If you have a health problem, even if it is just an imaginary one, some giant pharmaceutical company out there is probably making a pill for it. According to shocking new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 59 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least one prescription drug, and 15 percent of all U.S. adults are on at least five prescription drugs. Continue reading
Statins are the most commonly prescribed medicine in Britain
Sir William Osler, the “father of modern medicine”, said that what distinguished humans from animals was the desire to take medicine. Osler died in 1919, but, like most of his brilliant aphorisms, it is still true, with the added development that now many of us take pills even if there’s nothing wrong with us. He also thought one of the first duties of the physician was to educate people not to take medicine. That idea, that medicines are potentially dangerous and should be avoided if possible, has gone out of the window – and that is a pity. Continue reading
“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to doctors and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic.” ~ Attributed to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Signer of the Declaration of Independence
Benjamin Rush accurately foretold a grave possibility facing Americans today, namely, that the art and science of healing be restricted to a select class of allopathic physicians, who have the sole legal right to recommend and administer medicines, and whose pharmacopeia excludes – as a matter of principle – all the healing foods, vitamins and herbs which have been used safely and effectively for countless millennia in the prevention and treatment of disease. Continue reading
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in children. The condition can range from mild to severe, and usually involves not only inattention, but also difficulty controlling behavior.
On the rise…Between the years of 2003 and 2011, ADHD diagnosis grew by 42%. Continue reading
A gang of 14 state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, has threatened to file a class action lawsuit against the dietary supplement industry for supposedly selling herbal products that don’t contain the listed ingredients.
According to Reuters, an investigation led by New York’s Schneiderman turned up results suggesting that dietary supplements sold by four major U.S. retailers, GNC Holdings Inc, Target Corp, Walgreens and Walmart Stores Inc, failed to meet efficacy standards, because they allegedly do not contain some or all of the plant materials listed on their labels. Continue reading
Seniors represent only 13% of the population, but they take over 40% of pharmaceutical drugs in the US. In the UK, 45% of prescriptions are doled out to individuals over the age of 65 years. The practice of polypharmacy has never been more acute than it is in the modern era. So why are we drugging the elderly so profoundly? Continue reading
The story of Daraprim’s huge price hike is part of a trend of exorbitant pharmaceutical pricing.
The drug company Turing Pharmaceuticals is under fire after a New York Times article published Sunday detailing how it raised the price of a toxoplasmosis drug by more than 5,000 percent after acquiring the drug in August. One tablet of Daraprim used to cost $13.50; now, after its acquisition by Turing, it costs $750 per tablet. Continue reading
A reexamination of old data for Paxil found that the antidepressant is more dangerous than the authors let on. How much harm has been done in the 14 years since it was published?
Sara Bostock once sent me a picture of her and her daughter Cecily in happier times, and it’s a happy shot indeed: Mother and daughter, 40-something and 20-something, outdoors in the sun, looking radiant. With their beaming smiles—the same smile, really, for they look so alike—they appear thrilled to be mother and daughter.
One night in 2002, a couple years after that photo was taken, Sara woke in the night thinking she’d heard a bump in her kitchen. When she went to investigate, she found her 25-year-old daughter on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. Next to Cecily on the floor was a large and bloody chef’s knife. In her chest were two knife wounds. One was shallow; the other was fatally deep.
Sara Bostock has always thought that her daughter was killed that night by an antidepressant called Paxil. Continue reading
Recent breakthroughs in cancer treatment come with a hefty price tag.
In 2014, virtually every new cancer-treatment drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration was priced at more than $120,000 a year, according to a new study. And the cost for each additional year lived by a patient as a result of new drugs soared from $54,000 in 1995 to $207,000 in 2013. Continue reading
Below is a clip taken from the “One More Girl” documentary, a film regarding the Gardasil vaccine, which was designed to prevent Human Papillomavirus. In it, Dr. Peter Rost, MD, a former vice president of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world (Pfizer), shares the truth about the ties between the medical and pharmaceutical industry. Continue reading
Pharmaceutical mammoth Pfizer faces more than 1,000 lawsuits from victims who say that the company knew about the relationship between birth defects and their #1 best-selling anti-depressant. A claim that Pfizer has, of course, battled against. Continue reading
Just as Natural News has warned for over a decade, mind-altering medications such as tranquilizers and psychiatric drugs (SSRIs) have now been confirmed to increase the risk of a person committing murder.
A new study published in the journal World Psychiatry (June 1 edition, not yet found on the web) found that several classes of prescription medications — including antidepressant drugs, tranquilizers and anti-inflammatory painkillers — markedly increased the chances of someone murdering another human being. Continue reading
If every single person currently taking psychotropic medications or antidepressants were to be pulled off these deadly drugs and given a new, safer regimen instead, society would be much better off. This is the larger inference of a new review published in The BMJ (British Medical Journal), which found that more than half a million people in the West die every year from psych meds, which authors found have “minimal” benefits and a multitude of harmful side effects. Continue reading
The federal government released detailed data today on nearly 1.4 billion prescriptions dispensed to seniors and disabled people in the Medicare program in 2013, bringing more openness to the medication choices of doctors nationwide.
The data release comes two years after ProPublica reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had done little to detect or deter hazardous prescribing in its drug program, known as Medicare Part D. ProPublica analyzed several years’ worth of prescription data, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and created a tool called Prescriber Checkup that lets users compare individual physicians to others in the same specialty and state.
But Medicare itself hadn’t made this information easily accessible—until now. Continue reading
A course of treatment with Sovaldi costs $84,000 in the United States. Credit Gilead Sciences, via Associated Press
Activists in several countries are seeking to void patents on the blockbuster hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, saying that the price being sought by the manufacturer, Gilead Sciences, was prohibitive.
The Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, a legal group in New York, is expected to announce Wednesday that it has filed challenges in Argentina, Brazil, China, Russia and Ukraine. In all those countries except China, the organization is being joined by local patient advocacy groups.
The actions are a sign that the controversy over Sovaldi is spreading beyond the United States, where the $84,000 charge for a course of treatment has strained Medicaid budgets, to middle-income countries. Continue reading