Daily Mail article
I’m going to leave this subject aside for a bit after this, but thanks to my colleague up North who sent this in: a recent report by The Daily Mail’s Medical Correspondent Jenny Hope. Apparently the number of deaths in the UK from adverse reactions to medications has risen by 131 per cent since 1997. This is clear evidence that medications are killing and seriously harming people in ever-greater numbers.
The number of prolonged hospitalisations due to severe allergic reactions or serious side effects rose by 82% in the same period, totalling 41,935 people over the last ten years. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that these medications have not been tested as well as they should have been, and that at least some of them should not have been passed as if they were safe. Nicotine Replacement products certainly should not have been approved - but we’ll never know how many heart attacks and strokes they have caused, since that poison was stupidly given the official status of “medication”, despite having no medicinal properties whatsoever.
8,077 of these people with severe adverse reactions to medicines died as a result, with last year’s UK fatality rate of 1,031 being the highest yet. Let me make this quite clear: these people were not killed by illness, but by medicines that were officially approved as safe by the existing system. They proved not to be - and although a certain amount of this sort of thing is inevitable if you are going to prescribe drugs at all, these numbers are frightening - especially when you add that to the number of people now being killed by superbugs contracted whilst in hospitals. How long will it be before people are more afraid of doctors and hospitals than they are of being ill? Will more people end up dying soon because they are too afraid of medicines and hospitals to seek medical help?
To put it simply, medicines are supposed to make you better, not hospitalise or kill you. In the article, an unnamed spokesperson for the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency suggested that recent reforms had encouraged doctors, healthcare professionals and patients to be more pro-active in reporting adverse reactions to the Agency. “As a result,”she says glibly, “the number has gone up.”
As reassurances go, this leaves a lot to be desired. It is rather like saying: “Don’t worry, it isn’t really getting worse. It has always been that bad. We just improved our Making A Note Of It system.”
Oh. So what we are really seeing here is an improvement, is it? I can’t help wondering what Edzard Ernst, Exeter University’s Professor Against Complementary Medicine makes of all this. As a member of the Medicines Commission of the British Medicines Control Agency (MCA), which has evidently been approving as ’safe enough’ many of the medicines that have caused all this suffering and death, does he not feel agonized by the sheer hypocrisy of his ridiculous position? He says nothing - nothing - about the thousands of innocent people being killed by the very medications he is personally involved in approving, but works very hard to make sure no-one can say anything positive about complementary medicine without him leaping up to object, and the truly sickening thing is that he claims to be doing that to protect the public.
From what - homoeopathy? When did that ever hospitalise anyone, you sanctimonious liar? If you really wanted to protect the public, you could do a better job of it by doing your other job properly. But that’s not really what you are about, is it, you oh-so-comfortable lackey of the pharmaceutical industry?
Now that I’ve got that off my chest… if you would like to know more about hypnotherapy, which the medical authorities in the U.K. are still officially describing as “unproven” thanks to the unholy influence of the pharmaceutical industry, visit the Central Hypnotherapy website.
They are lying, by the way: the British Medical Association endorsed hypnotherapy as a valid form of treatment in 1955. Of course, that was before they were controlled by the pharmaceutical industry.
Filed under: Drugs on Trial by Chris
Homeopathy hospitalised a good friend of mine recently. He had building stomach problems over several months. His wife gave him homeopathy. Sugar pills could not cure him and it became a medical emergency involving life threatening surgery. If he had gone to his doctor instead of taking useless pills he would not need six months of work now.
Actually homoeopathy did not do that to him, the real cause of his illness did that. Anyone suggesting homoeopathy as an exclusive treatment when the cause of the illness is has not been properly investigated is a fool.
I think your use of the expression “sugar pills” is telling, though. I know very little about homoeopathy in practice, but I do know that there are no pills or sugar involved, although there often are in pharmaceutical remedies. The significant difference is that medicines hospitalise (and kill) hundreds of people every year without the condition they are supposed to be treating being dangerous enough to do that - so you could equally argue that in some of those cases at least, if they had only used homoeopathy they wouldn’t have died, or been hospitalised… because by itself homoeopathy cannot do that to people, whether they judge that it is helping or not.
However, I am not suggesting that your friend’s choice was a wise one, quite the reverse, because obviously serious conditions that might need medical attention have to be properly assessed, and not just by a homoeopath. Most people would know that, so I think that extraordinary foolishness plus a serious condition were the real factors that hospitalised him. After all, there was no reason for him to avoid the usual medical checks whilst his wife was giving him homoeopathy anyway!