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
Category Archives: PHARMACEU’TIC: A Spoonful of Sugar
The Drug With a 5,000 Percent Markup
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
The Human Cost of a Misleading Drug-Safety Study
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
As Drug Prices Soar, Doctors Voice Outrage
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
Pfizer Vice President Blows The Whistle & Tells The Truth About The Pharmaceutical Industry
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
Report: Pfizer ‘Hid Link’ Between Anti-Depressants and Birth Defects
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
Certain Medications Cause People to Commit Murder
Homicide risk increased by 31% to 200%… 100 million Americans take these drugs
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
Medical holocaust: Psych drugs have killed more than 5 million people over the last 10 years
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
Government Releases Massive Trove of Data on Doctors’ Prescribing Patterns
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
High Cost of Sovaldi Hepatitis C Drug Prompts a Call to Void Its Patents
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
Government Says Big Pharma Kills More People Than All Illegal Drugs Combined
A new study has shown that pharmaceutical drugs cause more overdoses and more deaths than all of the illegal drugs on the market combined. According to the government’s own statistics, listed on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, deaths relating to pharmaceutical drugs rose to roughly 23,000 last year, which accounts for over half of the total overdose deaths in the country for that time period.
Additionally, a recent study conducted by researchers with the University of Virginia, University of Arkansas, the Partnership for Drug Free Kids, and the American Institutes for Research reconfirmed the known dangers of pharmaceutical drug abuse. Continue reading
Contraceptive pill can ‘make women more anxious by shrinking part of their brain’
A new study has suggested the oral contraceptive pill could shrink parts of the brain that govern a woman’s emotions
For the 100 million women worldwide on the contraceptive pill, the side effects are familiar.
Mood swings, headaches and nausea, while more serious complications include blood clots and breast cancer.
But scientists in California have added another potential cause for concern to the check list.
Their new study has found the oral contraceptive shrinks two key regions of the brain, changing the way they function.
The findings suggest the synthetic hormones found in the Pill cause these alterations in brain structure and function. Continue reading
Depression is NOT caused by low serotonin levels
Most drugs used to treat it are based on a myth, psychiatrist claims
The idea that the most popular antidepressant drugs raise serotonin levels in the brain is nothing more than a myth, psychiatrist Professor David Healy argues.
The belief that the most popular antidepressant drugs raise serotonin levels in the brain is nothing more than a myth, a leading professor of psychiatry has claimed.
David Healy, head of psychiatry at the Hergest psychiatric unit in Bangor, North Wales, said the misconception that low levels of serotonin were responsible for depression had become established fact.
He suggested that the success of so-called SSRI drugs – which include Prozac and Seroxat – was based on the ‘marketing of a myth’. Continue reading
Do you take statins? If not, you may have to
New cholesterol guides may put 13 million more Americans on the drugs
When new guidelines were released last fall on the prevention and treatment of heart disease, some predicted their approach would greatly increase the numbers of people taking cholesterol-fighting drugs called statins. Indeed, an additional 12.8 million U.S. adults could receive or become eligible for statin therapy under the full implementation of the guidelines, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Continue reading
Cancer Drug Company Accused of Hiding Cheap Alternative
This article is meant to simply showcase one of the many ways that Big Pharma practices corruption.
Pharmaceutical companies have been known to discredit natural, cheap solutions that compete with their high-dollar drugs. Now, the British Medical Journal has unraveled new research revealing how the makers of a cancer drug are blocking public access to a cheaper, safe, and effective alternative. Continue reading