Great Health In Tough Times

Big Pharma vs. Compounding and You

Now, after a long pause, we will address what I consider one of Big Pharma's most dangerous threats to our health and our ability to take charge of it. To help us understand and respond to this serious challenge, I have asked Mike Belcher, RPh, a good friend and valued colleague for the past 25 years, to describe this evolving situation and make suggestions about what we can to about it

Here’s Mike:

Is Big Pharma A Threat To Your Compounded Prescription?

Big Pharma is at the heart of corporate America. The individual companies within Big Pharma are in heated competition with each other to gain market share for each of their individual products and in the bigger picture are in competition with all of corporate America for investment dollars from potential stockholders. With only 1% to 10% of all prescriptions dispensed being compounded according to testimony given before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in 2003, one would assume that a compounded prescription would be no threat to Big Pharma.

A compounded prescription is a prescription that has been ordered by a physician for a product that is not commercially available from a pharmaceutical manufacturer. The compound prescription must be prepared by a compounding pharmacist who formulates the prescription from bulk chemicals into a dosage that is customized to suit the needs of the individual patient. So if between 99 and 90 percent of all prescriptions dispensed are filled with products from Big Pharma, are compounded prescriptions for us a threat to Big Pharma? The logical short answer should be NO! But occasionally the perfect storm is created and the consequences and precedents that were set in the following scenario could be devastating to compounding pharmacies, physicians who utilize compounded products, and the health of their patients who depend on compounded products if similar situations arise in the future. This is it and 22 are we are fired at night if you in the end it tells me that I get this point and in inappropriate amount of resources to open my medical practice and developing my diet of practice have gotten three so far today helmet

This perfect storm began brewing in 2002 and culminated in 2008. In 2002, a study for the long-term use of hormone replacement therapy, which had been conducted by the National Health Institute as a part of the Women’s Health Initiative, was abruptly terminated due to the increase risks of strokes, heart attacks, blood clots and breast cancer experienced by study participants. The drugs that were used in the study were Premarin and Prempro made by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. Sales of these two products fell from over 2 billion dollars per year in 2002 to about 800 million in 2008 according to Drugs.com – a significant loss of revenue for Wyeth. About this same time period, Suzanne Somers through her book and the publicity she received through the Oprah Winfrey Show sparked tremendous interest in bio-identical hormones. As women began discontinuing their Premarin/Prempro due to the health risks associated with these drugs, they sought out physicians to replace their Premarin with bio-identical hormones (BHRT). In 2005, Wyeth filed a Citizens Complaint with the Food and Drug Administration requesting that the FDA take actions against pharmacies that were engaged in the compounding of bio-identical hormone replacement therapy. Wyeth asserted that the efficacy and safety of the drugs being compounded were not subjected to the same FDA scrutiny as manufacturers were required to comply with and that pharmacies were making false claims regarding the products and mislabeling the products. One can speculate that Wyeth did this in order to protect the dwindling market share of its products. If the competition could be crushed by government intervention, then the sales of their products would return to previous levels.

Mike will continue this discussion in the next post.

I'm Back! :-)

This is my first post in about three weeks. I have been preoccupied with a combination of things. One of the big ones is the problem I have had finding a new and reliable platform for the Phoenix Mission. I tried for about a month to get the first platform to work, then gave up on it. I asked one of the participants in the Mission to set up a Yahoo Group, which seems to be working well. I initially thought of the Phoenix Mission as a spin-off from the Great Health blog. As I have worked with both programs I have discovered that the Phoenix Mission is very important to the blog. Already, the Mission is a major energy generator for the blog and it may provide some amazing and inspiring success stories. In any case, I felt it necessary to get the platform for the Mission right before I posted more to the blog. In same time, I have been dealing with some personal issues and the medical practice was unusually busy. Now, I am happy to resume posting.

