Category: Drugs on Trial | Page 5

The Trials of Edzard Ernst

Show me a hundred different scientific studies into the efficacy (or lack thereof) of any kind of therapy. Will they all produce more or less the same findings? No. But why not? If the randomised controlled trial (RCT) is the gold standard of assessment, surely it will just come up with truth, will it not? Isn’t this the reason that Ernst says “Don’t shoot the messenger!” as if he didn’t play any personal role in producing those findings whatsoever, and his followers will point to his publications and say: “The science says…”

Almost as if “the science” just does itself, and Ernst’s role is rather like that of the sorcerer’s apprentice: once he has set it in motion he has no influence over the process or the outcomes…

And indeed this would be the case with all scientists, would it not? It’s just pure science, and it simply reveals pure truth. That’s the idea, that’s the suggestion whenever we have one study or another shoved under our noses by the cynics. So if the cynics were right about CAM therapists – that we’re all just quacks – then all the scientific studies that have already been done (not just Ernst’s activities) would have demonstrated this beyond all doubt, would they not? What would there be left to say? Why bother paying him any longer?

Back in the Real World

Of course the cynics are not suggesting that ALL scientific studies are just revealing pure truth! How could they be, when some of them produce ‘findings’ that seem to confirm their prejudices, and some do not! Clearly they cannot ALL be right! So it becomes necessary to find crucial errors in the way some of those studies were designed or conducted, or the interpretation of the results…

“Really? That can happen in Science?”

“Oh yes, but don’t worry! Don’t lose your faith in the RCT and the Scientific Way! If the results aren’t what we want them to be, clearly we need to do the Science differently until we get the results right!”

For how likely is it, really, that the cynic’s PREJUDICES might be wrong in the first place? Exactly, that couldn’t happen, because a cynic knows everything already and most especially knows for sure that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is wrong. So there is never any need to question The Science That Says The Right Thing (bless the messenger), only the Bad Science That Says The Wrong Thing (denounce the author, attack the methodology, the interpretation… call people nasty names…) yeah that’s way more scientific. In fact the entire history of Science is full of that sort of abusive slanging match… and that’s just how scientists talk to each other, they have even less regard for people who are prepared to think outside of scientific paradigms. Those are just Voodoo People, and should probably be burned or something.

Science says Nothing

“The Science” says nothing, mainly because there is no such thing as “The Science”. This doesn’t make science useless, of course it doesn’t. But it does mean that with any kind of study you read about in The Daily Rag, if you don’t know who funded it, what they are trying to achieve and whether this is part of a wider programme which hasn’t been mentioned deliberately in the press release or whether there were other trials which the authors of the press release decided not to tell The Daily Rag about because they contradict the trials that Say The Right Thing… then you only know what the press release says.

All the questions I raised about Ernst, and how on Earth he ever came to occupy that position are perfectly valid, but I know we’ll never get answers that haven’t just come from a fawning interview with an adoring hack or some dodgy press release that came from the Ernst camp anyway. And I really can’t be bothered to exchange another pointless word with the cynics who don’t even understand the difference between skepticism and cynicism. It is impossible to communicate in any useful way with any person who has convinced themselves before the conversation even starts that you must be a fraud, a fantasist or an idiot because you don’t already agree with them.

So I thought I’d do one last post about the boring old duffer but every time I considered it, it just seemed like a chore. Somewhere along the line I realised that although I found it very annoying at first that he said things about hypnotherapy that were totally wrong, he’s really just another dull academic who knows nothing about it. The fact that someone decided he could have a title that makes it sound like he’s knowledgable is irrelevant, he remains a nobody in the field of complementary therapy, his own university don’t even seem to like him, just about everything he says is negative and no ordinary member of the public I’ve ever mentioned him to has heard of him at all, so although he’s beloved by a few hacks and a small platoon of cynics, the rest of the world could not give a toss.

Therefore: neither do I.

Killer Chantix Champix Isn’t Magic

by Chris Holmes

*Update: If you or a loved one has suffered a bad reaction to Champix and you are based in the U.K., you can report it to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) here. The more people do that the clearer the true picture will become. Protect others! Report it.*

The weird and wonderful internet just threw up another amusing splinter of craziness in the form of an email message, sent through the Truth Will Out Contact Form facility, from a website called ChampixMagic. It purported to be from a person called Jay, and it said:

Jay wrote:
Dear sir/webmaster,
I am the responsible person for link exchange at chantixmagic.com I visited your site and feel, it’s a quality one and relevant to my site theme. So I hope that you would consider link exchange with us. If you determine that a link to our site is appropriate, Please let me know whether you are interested or not. If yes please provide your site info.

I find it very hard to believe that Jay has ever visited the Truth Will Out site. I think it is much more probable that this message is sent out automatically to any site that mentions Champix a lot. There follows here an excerpt from one of my earlier posts that mentioned it under the heading CHANTIX CHAMPIX KILLS, BUT A.S.H. WON’T TELL THE SMOKERS, and it also mentions the ChampixMagic site:

Now look at this, which purports to be a “Trusted Information Bank” about Champix (Chantix). At the base of the page, a disclaimer states “We don’t encourage the buying and selling of Chantix without prescription”, which is a weird thing to claim when you can buy it right there, via the site! It mentions nothing about any dangers, but says:

“Chantix is the latest blockbuster drug approved by the FDA on May 11, 2006 that is indicated as an aid to quit smoking. Manufactured by Pfizer Inc., Chantix offers a new approach, different from the existing smoking cessation therapies to quit smoking.”

It does not mention that the drug is now under investigation by the FDA for serious side effects. Instead it uses crude scare-tactics in the first two, very badly written paragraphs about the dangers of smoking to suggest that Chantix is your ‘only hope’, if you are a smoker, to escape ‘certain death’. The site is called ChantixMagic and it is dangerously devoid of any serious warnings about how this medication could wreck your life or even end it.

In reality, Champix is a pretty faint hope because it doesn’t work for at least 80% of smokers even with all that hype. In contrast, expert hypnotherapy has a 60% success rate in first sessions alone. If you include the successes that took more than one session (some do, it’s inevitable, people are not all the same) then the overall success rate is well over 80% PROVIDED the therapist is a smoking cessation specialist with plenty of experience.

