also quite unusual, as any doctor will tell you.
But enough about my numbers. Let's talk about YOUR numbers, and how you can change your numbers for the better. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
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| Toxins from Water: 150,000
Arsenic, fluoride, chlorine, prescription drug residue, pesticides, rocket fuel (perchlorate), Bisphenol-A (toxin used in making plastic water bottles), C§ (the chemical used to make Teflon111), bacteria, parasites, etc
Toxins from Prescription Drugs: 180,000
Aluminum, mercury, chemotherapy, left-over animal parts from meat processing plants, synthetic chemicals, liver toxic glues, fillers, binders, artificial colorings, spermicides, synthetic hormones, vaccines, etc. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
| There is no way around it! No prescription drug will give you the same benefit, and there’s no nutritional supplement that takes the place of physical exercise. The human body was meant to be moved, and if you want yours to be healthy, you've got to move it.
Besides exercise, I’ve also completely eliminated all processed foods and junk foods from my diet. I eat no manufactured foods whatsoever, that is, no breads, no packaged cereals, no frozen foods, no fried foods, no junk foods, and certainly no candy bars, breads, crackers, cookies, pastas or anything of that sort. |
H. Winter Griffith, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
| Your pharmacist can tell you all active and inert ingredients in a prescription drug.
Occasionally, a tablet, capsule or liquid may contain small amounts of sodium, sugar or potassium. If you are on a diet that severely restricts any of these, ask your pharmacist or doctor to suggest another form.
Some liquid medications contain alcohol. Avoid them if you are susceptible to the adverse effects of alcohol consumption.
BASIC INFORMATION-3—Habit Forming
A drug habit can be physical or psychological. Either leads to drug dependence. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The predominant view is that when a person has a disease (or various symptoms that have been given a disease label), they can turn to a prescription drug to solve that problem. Unknown to most patients, however, is the fact that prescription drugs only mask the symptoms of disease, they don't actually resolve any health problems whatsoever.
Thus, the great failing in turning to conventional medicine or relying on prescription drugs is that patients shift responsibility for their health outcome to the drugs themselves. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 There seems to be no limit to how far the highly corrupt psychiatry community and prescription drug companies will carry this to exert control over the population and generate obscene profits. And the truth is that anyone can be diagnosed with a mental disorder given sufficient creativity on the part of the psychiatrists. If a person is too creative and excited, they have Attention Deficit Disorder. If they're not creative enough, they have a reading disorder. And if they get nervous while being observed by the psychiatrist, they obviously have a social anxiety disorder. See? |
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