For those of you who have not been reading my earlier blog posts about the Phoenix Mission, it is a workshop for people who want to find out if they can heal or cure conditions which conventional medicine considers incurable. My experience, personal and professional, in the past year indicates that this may be possible in some cases. If this interests you, navigate to my posts on the Phoenix Mission. If you have questions about what you see, please send me a comment.

In the past two weeks I have watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the disease treatment industry has made its powerful moves to block or deform health care reform. A recent e-mail from Common Cause said that since the first of this year the disease treatment industry (pharmaceutical companies, and the insurance industry, and medical device and equipment manufacturers) have spent $1 million a day to buy laws and regulations that will continue their enormously profitable operations. Never mind that the cost is in the process up bankrupting tens of thousands of families per year and the United States Government, while leaving 45 million Americans uninsured and 140,000 more people lose their health insurance every day.

My conclusions at this point are that we had better

• get more involved in the political process, find out who is getting paid how much by whom for what, and let our lawmakers know we are watching--and voting. A ballot still packs more wallop than a buck.
• learn to  suspect and detect spin and lies  
• learn to follow the money if you want to find the truth. We need to know who is paying for what we are reading but that is not always easy to discover.
• Most important of all, we need to be taking charge of our own health. We cannot depend on the government to do that for us and the disease treatment industry for certain sure won't look after our health.

The purpose of this blog is to give you information and inspiration on how you can, in fact, take charge of your own health. My next post will tell you how to learn one of the most important skills for taking charge of, protecting, and enhancing your own health. That skill is muscle testing a.k.a. applied kinesiology.

Big Pharma: Overdose!

Another way in which Big Pharma threatens the health of people who take prescription drugs is by recommending doses that are likely to be excessive and sometimes dangerous. Jay S. Cohen, M.D., in his book, Overdose: The Case Against the Drug Companies, discusses and documents this practice in detail. Why would pharmaceutical companies do this? They evidently believe that they need to persuade doctors to prescribe their products. Dr. Cohen's contention is that the drug companies believe that it is easier to persuade a doctor to prescribe their drug if the doctor believes there is one dose that is right for everyone. If a doctor has to choose between a drug that has one dose for everyone and a similar drug for which he has to calculate the dose according to various factors unique to the patient, which drug is he likely to choose? Big Pharma has apparently decided to that he will choose the single dose drug. The current practice seems to be to recommend the largest dose that may be necessary in the most resistant patient. That dose will be right for some people but it will be excessive and sometimes dangerous for many others, particularly the elderly. The older one gets the slower the body detoxifies drugs. The dose that is right for someone at age 30 may be toxic or lethal for the same person at the age 75. Dr. Cohen's research indicated that pharmaceutical companies have data showing the effectiveness of some of their products for some people is 1/2 to 1/4 the recommended dose.

Big Pharma, through its army of personable and persuasive sales representatives, misleads doctors to believe that the largest dose of a drug that is required to get the desired response in those requiring the highest dose is the correct dose for everyone. This makes as much sense as claiming that everyone should wear a size 12 shoe but most doctors seem to believe it. There will be many people who would respond best to 1/2 to 1/4 the recommended dose. At the Big Pharma recommended dose, these people are likely to have side effects and reactions that can vary from disagreeable to incapacitating or even lethal. I believe this is one of the reasons why there are over 100,000 deaths each year for pharmaceutical drugs correctly (according to Big Pharma disinformation) prescribed and taken in hospitals.

I have given you a lot of bad news in the last three blogs. Now it's time for some good news. There is a simple, inexpensive, and safe way to protect yourself against taking the wrong drug and/or the wrong dose of the right drug. The procedure is muscle testing, a.k.a. applied kinesiology. I have written about the value of this procedure before; I'm even more impressed with its value now. Once you develop this skill you will be able to determine, before you take the drug, whether it is likely to help you or hurt you or I or will and the best dose for your unique biochemistry.

In my next post I will tell you exactly how to learn and use muscle testing and an experience I recently had involving some yellow jackets that increased my appreciation for it.