I should also qualify the above statement by saying that I’m talking about success rates in countries in which tobacco use is in general decline. I work in the U.K. where only about 26% of adults still smoke, so smoking is not the norm. In countries like Greece and China where there is a much greater proportion of smokers, the long-term success-rate of hypnotherapy would not be as high because the influence of other people smoking has a bearing on relapse rates for all quitting methods, including hypnotherapy – as does the general social perception of what is “the norm”.

So you see, ChampixMagic, I already have a link to your site but I don’t think it was quite what you had in mind. Since all you want to do is sell more prescription medications without prescriptions or proper warnings regardless of whether it harms or kills people, I suggest you go throw yourself off a cliff.

safer alternative

Corruption at the Department of Health

“Evidence-based medicine” is shown to be a hollow phrase when the evidence from the Borland report shows that Nicotine Replacement products and willpower alone have exactly the same long term outcome. January 2012: Harvard University confirm Truth Will Out’s claim that NRT does not help smokers at all in any form.

by Chris Holmes

President Barack Obama said today: “Where there is inefficiency, where there is corruption, we expect those people to be held accountable.”

That is a fine democratic principle. Well said, Mr President. Of course he was talking about the government of Afghanistan, warning those people that they could not expect continued support from Western governments if they did not root out corruption wherever it is identified.

I take it, then, that President Obama would recommend the same remedial action to be taken within the U.S. administration and indeed their counterparts in the UK government, wherever it can be clearly shown that inefficiency and corruption are wasting valuable resources and attempts are made to conceal this, rather than rectify it.

Nicotine Replacement Therapy doesn’t work at all in the long term according to the government’s own research. Already, following the press release in July this year from the smokers’ rights group Freedom2Choose which cited my research demonstrating clearly that the NHS advertising claim that smokers are “four times more likely to succeed” by using those services was actually false, we note that in the latest TV campaign promoting those services, the bogus claim has been quietly dropped!

This is not enough. Let me just remind you what the Borland report found when that group investigated the long term results of the NHS approach to smoking cessation at the 12 month interval:

What they found, at 12 month follow up, was that the in-practice treatment scored only 2.6% success at one year, whereas the Stop Smoking Services delivered a staggering 6.5%. And then they actually had the temerity to officially conclude thus: “Where suitable services exist, we recommend that referral become the normal strategy for management of smoking cessation in general practice”.

Seriously folks, I ask you: is it possible to believe that anyone – any collective group of people – could be so unutterably stupid as to recommend the continuation of either of those approaches to smoking cessation, at the taxpayer’s expense, based on failure rates of 93.5% and 97.4% respectively? Also, what happened to the supposed 15% success rate claimed by the Ferguson report? Gone – reduced to 6.5% at best. This proves that the report was flawed and misleading and should never again be cited to market NRT products or NHS services. No wonder they buried it.

Finally, if the 1992 University of Iowa report found 6% for willpower over very large sample numbers, as did Cohen (4%), then how is 6.5% “up to four times more likely to succeed”?

The fact is that it is not.

At the start of the Truth Will Out Campaign, I reported that smokers were being lied to about the effectiveness of these services and drug company products, and reproduced in the Evidence section of this site published NHS and DoH documents that claimed up to 90% success rates for short-term results (4 weeks), but did not report at all on long-term outcomes. When they finally did, they claimed 15% success at one year, which I have now proved is also very misleading.

I said, right from the very beginning, that it was 94% failure. Thank you Borland et al, you just officially confirmed it. (Reproduced from the blogpost Dept of Stealth 6)

These results do not indicate that smokers should be directed to the Smoking Cessation Services. In fact they make it blindingly obvious that the whole sorry, stupid failure should be scrapped before any more valuable resources are wasted on it. Any fool can see that, so before we start lecturing the Afghan government about corruption, we should take that fine democratic sentiment and use it to investigate the corruption at the heart of the British government, and the role of the global drug companies that are bleeding the NHS to death.

If you agree, link up – spread the word. Let’s end it! Where are the bloody investigative journalists these days? Wake up, Health Editors! THIS IS A SCANDAL!

*Update 15.01.10
Apparently in some NRT promotions this New Year the ‘Four Times More Likely To Succeed’ claim is still being used. This is not “evidence-based medicine”, unless of course the DoH and the MHRA are going to cynically attach that label to any officially approved medicines REGARDLESS of what the evidence actually is.

Hear that trickling sound, Doc? That’s the sound of your credibility steadily draining away. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

**Update, January 2012: Harvard University report that NRT does not help smokers quit in any way. August 2011 Tel Aviv University study confirms that smokers’ cravings have nothing to do with nicotine and that smoking is a habit, not a drug addiction – exactly what I said four years earlier when I first published:

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

Central Hypnotherapy

Drug-taking versus Therapy

by Chris Holmes

In response to the post Champix Kills, But Don’t Tell The Smokers a comment came in from James which raised a number of important points, so I have decided to reproduce it here, along with my response to the points he raised:

JAMES on October 27th, 2009 at 7:11 am Said:

I am in two minds regarding Champix. I have many friends who have taken it, the majority have stopped smoking for good (so far). One had a bad reaction and had to stop the course. Depression.

I will be getting the pills tonight and I am optimistic about them. Even though I have read many, many of the horror stories surrounding the drug, I have read many, many, many more that support its use from satisfied patients.

I suggest having a look through this forum: http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/interactive/discussion/viewtopic.php?t=6901&f=11&postdays=0&start=1

There are many people on there who are using/used the drug, detailing all their side effects and most of them come out on top, even after suffering the more drastic ones such as depression. Funny that, I don’t think a single one ever mentioned “suicidal tendencies or thoughts”. I don’t deny this, but when it comes down to either Tobacco companies generating insane amounts of revenue at the cost of my health, or a Chemical company offering me something with a 20% (based on your figure) success rate of quitting smoking that has many people praising, or spending hundreds of pounds on hypnotherapy.. I’m going with the pill.

