by hypnotherapist Chris Holmes
Out of the 13 comments awaiting moderation today, only 1 turned out to be real. The other 12 were mainly long lists of porn video titles, the strange variety of which makes me feel really normal, as I scroll down to the Spam button which prevents these things from getting on the site. One has to be impressed to some degree, though, by the determination of porn producers to cater for every taste, as evidenced by one example today, entitled “Grandmother Incest Stories”. I mean, whoever made that film cannot have been expecting to sell a lot of copies. Most inexplicable title so far has to be “Cold Hands and Feet”. What the hell is that? A fetish? Or is it a euphemism for necrophilia? Either way, I don’t think I really need to know.
The other unwanted contributions were from internet sites pushing pharmaceuticals. One was peddling Zoloft, a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) originally approved by the FDA in 1991 as an anti-depressant along with Prozac, and other drugs in the same class. As it is now public knowledge that SSRI drug trials actually showed virtually no useful success and did indicate some dangers, but the drug companies were selective about what they told the FDA so they got approved anyway, why anyone should choose to buy it now might seem to be a mystery. Especially after they read the warning attached by the people selling the stuff:
“Care should be exercised if this drug is prescribed as prolonged use to treat depression through antidepressants carry the risk of suicidal behaviour especially in the younger generations”.
So, who wants to buy some of this chemical compound that sometimes makes sad young people feel like killing themselves? Form an orderly queue now, no pushing and shoving, I’m sure Pfizer made enough for everyone. If you’re over sixty five though, the suicide risk is described as “significantly lower”, probably because once you are approaching ‘three score years and ten’ as the Biblical term has it, there hardly seems any point in hastening your demise anyway. The patient might as well just be… well, patient.
Perhaps still more mysterious is the fact that Zoloft received approval in 2003 “for use in paediatric patients although it carries a warning about suicidal tendencies in younger patients.” What kind of stupid approval system did that then?
Most astonishing of all is the phrase: “Care should be exercised if this drug is prescribed…” Clearly this phrase has been lifted from another place – another time, in fact. A time when drugs like this had to be prescribed. Care should be exercised? By whom? You are selling it over the internet, you stupid, stupid bastards! And somebody, somewhere is going to end up killing themselves as a result, it’s inevitable! Is no-one going to stop this madness? Is no-one even going to try?
These ‘Internet Pharmacies’ are just unsupervised outlets for old, and sometimes discredited medications to be dumped on the public when their exclusive patents run out, which in the case of Zoloft was 2006. Just an unscrupulous way of squeezing a little bit more money out of them before they are abandoned utterly, to help pay for the next generation of unnatural and risky chemical concoctions. And if you are inclined to think I’m being too critical – an extremist, perhaps – and that these people are not just greedy, irresponsible drug-pushers posing as responsible professionals, just consider this: there’s a special offer attached to Zoloft on this site, which you would never have been offered by any doctor. If you buy 60 Zoloft pills, you get 2 free Viagra tablets! If you buy 90 or more, you get four. This is, quite obviously, an attempt to sell thirty more tablets by giving away a few tablets of a completely different medication!
Was Zoloft ever tested in clinical trials in combination with Viagra, to see if there’s any reaction or risk associated with taking them together? No, of course not! And should it not be illegal – because it is certainly unethical – to try to shift old stocks of one medication by offering other tablets – for a completely different condition – for free?
Surely you don’t have to be a radical thinker to recognise that what is happening here is insane. And don’t say: “There’s nothing anyone can do, it’s international, it’s the internet, there are no controls…” I notice they aren’t selling heroin or LSD, so someone is controlling it, aren’t they? Heroin happens to be a very effective painkiller, so it’s not because it doesn’t have a medical use. And no-one takes the attitude “There’s nothing anyone can do” when it comes to child pornography, do they? International laws may vary, but they still manage to bust people, don’t they? These drug peddlers should be hunted down and busted, because they are selling drugs without any restrictions that were only approved for supply on prescription. Can you imagine how alarmed you would be, if a shop opened up in your town centre called No Questions Asked, with hundreds of medications just sitting on shelves, self-service checkouts and people just milling about putting one medicine after another into their shopping basket? That shop is closer than you think. And it delivers packages that are discreetly wrapped.