Big Pharma: Endangering Your Health

In my most recent blog, I said I would quote past editors of the New England Journal of Medicine on their perceptions of the effect Big Pharma is having on the practice of medicine. Marcia Angell, M.D., editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine for 12 years said, "Physicians can no longer rely on the medical literature for valid and reliable information." Jerome Kassirer, M.D., another former editor of this prestigious journal said, "Financial ties between the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and device industries and the medical profession create conflicts of interest that can damage the integrity of medical information, threaten the well-being of people, (italics mine) and inappropriately raise the cost of care."

It's probably clear by now that by publishing, in respected medical journals trusted by most doctors, false reports of the results of clinical studies, big Pharma endangers the health of people who have medical conditions that a certain drugs are claimed to treat. One example is the Pravachol study in which that drug was claimed to reduce stroke risk by 19%. In fact, according to the pharmaceutical company's own data, women who took Pravachol actually had 26% more strokes than women who took placebo.

If you believe, as I do, that this and the other example I have written about are not isolated instances but part of a pattern of deceit and threat to your health, how to respond becomes a very interesting question. I think the first step, and a very important one, is to have a high index of suspicion before taking a pharmaceutical drug. If you just assume that the doctor prescribed a drug that will probably be safe and effective for you, you will probably get a prescription filled and swallow a dose right away. In that case, you may miss subtle clues that warn you that you are in danger. If you knew what the possible side effects are and you have one or more even to a mild degree, you would probably be more cautious about taking the next dose than you would be if you weren't noticing your response to the first one. The high index of suspicion is not an absolute protection but it is a strong first step in responding to the Big Pharma threat to your health. Learning all you can about side effects and listening carefully to what your body is telling you adds another layer of protection.

Here's a suggestion from Genevieve, my wife. Genevieve is an authority on health endangerment by Big Pharma. She is just beginning to recover from a severe adverse reaction to the drug, Reclast, last August. She lost 10 months out of her life, incapacitated by severe exhaustion and constant pain. Her suggestion is: Before you start taking a pharmaceutical, go to Google Advanced Search, pull up the drug you are about to take, and read about the risks and side effects. Google may also be able to find websites and blogs about harm people have sustained from taking that particular drug. This was certainly the case with Reclast.

In my next post I intend to write about another way Big Pharma threatens your health and the most powerful action you can take to protect yourself and your loved ones.

Big Pharma: Misleading Doctors

In a recent post I wrote about how pharmaceutical companies are corrupting science. From the evidence I can find, this corruption appears to be not an isolated occurrence but a pattern. Today, lets consider how Big Pharma uses this corrupted data to mislead doctors.

In Overdosed America, Chapter 2: “Spinning the Evidence,” Dr. Abramson writes about a paper that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The title of the paper was, "Pravastatin Therapy and the Risk of Stroke." The conclusion of this paper was that Pravastatin resulted in a 19% reduction in the risk of stroke. When Dr. Abramson analyzed the data he found that patients who had been treated with Pravastatin actually had 21% more strokes than patients given a placebo. Women in the study had 26% more strokes than women who were given a placebo. These results, of course, were not what the readers of the New England Journal of Medicine article read. The conclusion of the article, as stated above, was that pravastatin produced a 19% reduction in strokes. If you'd like to read Dr. Abramson's fascinating account of how this pharmaceutical company rigged the study and corrupted the data, you can find it in Chapter 2.

This process of corrupting data and getting the resulting disinformation published in prestigious medical journals creates a huge problem, a nightmare really, for doctors. We were taught in medical school to trust and accept as true what we read in respected medical journals. If we can't trust that information, then how will we know what to do for our patients? How will we know how to practice medicine? The problem is so big and scary that most physicians don't seem to be able to bring themselves to believe that at least some of what is published as true in medical journals is, in fact, false. The fear could feel like what you would experience if you were driving fast at night on a winding mountain road and your headlights suddenly went out. This may be one of the reasons that many physicians continue to believe what they read in the journals.