The one thing I DO agree with, is that the NHS / Health Associations are all corrupt. I read Alan Carr’s book, which helped me stop smoking for 6 months previously. Reading it again does not have the same appeal, naturally, but his points do stand. If the NHS actually thought for themselves, or did some research, they really would find out that hypnotherapy is far more successful than NRT, although the costs of such would not necessarily benefit them. I imagine hypnotherapy is more expensive than patches!!

It does not suprise me that hypnotherapists are very anti-champix, as naturally, it is one-side fighting for revenue against another. Saving lives is the most important, but this can really split peoples trusts.

Needless to say, I will be taking Champix, I am aware of the risks and will keep an eye on my mental state very closely (along with the help of others). If I don’t quit using it, I cannot afford hypnotherapy. Therefore, its either the cigarettes or the Champix that will no doubt, one day kill me.

Even though you have your own ideas about Champix already, and can back them up, if it helps 20% of smokers to become non-smokers, then withdrawing it is a BIG mistake.
Those 20% who do quit with it, may not be able to afford the several-hundred pounds cost of hypnotherapy (based on last time I checked a session at an Alan Carr clinic). You could be giving them a death-sentence, if they continued to smoke.

Smoking is expensive enough, I’ll take my chances with a prescription fee

James

P.S.. Interesting read, nonetheless!!

CHRIS on October 28th, 2009 at 5:45am Said:

Hi James, thanks for your thoughts.

I had a look at the “netdoctor” site, and what struck me immediately was that nearly all the posts on the first page are from people on Day 1 or Day 3 of the course! These are “so far, so good” posts that many champix blogs are littered with, which create a totally false impression. That’s like someone sending you a text message that says they’re 12 minutes into their hypnotherapy session, and so far they haven’t wanted a cigarette! Only people who have been off the tablets for weeks or months can truly report their own experience as a success. Don’t forget, half the people in the original trials who were counted as successes were smoking again within 28 weeks.

Most of the horrific side effects have kicked in after weeks on the drug, so please don’t be falsely reassured by these early comments.

Who or What is netdoctor?

Down at the bottom of the homepage it says that netdoctor.co.uk is a trade mark. Is it? And what trade might that be, then? And do you suppose that the lack of posts reporting serious side effects might be because the site moderators think that those sort of reports might be bad for “trade”, so they don’t get approved for display on the site?

Hypnotherapy v. Champix?

I’m not against Champix simply because it is competition. If it were as straighforward as that I would be against the Allen Carr people and acupuncturists too, but as anyone can see from reading Truth Will Out, I am not – in fact I recommend them. I do claim hypnotherapy has the greatest success of the three, but then I back that up in the Evidence section. This site is all about evidence, and so is the book. You don’t have to buy the book to see that, because I publish a lot of it here for free.

The Relative Costs

Although I often state that the Allen Carr Easyway method is a form of hypnotherapy – which is true – it is not the best form by a long way. In fact I would suggest to anyone that the best version of the Allen Carr approach is to read the original book, the one that actually made him famous in the first place. The group sessions involve too many people, it complicates matters and brings down the overall success rate. The book is something you contemplate, and can return to – there are fewer distractions, just as in a one-to-one hypnotherapy session it is a more personal experience.

Please don’t assume hypnotherapy costs hundreds of pounds just because the Allen Carr franchises charge hundreds of pounds for their stop smoking sessions. I confidently regard myself as an expert in this field, but I only charge £120 for the Stop Smoking session I offer. I also have a reduced-fee back up session, so even those smokers who need two sessions – most do not – only pay £160 in total. Most smokers save that back in a month.

Now, some colleagues have suggested that I should charge more, and I certainly could charge more. But it is also true that some smokers – like yourself – would not choose hypnotherapy if I did that, so it would be the opposite of promoting the wider recognition of hypnotherapy as a therapeutic mode, something to which all professional hypnotherapists are supposed to be committed.

You are suggesting that Champix is attractive because you only pay a prescription fee. For many people that may turn out to be true. But over the last two years I have been told of many people who have paid a much higher price. Some of them are dead. So what you are suggesting only remains a valid conclusion if none of that happens to you personally. It is exactly the same “It won’t happen to me” assumption that many smokers adopt with regard to heart attacks and cancer – but in your case you have transferred it to Champix instead, accepting the suggestion that “it has to be better than dying of cancer”, as if those were the only choices! It’s a marketing suggestion and it apparently works very well, but it has a very hollow ring later for the unlucky ones.

Is it really about money? Those people who have posted their horror stories here and on other blogs, the ones who are terrified they will never feel normal, happy and healthy again – how much money would they pay to get their health back, or to be able to turn back the clock and never take the damn stuff in the first place?

How much did you pay for your last holiday? Was it £120? That was over in a flash, and now you have only your snapshots and your memories, but the benefits of stopping smoking last a lifetime.

What I am telling everyone is the truth, and I don’t just state it, I’m providing plenty of evidence and plenty of references so people can find out more – far more than the drug company lackeys are telling them. Then I am suggesting that you make an informed choice, and I think it is logical to try all the non-risk options first: hypnotherapy, the Allen Carr method and acupuncture have never harmed anyone, but they have certainly helped a lot of people to quit smoking.

In the context of your safety, your good health and the whole of the rest of your life, the investment in these non-risk approaches is peanuts, really! How much money do we burn up every year simply on our own idle entertainment?

I am only suggesting that the use of methods that have already harmed people should only be considered when all the safe methods have already been tried. You would think doctors would agree with that, wouldn’t you? As for the NHS funding hypnotherapy sessions for smoking cessation, HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!

Too many fingers in too many pies, my friend. The annual NHS bill for medications alone topped £10 billion some time ago, and it is rising still… do you really think the use of pharmaceuticals saves the NHS money?

It is killing the NHS. And we’ll see the end of the NHS before we see the end of the stranglehold the drug companies have over the medical profession. Hypnotherapists can’t stop it. Doctors can’t stop it. Even the drug companies can’t stop it, because they are in competition with other drug companies, and they have obligations to their shareholders. They have to sell more drugs, which means the NHS has to buy more drugs, which means people – such as yourself – have to take more drugs. They can’t have you going off to see a hypnotherapist – if everyone started doing that it would only mean one thing for drug companies: hard times. So of course they do everything in their power to steer you away from that, and netdoctor.co.uk is doing its bit there.