This is not true of all physicians. Dr. Michael Wolfe is the co-author of the JAMA editorial supporting Celebrex. When he discovered the deception perpetrated by Pharmacia, he told a reporter, "I am furious.... I looked like a fool." Dr. Catherine D. DeAngelis, editor of JAMA, said, "I am disheartened to hear that they had those data at the time that they submitted [the manuscript] to us.... We are functioning on a level of trust that was, perhaps, broken."

In my next post I will quote former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine on this vitally important and very scary issue. I will also make some suggestions about how to respond in a way that will help protect you and your loved ones. in the meantime, a suggestion: If you don't believe this about the corruption of science and the misleading of doctors, read Dr. Abramson's Overdosed America. If you still don't believe it, read Overdose: The Case Against the Drug Companies. The author is Jay. S. Cohen, MD. If you still don't believe it, start carrying a very large and powerful rabbit's foot.

Corrections

In my most recent post, I wrote, tens of thousands of people have paid millions of dollars for the privilege of having more serious gastrointestinal side effects than they would have had with the older, much less expensive drugs.

I should have said: Tens of thousands of people have paid millions of dollars for the privilege of risking more serious gastrointestinal side effects than they would have had with the older, much less expensive drugs. I don't know that tens of thousands of people actually had more serious gastrointestinal side effects The data that Dr. Abramson discovered indicated that the risk of serious side effects was greater with Celebrex.

I have noticed another error in several of my posts: I have been writing the subtitle of Dr. Abramson's book as: How the pharmaceutical companies are corrupting science, misleading doctors, and endangering your health. The actual wording is, threatening your health, not, endangering your health. I think the difference is subtle but significant. Would your response to a threat be different from your response to a danger?

I apologize for these mistakes. I consider the only significant apology to be the Warrior’s Apology, which is to change the behavior for which one is apologizing. We shall see what kind of apology I am making.

Truth Told with Bad Intent

We continue the discussion of principles you can use to protect yourself against Big Pharma’s endangering your health.

Principle number two: The truth told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.--William Blake

Here's how this principle worked in the Celebrex case. It's quite a detective story. You can read the details in Overdosed America, Chapter 3: False and Misleading: The misrepresentation of Celebrex and Vioxx.

Pharmacia, the manufacturer of Celebrex, needed some promotional material. They designed a study to show that Celebrex caused fewer serious gastrointestinal side effects than older nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) including ibuprofen. This study was to last one year. For the first six months all went well. Patients taking Celebrex had fewer serious gastrointestinal complications then patients taking ibuprofen and some other older, less expensive, NSAIDS. In the second six months, however, things went very wrong. Patients taking Celebrex began to have more serious side effects than the older NSAIDS group. What to do? Simple! Publish the first half of the study proving what Pharmacia wanted to prove and say the results of the second six months would be published later. It worked like a charm. An article appeared in a prestigious medical journal stating that Celebrex was safer to take than the older NSAIDS because it caused fewer serious gastrointestinal side effects. Sales took off and continue strong.

Isn't it beautiful? Pharmacia told the truth: in the first half of the study Celebrex really did produce fewer side effects. They forthrightly said this was only half the study. And they may eventually be telling the truth about publishing the results of the second half; after all, it's only been about five years. In the meantime, tens of thousands of people have paid millions of dollars for the privilege of having more serious gastrointestinal side effects than they would have had with the older, much less expensive drugs.

If something about this doesn't sound exactly right to you, you may be wondering what you can do about it. Here's a suggestion: join the American Association for Health Freedom. This organization will keep you informed about what Big Pharma is up to and makes it easy for you to contact your representative, Senators, and appropriate people in the Obama administration about your concerns. Some of what you read may scare you and/or make you want to throw up.  It will also encourage and empower you to know that there are thousands of people who care enough about their health freedom and their ability to protect themselves and their loved ones to get the information and support they need to fight for both.