The question is, who do you trust? Those of us who have never hurt anyone but have helped thousands of people to safely stop smoking, or the people who have a long and apparently shameless history of killing and maiming tens of thousands of ‘unlucky ones’ with a whole list of nasty concoctions over the years, every one of which was mistakenly passed as “safe”?

Whatever you choose to do, James, I wish you well. Please do keep us posted about your progress.

*This exchange was four weeks ago. So far James has not been back to tell us whether he did start taking Champix that night as he planned, or how the first four weeks went.

the safest quit smoking method is also the most successful

Ageism and the Chemical Cosh

When I first commented on this a year or so ago, I was horrified by the estimate that in the previous five years, these medications were reckoned to have killed about seven hundred people – mainly through causing strokes and pneumonia. Now the estimates are between 1000 and 2000 elderly people being killed in this way every year yet the N.I.C.E. guidelines are that unless the patient is psychotic, these drugs should not be used to sedate them. They are so powerful that they are now being spoken of as a kind of “chemical cosh”, and the accusation is that this dangerous practice is simply to make these people less troublesome and easier to handle.

by Chris Holmes

Twice before I have mentioned the scandal of people of a certain age who are more frail and confused than they used to be being knocked senseless by GPs with the use of powerful anti-psychotic drugs, and now this scandal is back in the news again.

Deliberate Mis-Prescribing

No-one is suggesting that the job of a GP is easy. A great number of the decisions a GP will make when considering whether to prescribe a certain medication or whether not to, will be a judgement call, and it is possible to get that wrong. That’s why they have advisory bodies like N.I.C.E. to give them guidelines.

The trouble is, quite a lot of GPs are ignoring the guidelines. These drugs are designed for people who are psychotic, but of the 180,000 people currently being prescribed these drugs in care homes, it is reckoned that about two-thirds of them aren’t psychotic – they are confused, suffering from some form of dementia or are just agitated about the transition of going into care.

The Telegraph’s Health Correspondent Beezy Marsh wrote:

The findings emerged in Keep Taking the Medicine, a report by Paul Burstow, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for older people, who obtained information through parliamentary questions.

Last night he said: “The chemical management of older people is a continuing scandal.

“It denies older people dignity and robs them of a better quality of life. Pressures on care providers are not an excuse for inappropriate medication.

The Telegraph again:

Frank Ursell, chief executive of the Registered Nursing Home Association, said accused Mr Burstow of “pointing the finger of blame”. He said: “We want to disassociate this idea of these drugs being used as a chemical cosh, because it is just not true.

“If you are running a home, you do not want people wandering around in a sleepy state. They can be useful to help people settle in, because it can be very traumatic for elderly people when they first arrive, to bridge that gap.

“It is the GP who prescribes the drug and to suggest that there is inappropriate prescribing is a scurrilous attack on GPs.”

“Help people settle in”? Settle in to what, a shroud? And this is not just a “suggestion” that the drugs are being mis-prescribed – clearly the guidelines are being ignored which is causing the deaths of over a thousand people a year!

Look, if someone is upset or agitated, or having trouble adjusting to a new way of life, you could just give ’em a Valium or something like that. You don’t have to put them on a tablet designed for something completely different that also has the slight drawback of killing a thousand people a year, thus deliberately ignoring the official guidelines that tell you not to do that. Forgive me, but that is not “a scurrilous attack on GP’s”. And yes, it is “pointing the finger of blame” because GP’s ARE to blame for that one! There are times, Mr Ursell, when pointing the finger of blame is entirely appropriate, and when GPs cause unnecessary deaths by choosing to ignore the official guidelines – not just once or twice but in thousands of cases annually, then clearly the blame lies WITH THEM… not with N.I.C.E., not with the care homes, not even in this case with the drug companies who manufacture the damn stuff, but the individuals that sign those prescriptions.

I did call it, last time, a Licence to Kill. GPs know that if any of these old folk die as a result, no-one is going to sue them personally. How is this different from Shipman’s arrogant assumption that he should remain untouchable if he killed people off with the inappropriate use of medication? And it is clearly ageism: would they even dream of deliberately knocking out any other section of the population en masse with these drugs? It isn’t really to help them settle in, otherwise it would be used on children during their first few weeks at boarding school. It isn’t really to manage difficult behaviour, otherwise the same drugs would be used on half the prison population, but no – these nasty, deadly drugs are only being mis-prescribed to the elderly. So Paul Burstow is right when he states that the chemical management of older people is a scandal.

I make no apologies for once more making the point that people like Edzard Ernst, who spend so much time atacking complementary medicine or trying to damn it with faint praise say nothing – NOTHING – about things like this, even though Ernst used to be actively involved in the work of the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency! No, conventional medicine and general practitioners can kill as many people as they like, that’s fine by Ernst. But he’ll be very quick to warn you about things like acupuncture or homoeopathy… as if that is where the danger lies!

This is just one of many examples that prove that the overall drive is to medicate, medicate, medicate. Not all doctors are pill happy but too many clearly are, and it is now killing people in vast numbers but for some really scary reason, the trend is to prescribe even more despite that, and the guidelines, well… they might as well be in the bin.

Central Hypnotherapy

Are Medical Authorities Secretly Reading This?

by Chris Holmes

Since the launch of this site in March 2008 I have been urging medical authorities to press governments to do something about the madness of ‘internet pharmacies’ from which people can buy prescription medications without any doctors or prescriptions being involved. Occasionally I had heard people like Dr Chris Steele ( a TV Doctor here in the U.K.) gently warning the public that some of the medicines might be fake, and that is why it’s not a good idea.

That is just one of the reasons it is not a good idea. Someone just deciding that they could do with some Valium, some hydrocodone and maybe some anti-depressants but they can’t be bothered to consult a medical professional about whether or not that’s safe or appropriate… but they have a credit card, and the people who push drugs on the internet have certainly got the greed if not the scruples to be concerned that their customer might be about to end up like Heath Ledger… these are some of the other reasons that internet drug shops are not a good idea.

Anyway I have suggested a number of times that the medical profession should be very seriously concerned about this and move to oppose it, mainly because it is dangerous and unethical but also because if people don’t need a prescription they might soon conclude that they don’t need doctors either, or that they can be their own doctor now by reading up about their condition on the internet and simply buying a treatment – without any objective, experienced, wise or properly-qualified opinion being involved.

I know a lot of people read this website, in fact it is increasing all the time. Some of those people are smokers. Some are therapists. I know this because they send me comments and messages, some for publication on the site. As yet, no doctor has ever sent me a message of any description via the Truth Will Out site, although I do have some contact with doctors and other medical people through my hypnotherapy practice. (I even did some work for the NHS last year – unheard of!) But that doesn’t mean medical folk never read this stuff.

So I was interested to see a new billboard, whilst travelling in to the office this morning, featuring a corpse on a gurney in what I suppose was an autopsy room, covered over with a sheet. It said “You might pay with more than a credit card, if you buy medications on the internet.” Then the slogan: Get Real – Get a Prescription.

Elsewhere on this site I have mentioned alarming figures about the harm done by medications that have been prescribed by doctors anyway, but I think it is important to get these things in perspective. I don’t expect everyone to turn away from drug therapies and embrace alternative therapies en masse – nor should they. It would be a much better idea to establish which methods are genuinely most useful and safest for the wide variety of symptoms requiring treatment, so people can benefit from all forms of therapy, not just drug treatments.

But I certainly don’t want to see doctors being edged out of the picture by the drug industry via internet drug shops, so it is nice to see somebody is finally doing something about it. It’s not enough, but it’s a start and I really welcome that. Well done, whoever is behind that one. Good on you. Doctors are not expendable, and when I got that email last year from an internet pharmacy that was titled: “Prescriptions are a thing of the past!” I just had to write about that (See Posting Comments 2 if you want to read it).

It may be, of course, that the people behind this new billboard campaign just came to the same conclusions as I did, without reading any of my ranting about it here on the Truth Will Out site. But if so, they took a hell of a long time to come to that conclusion considering that these drug shops have been flogging dangerous drugs for years now, and although none of that affects me directly it certainly affects them. And also, although I wrote the original rant about that back in June 2008, according to my stats package it remains, surprisingly, the most frequently read page on the site after the homepage.

Now, that’s not because of any links that I’m aware of, so it does suggest that people are sending that link quietly to each other. And people do have to have a shared interest in that subject to do that, don’t they? So that rules out smokers and hypnotherapists for a start.

So – hope you’re keeping well, Doc. All the best.

Money is the New Wonder Drug

Scientists – you know, those people with white labcoats and glasses who tirelessly Mine The Seam Of Truth for all mankind – have been getting very excited about the role of Money in the development of new Wonder Drugs.

Useful Definitions:

‘Wonder Drug’

A Wonder Drug is a drug which has just been launched, so it has yet to kill anyone and will not have proven itself to be an abject failure in reality until years later. The use of small numbers of people in a succession of drug trials by the pharmaceutical giant that produced the chemical concoction will have thrown up, through normal anomaly, at least one group with an apparent success rate (when converted into percentage terms) that would be truly useful if it were not just an anomaly, but will turn out to be very misleading in comparison to the way the drug will really perform across the board.

This cleverly dishonest procedure is all that is necessary to get the medication passed as if it were genuinely effective, and officially labelled “evidence-based medicine”. The use of small numbers of trial subjects overall, and the specific exclusion of certain types of depressed, anxious and volatile subjects minimises the risk of bad reactions which might otherwise lead to caution in the approvals procedure. At this stage, any evidence of actual risk must be carefully avoided at all costs. Once approved though, the Wonder Drug can be given to all and sundry and it usually takes months or years for the evidence of serious side effects to build up to the point where journalists start asking awkward questions about it. Approval bodies may then consider whether a warning should be attached to the medication to offset a little bit of this. This belated damage-limitation excercise doesn’t help the victims of the deception at all, but it does signal the end of the drug’s ‘Wonder’ status.

Studies revealed that there are no Old Wonder Drugs, only New ones.

‘Drug’

A drug is a chemical concoction which is supposed to be useful in treating illness or injury – or in the case of the more recent type of drugs, managing a condition or preventing illnesses that haven’t actually happened yet. Once approved as if it were genuinely safe and effective, the approval bodies will not remove the approval status even if it later proves to be useless or even deadly in some cases. This is because they are approval bodies, not disapproval bodies. It is also because the people who work for medication approval bodies are very fond of pharmaceutical companies, and feel very sorry for them if some people die, or are horribly damaged by one of their unnatural chemical concoctions. They know that it costs the pharmaceutical giants a lot of money to produce and market a new drug – especially if it is to be hyped as a Wonder Drug – and it can take a while to recoup that investment through worldwide sales before they start making fat profits from this farcical scam. So if it were to become common knowledge that the drug has horrible side-effects and doesn’t really work anyway, that might spoil everything. Therefore the approval bodies try to help out in any way they can, slowing the inevitable demise of the existing ‘approved’ drugs, and getting their big rubber stamp all ready for the next one to come out of the cauldron.

Active Ingredient: Money

In a bid to understand how drugs which usually don’t work but do sometimes kill people – such as Champix, for instance – can nevertheless become the recommended and publicly-funded treatment whilst other treatments which work far better and don’t kill anyone ever – such as hypnotherapy, just to give one example right off the top of my head – are stubbornly ignored, scientists began searching for a key factor that might be influencing the behaviour and choices of everyone involved in perpetuating this sorry and dangerous state of affairs. What they discovered left them deeply shocked – as it would anyone who still believes that Science is all about Truth.

They discovered that although quite a lot of early scientific discoveries were made by enthusiasts who could do any kind of experiments they liked because they weren’t working for any vested interests, all contemporary scientists are paid Money by vested interests and have to do what they are told whether they like it or not.

They discovered that although drug testing used to be carried out by relatively independent academics in Universities – hence the presumed validity of the term “evidence-based medicine” – all drug trials are now organised and carried out by the drug companies themselves, so everyone involved is paid Money by them. When that trial work is concluded, however, then notable academics may be offered handsome sums of Money to add their signature to the drug company documents that will be presented to the approval bodies, to give the impression of academic involvement in the trials themselves which is in fact completely bogus. Without this Money, scientists discovered, none of them would do that.