My next post will probably be Principle Number Three: The New Golden Rule.

Is Big Pharma Corrupting Science?

The subtitle of Dr. John Abramson's disturbing and empowering book, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine, is, "How the pharmaceutical companies are corrupting science, misleading doctors, and endangering your health." If Dr. Abramson is correct and you want to have your best chance for great health, you must take a different approach to disease treatment and your relationship to the medical establishment. This is not a pleasant or comfortable thing. Most people won't do it unless they are convinced that it is necessary to avoid a high risk of unnecessary danger, enormous expense, suffering, disability, and perhaps premature death. Let's look at the evidence for this hypothesis so that you will have the necessary information for an informed decision about whether or not Dr. Abramson's hypothesis is correct.

As we begin this investigation that are several principles that it may be helpful to keep in mind.

Principle number one: Figures don't lie but liars figure. Years ago I was making a presentation at a medical meeting with a number of other doctors. One of them was a statistician who said, "I have now reached a level of proficiency with statistics that enables me to take any given data set and prove anything I want to prove from it." I thought that was remarkable at the time but I have never doubted his ability to do what he said. I thought about his statement recently when I read in Dr. Julian Whitaker's newsletter, Health and Healing, that a drug company was claiming that using their anti-cholesterol drug reduced the risk of heart attack by 50%. That sounds very impressive but when the same numbers are crunched a different way they show that taking this anti-cholesterol drug will reduce your risk of having a heart attack from about one chance in 93 to 1 chance in 97. If the statistics done this way are correct, then you're in a position to make an informed decision about whether or not you want to spend several thousand dollars a year and risk potentially serious side effects including muscle weakness, pain and destruction, liver damage, and impaired brain function that looks very similar to Alzheimer's, in order to achieve a slight reduction in the risk of something that is probably not going to happen to you anyway.

Principle number two: William Blake, more than 200 years ago, wrote, "The truth told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent." In my next post for we are will take a look at whether or not Big Pharma is using this one.

Watch Your Back: Big Pharma Is!

After a short excursion into the power of purpose in achieving great health, we now return to biochemical issues. In our initial discussion of the biochemistry of great health we considered the role of the Big Four nutritional supplements: Nutrient 950, optimum dose vitamin C, optimum dose magnesium, and vitamin D sufficient to give a blood level of 60 to 80 ng. The Big Four probably give you the biggest boost for the buck on your way to great health. If you're already using them, congratulations! Please send a comment about what feels different. If you aren't already using them I suggest that you get started with Nutrient 950 as discussed in my Multiple Vitamin-mineral posts on this blog.

We will now approach the biochemical issue from a different perspective: Those biochemical factors that block your achievement of great health. You have probably heard about the swine flu epidemic, which is now pandemic. I'll begin to tell you about some hidden epidemics that are at least as dangerous as swine flu in its present form. The most dangerous of these, in my opinion, is the epidemic of deceit by the big pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma). John Abramson, MD, clinical professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, put it this way in the subtitle of his book, Overdosed America: "How the big pharmaceutical companies are corrupting science, misleading doctors, and endangering your health."

What I am about to write will not make pleasant reading for many people. If I were to notice that you are about to be blindsided by an onrushing truck and I told you about it, that would probably not be a pleasant experience for you. You might feel a flash of annoyance that I had disturbed you. You might even ignore what I was saying to you and continue on your merry way across the street. However, if you overcame your initial annoyance and looked around to see if I am telling the truth or not, you would probably not regret it.

In my next post I will give my perception of the Big Pharma truck that I see bearing down on you. I'll give you a list of how, in my perception, Big Pharma is endangering your health. In subsequent posts I'll provide some evidence to support my perception and tell you some action you can take to protect yourself and your loved ones. Some of the more important parts of what I've learned are from Dr. Abramson's book, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine. At this point, I think one of the most health supportive things you could do would be ordering a copy of Overdosed America (which you can do by clicking Bookstore on the home page of this blog) and read it.