Two of the scientists actually fainted when they discovered how much Money was used to market and promote a drug like Champix. In their innocence they had just assumed that if the drug was as successful as the drug companies said it was, it would naturally become the smoking cessation approach of choice by reason of its success. How could it not?

They discovered that Doctors were being paid Money to prescribe medications for smoking cessation, on the pretext that this helps smokers to quit. The obvious fact that this would affect some doctors’ clinical judgement and encourage them to keep prescribing even if it wasn’t apparently working made a number of the scientists frown – as well they might, for this is particularly unscientific.

They also discovered that quite a lot of Money was being spent on treating doctors and key medical professionals to lavish ‘conferences’ in very pleasant locations which were really just marketing exercises by drug companies to promote their medications. None of this Money was wasted on non-decision-makers, and although scientists couldn’t actually prove that this was just corruption, the facts suggested that the drug companies weren’t just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Conclusions

So it seemed that Money was indeed the New Wonder Drug, because without the generous injection of Money at all these key stages in the development of new chemical concoctions, none of them would ever be considered to be Wonder Drugs at all, even briefly. Shortly after concluding this the scientists vanished into thin air, after one of them pointed out that because they weren’t being paid any Drug Company Money themselves, they didn’t exist. They were merely a figment of the imagination of a certain hypnotherapist.

Certain, that is, of one thing: Truth Will Out.

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Chantix Champix Kills, but A.S.H. Won’t Tell The Smokers

by Chris Holmes

It’s not just doctors that are failing to warn smokers about the more deadly serious side-effects of Champix Chantix. The so-called “public health charity” Action on Smoking and Health (A.S.H.) have conspicuously failed to update their advice to smokers and health professionals in the light of all the horror-stories over the past eighteen months, choosing instead to take their lead from N.I.C.E., the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, who don’t seem to have updated their recommendations about Chantix Champix since 2007.

N.I.C.E. seem to have adopted the position that “Clinical Excellence” means taking forever and a day to even acknowledge the fact that a medication is causing unnecessary deaths, and then to not really do anything about it anyway, except perhaps issue some “new guidelines”. If the guidelines are ignored by G.P.s they wring their hands and say it is “unacceptable”, and that’s about it.

Put simply, these people don’t really care if Chantix Champix kills you. Or your mother, or your best friend, or your son. Not enough to actually do anything about it anyway. They won’t withdraw any medications just because it becomes obvious that prescribing them significantly increases the risk of serious illness or death. They won’t even do anything about it if they know for sure that dangerous medications are being routinely mis-prescribed.

Here comes the Science Bit

Witness the atypical anti-psychotic drugs like Olanzapine and Quetiapine which last year were reckoned – in a conservative estimate, since these were only the fatalities that were officially reported – to have killed 700 people in the previous five years in the U.K. alone. Of the estimated 150,000 elderly patients being precribed these drugs, somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 shouldn’t be, according to the Director of Research for the Alzheimers Society, Professor Clive Ballard of Kings College London. Commenting on this on BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 programme in June 2008, N.I.C.E.’s reviewer of the use of these medications, Dr Tim Kendall said that in his opinion, doctors mis-prescribing such dangerous medications should be disciplined by the General Medical Council.

Well, they haven’t been. So now, more than one year on, more prescriptions, more deaths, no-one held responsible, no-one about to be held responsible.

This isn’t Clinical Excellence. It is a Licence to Kill.

Back to The Great Chantix Champix Experiment

Given this incredibly lax system, why should GP’s trouble themselves to find out whether the drugs they have been advised to prescribe actually have horrific side-effects such as severe psychiatric disturbances which can lead to suicide? Why should they be anxious about it? Nothing is going to happen to the GP if he or she loses an elderly patient to Olanzapine or a smoker to Chantix Champix.

Only this morning a woman who has been a contributor to this blog on a number of occasions, Jane, emailed me to tell me how her doctor had just offered her Champix again, despite the fact she had a bad reaction to it the last time. He apparently knew little about the suicides and other severe side effects, so she directed him to this site right then, during the consultation.

Do you get this, A.S.H.? Are you appreciating the astonishing and horrifying irony of this, N.I.C.E.? I’M EDUCATING DOCTORS, NOW. ME, A HYPNOTHERAPIST. They’re having to find out from Truth Will Out about the horrors that Chantix Champix can inflict upon their patients, because you aren’t making it clear enough or acting fast enough, and it’s all because you are way too close to the drug companies to have the patients’ best interests at heart.

Cash In on Smoking and Health

Action on Smoking and Health (A.S.H.) are officially a public health charity. According to their own official story, they came into existence because “a group of concerned doctors” were unhappy that not enough was being done by the Department of Health to deal with the smoking issue. All very commendable, you might think – so you would then expect that the safety and health of smokers was their main concern and anything that could be proven to help smokers quit consistently would be championed by them.

Not so. Only drug company products are championed by them, and they routinely mislead smokers about all alternative methods (see the Evidence section of this site). In November of 2007, the then Director of ASH Deborah Arnott was forced to apologise to The Allen Carr Easyway International organisation for rubbishing their claims to a 53% success rate with smokers at twelve-month follow-up… a success rate far higher than any of the drug methods ASH routinely promote.

So she apologised. And agreed to pay Easyway’s legal costs for the case. Did she then direct ASH to start recommending the superior, and now proven Easyway method? No, they continue to completely ignore it, which proves that they do NOT have the interests of smokers at heart, they are simply a shop window for drug companies POSING as a public health charity.

ASH are not even up to date regarding the failure rates and the dangers of the drug products they push. Do they explain to smokers that the nicotine replacement products are proven to have a 93.5% failure rate when the results are reviewed at twelve-month follow-up, according to the 2008 report by Borland et al? Do they also warn smokers that the same report found that this failure rate rose to 97.4% if they just got those products from their GP, which means that all the expertise and the efforts of the specialist NHS Stop Smoking Services made a difference of less than 4% across the board – which, by the way, is not “four times more likely to succeed”?

No. And they don’t tell smokers that Champix carries the risk of very serious, even fatal side effects, and won’t work anyway for over 80% of smokers when results are reviewed at one year, which of course is a worse performance than the original trials suggested. Not surprising really, since drug trials these days certainly aren’t as ‘scientific’ as they used to be (see “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor” on this site).

Just in case you think ASH should be forgiven for not getting around to any serious warnings yet, just take a look at this, from December 2007: Medical News Today So, why still no mention of any of this by Action on Smoking and Health twenty-one months later? Simple: they are not really a public health charity at all. If they were, they would be recommending hypnotherapy and the Allen Carr method as the two methods that have consistently proven themselves most effective so far. They are also the safest methods. Instead they continue to recommend Chantix Champix and Zyban, both of which have caused deaths. So much for “a group of concerned doctors”! What were they “concerned” about, drug company profits?

Lowest of the Low: The Internet Drug Dealers

It does not mention that the drug is now under investigation by the FDA for serious side effects. Instead it uses crude scare-tactics in the first two, very badly written partagraphs about the dangers of smoking to suggest that Chantix is your ‘only hope’, if you are a smoker, to escape ‘certain death’. The site is called ChantixMagic and it is dangerously devoid of any serious warnings about how this medication could wreck your life or even end it.

ASH: Stop pretending to be a Public Health Charity with smokers’ interests as your primary concern – you are BUSTED!

NICE: Stop sitting on your hands while smokers are actively encouraged to use dangerous medications without being properly informed about the risks. Allen Carr was right: therapies like ours work far better, so stop pretending they don’t – the public are becoming increasingly aware of these facts, despite all the misinformation generated by the “systematic review” ploy and the bloody Cochrane Library! The truth is a different matter – you’ll end up losing ALL your credibility, and so will the medical profession generally if you allow the Global Drug Pushers to keep running the show.

Doctors: Don’t prescribe Champix Chantix! You haven’t been properly informed, do some independent detective work on the internet – just Google “Champix Suicides”, and have a read of that lot. Then ask yourself: would you put a member of your family on that stuff? Do you trust Pfizer enough, when they sidestep the issue by saying that there’s no causal link proven – which of course is quite different from saying that there’s no causal link – to risk the life of a loved one? Haven’t Pfizer just been ordered to pay a truly collosal sum for the offence of “fraudulent marketing”?

All your smoking patients are somebody’s loved one. Hypnotherapy, the Allen Carr method (which is a form of hypnotherapy anyway) and acupuncture have all scored better long term results in scientific trials, and all carry NO RISK. Look at the Evidence section here, and elsewhere on the web.

Folks, if you share these concerns please help by spreading the word: Truth Will Out is about Health Care, not Health Risk. There are safer and more successful ways to quit – don’t take the suicide pills.

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The Drug That Never Was

Chantix Champix Kills: But Don’t Tell The Smokers!

The Canadian Lung Association fails to mention any serious side effects associated with Chantix Champix. This is a very serious omission, but it is no different from what most doctors are doing. The blog also informs us that The Canadian Lung Association received funding in the form of a grant from… Pfizer Canada, the Canadian arm of the global drug giant Pfizer, who make Chantix Champix.

by Chris Holmes

The Real Threat to Doctors, Pharmacists and the Medical Profession

To learn the truth about Chantix Champix, all you have to do is Google “Champix suicides” (or Chantix suicides) and read all about it for yourself.

But why should smokers have to do that? Most smokers assume that their doctor or their pharmacist would warn them of any serious risks that their patient might be running if they take Chantix Champix. Some do: in fact, we have heard anecdotally of one or two doctors who have refused to prescribe it. However, these are the exceptions.

Reading around the blogs which are dealing with the Chantix Champix controversy it becomes frighteningly clear that most smokers are left completely in the dark by doctors and pharmacists about the serious side effects of Chantix Champix, and only warned about the minor ones. The fact that this negligence is leading to injuries and deaths must surely be actionable. We are talking about a medication that is currently under investigation by the FDA for serious and dangerous side-effects. It has been very clearly implicated in many suicide attempts and a considerable number of deaths. Many other people have had other horrible reactions that have left them hospitalised, terrified and emotionally damaged, and also Chantix Champix has wrecked relationships and families.

Your doctor and your pharmacist may decide, though, that they’d better not tell you that in case you decide not to take the damn stuff.

One recent contributor to this blog, Kath (see Champix 4: Enough Already. Comment No.98) – was particularly angry about that point, once I had explained that she was not alone. She said:

“Chris thank you for taking the time to respond to me. As I read your reply what really stuck out is that when I had a weird episode of behaviour at 4 weeks, I would have known where it was coming from if I knew that Champix has side effects. If my doctor had warned me to watch for behavioural changes I would have been off this drug much sooner, before it made me into a blubbering mess. That is what bothers me the most.

I was having a conversation with a friend today about how even the doctor makes money when he writes a script. That is really effed up. How can my doctor have a financial benefit to prescribing a drug? What the hell kind of world are we living in? How can we expect to get proper health care when the gp’s make money for giving us life-threatening drugs?”

How indeed. And this is the real threat to the future of the medical profession. It is obvious why Chantix Champix is getting the whitewash treatment, and it all comes down to money. Doctors are treated to free trips, lavish treatment at ‘conferences’ and all kinds of incentives to promote medications which can all be summed up in one simple word: Corrupt.

How complacent are you, all you medical professionals who are just sitting on your hands and pretending it is okay to keep taking the incentives and keep your mouths shut about killer drugs like Chantix Champix? You keep pretending nicotine replacement is a real medication even though you know it doesn’t work at all, you keep prescribing Prozac and Seroxat even though we all know now that they didn’t perform any better than placebos in the trials… Your professional credibility is rotting away even as I type this, and the stench of your corruption is making even the most conservative of patients wince. If you continue down this road there will BE no medical profession, it will all become Medico-Pharmaceutical Inc.

Think I’m exaggerating? Then have a look at this report by one of the few exceptions, a blog edited by practising Canadian pharmacists called Canada Pharmacy News. The story points out that The Canadian Lung Association fails to mention any serious side effects associated with Chantix Champix. This is a very serious omission, but it is no different from what most doctors are doing. The blog also informs us that The Canadian Lung Association received funding in the form of a grant from… Pfizer Canada, the Canadian arm of the global drug giant Pfizer, who make Chantix Champix. Only a few days ago, the Justice Department in the USA announced that Pfizer had been ordered to pay a record settlement of 2.3 billion dollars for “fraudulent marketing”. Nothing to do with Chantix Champix, that one, by the way. But this is (link).

The credibility of pharmacists and doctors was originally based on hard science, but it has all been hijacked by the medico-mafia of the drug companies and their well-placed friends in the medical authorities, the medication approval bodies, academia and the press. Once you’ve lost that credibility in the minds of the public, Doc, you will never get it back.

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The book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

New Poison For Old!

Now that Harvard University has confirmed Truth Will Out’s claim that Nicotine Replacement products don’t work at all, the race is on to find a new use for the drug giants’ poison factories. So look out for dodgy press tales of things nicotine “might” be useful for, released by the pharmaceutical industry!

Spurious New ‘Uses’ for Nicotine by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes

Not so long ago this site was blasted in a blog written by one of the passionate converts to the new Electronic Cigarette. He took exception to my statement that nicotine is “just a poison”, and that it has no therapeutic use or any recreational use (there is no high), so it cannot qualify as a drug.

As a hypnotherapist specialising in smoking cessation – which is usually achieved in one session and without any withdrawal symptoms whatsoever – I already know that tobacco smoking is not a drug addiction but a compulsive habit, and that smokers’ cravings have nothing to do with nicotine at all. The reason I wrote the book is to explain this to the world and in doing so, rid the world of the nicotine myth which does a great deal to keep people smoking.

Naturally I did not expect to be congratulated by the drug companies which manufacture nicotine products, because what I am revealing is that their products are entirely based on a myth, which is why they don’t work. Nor was I surprised by the stony silence from the medical profession, many of whom already know that I’m quite right about that, but they cannot admit to being wrong about anything, in case that undermines their imaginary god-like status.

I don’t suppose I expected the tobacco industry to be too chuffed either, since these facts becoming common knowledge would end the vicious circle of smoking, trying the gum, smoking, trying the patches, smoking, trying the lozenges, smoking, trying the little inhalator-thingy… a money-go-round which has propped up many a smoking habit since NRT was invented back in 1984.

I didn’t really expect to be attacked by anyone from the Electronic Cigarette brigade though!

NRT Goes Electric!

You see, I have nothing against the Electronic Cigarette. According to the marketing, it looks like a cigarette, and it handles like a cigarette, but there’s no smoke. This means no nuisance or danger to other people, and as it doesn’t burn anything there is no fire risk. It delivers a little puff of vaporised nicotine when the ‘smoker’ draws on it, and that’s all it does.

Now, since governments all over the world officially endorse nicotine replacement products that do exactly the same thing, you might expect that they’d be all in favour of the Electronic Cigarette. It qualifies as harm reduction compared to smoking tobacco, just like NRT. Just like NRT, it eliminates the considerable fire risk of tobacco smoking. In fact, it simply IS a form of NRT. So Health Departments should be all in favour of it, yes?

Actually NO! And here we can see the corrupting influence of drug companies like Pfizer and GSK at its most blatant and blindingly obvious, because the Electronic Cigarette is not made by them, so there are political moves in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. to BAN it.
There is no logical reason for that that would not apply equally to all forms of NRT, which are heavily promoted and funded by the same governments. This has nothing to do with medical matters or health concerns, it is entirely an attempt by the makers of NRT products to pull every political string they can to protect their market against fair competition. It is a corrupt abuse of the political systems of all the countries where it is going on – so although the Electronic Cigarette is every bit as useless as any other form of NRT when it comes to long-term cessation success, I am all in favour of it remaining legal.

Nicotine Has No Use

What my attacker was actually objecting to was the fact that I challenged the notion that nicotine was a drug of any sort, and my assertion that it was actually only a poison. He didn’t bother to read my argument in full, he just picked up on that point and ridiculed it, so I took him to task about this. He then listed a whole bunch of spurious notions about supposed ‘benefits’ related to nicotine, some of which were just wrong but also quite a few which referred to recent scientific studies which ‘suggest’ that nicotine might have all manner of future ‘medical’ applications!

I pointed out to the chap that my observation that nicotine HAS no medical application is in no way undermined by the possibility that one day it MIGHT have, so reference to such speculative, inconclusive studies certainly doesn’t prove me wrong, as he suggested it did. But it did alert me to the curious fact that quite a lot of research has been done over the last few years to see if the poison nicotine might possibly have some other application, as well as fraudulently posing as a medication (NRT) and leading poor, unsuspecting smokers a merry dance.

Now, do you suppose the drug companies – who plan and fund all of these ‘scientific’ investigations, of course – might be doing the same thing with cyanide, mercury, arsenic and a clutch of other poisons… just to see, you understand, if they might actually have some sort of medical application, despite the stark unlikelihood of it?

Probably not, eh? But they do have rather a lot of patch-making equipment and they already have the nicotine production-lines rolling, so just in case the smokers of the world suddenly realise that this mad hypnotist (that’s me, by the way) might be quite right about smoking not being a nicotine addiction after all, perhaps it would be a good idea to see if they can line up some other dubious ‘medical’ application for that worldwide poison factory.

So watch out for any stories popping up in the press reporting that “New studies SUGGEST that nicotine COULD help to prevent eyebrow hair from growing out of control, or gallstones from growing quite as fast as they otherwise would, or improve post-operative joint mobility…”

Anything, really. Absolutely any old use will do. Surely it must do something useful… what about memory, might it improve memory? Concentration? Appetite control? Tremor-reduction? Come on, THINK! We’ve got tons of the stuff, and all this machinery… those smokers aren’t going to be fooled by our misinformation forever! NICOTINE NEEDS A MEDICO-MAKEOVER, NOW! FOR GOD’S SAKE, THERE MUST BE SOMETHING USEFUL IT CAN DO!

Nope. Just a poison, mate. Just the same old useless poison. Give it up.

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was

The easiest, safest and most successful way to quit smoking tobacco