Nobody should be able to buy prescription drugs over the internet. Nobody should be selling drugs that way, profiteering from the vulnerability of people whose doctor might not have prescribed those drugs for a very good reason. It is blatant drug-pushing, and anyone involved in selling prescription drugs without prescription is directly responsible for any harm that comes to people as a result. So are the manufacturers. If new laws are needed they are well overdue – too many people die from drugs that were prescribed by a doctor – remove that restriction and the fatalities and dependencies are bound to rocket.
The Truth Will Out Campaign is essentially about blowing the whistle on the Nicotine Replacement Poisoning Scam, but that raised questions about the system that approves such things as if they were a useful medication, which naturally leads to us noticing when other examples crop up, because it is yet more evidence proving the pressing need for change. And we never have to wait long: only the other day I was listening to a report on BBC Radio 4 about an ‘atypical anti-psychotic’ drug which is reckoned to have killed seven hundred people in the UK in the last five years (conservative estimate). And that’s just the fatalities, it does not include all the non-fatal strokes and pneumonia cases the drug causes, which led to a warning about that being attached by the National Institute for Chemical Excess (N.I.C.E.), as well as a specific guideline that this drug should not be prescribed to patients who just have dementia, because it is inappropriate, they are not psychotic. That was in 2004, but unfortunately some doctors thought it was worth the risk to go on doing that anyway, because it keeps dementia patients pretty quiet by knocking them senseless. The estimate of the experts is that of the 150,000 people in the UK currently being prescribed that drug, about 100,000 would not be if the guidelines were being followed.
I had barely finished shaking my head in disbelief over that one, and already there’s another story about N.I.C.E. all over the front page of today’s Daily Mail: SUICIDE FEAR ‘FAT PILL’ GETS GO AHEAD is the headline, and the story is that Acomplia, also known as rimonabant, has just been approved by N.I.C.E. for use by the NHS in the UK, despite being banned in the United States because of a risk of suicidal thoughts, low mood and depression, anxiety, irritability, nervousness and sleep disorders which apparently occur in 10% of cases. This risk is reckoned to be acceptable by N.I.C.E. because, according to the Daily Mail: “Trials have shown that it could help two out of five patients lose 10% of their weight”.
That’s a pretty poor show. And anyway, for how long? I work with weight issues all the time, and I know that diets and drugs only cause temporary weight loss, which usually goes straight back on again because no-one is addressing the real causes of the behaviour that put the weight there in the first place. By the end of the drug trial, they managed to demonstrate up to 10% reduction, although three out of five patients did not even achieve that. That’s all they have to do to get the damn stuff approved! No-one is looking at the long-term outcome, so this is not really evidence of efficacy. All it really indicates is that a minority of those taking it lose a bit of weight whilst they are taking the drug, but tells you nothing about what happens when they stop taking it.
This is how the drug companies are getting a lot of drugs passed now, as if they are genuinely effective when actually they only looked at the short-term effect. Same thing happened with Nicotine Replacement products, didn’t it? Once it gets rubber-stamped by approval bodies like N.I.C.E., it looks for all the world as if it was an “evidence-based medicine”, when it is really nothing of the kind. After that, it will not lose its ‘acceptable’ status even if it kills hundreds of people!
And that’s how the cynical bastards can still manage to sell Zoloft to some poor, unsuspecting fool who doesn’t realise just how much of a sleazy scam all this really is. That, and the free Viagra. All of which is almost enough to give anyone the odd suicidal thought occasionally, even if they do have more sense than to take any of these unnatural and dangerous concoctions themselves.
Hypnotherapy is brilliant for weight loss. No risk. And with results that last, too. Read more about it here. Now can I have some opinions about internet drug shops, free Viagra and whether those pharmacies should be allowed to sell LSD and heroin too, perhaps? Don’t be shy, say what you like! Perhaps you own an internet pharmacy, or maybe you’re a small-time street drug dealer who is worried about the competition… We’re getting good contributions to the Champix (Chantix) debate, but so far no-one has said anything at all about Webdealing.
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Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was
Central Hypnotherapy
** Update 22.07.09
Any further comments should be uploaded to the site within 48 hours. If you are seeking information about Champix/Chantix please read all the comments attached to the numerous posts in the Champix section.
This site is really about the Nicotine Replacement Poisoning scam, and we believe that the post entitled ‘The Great NHS Lie Exposed’ says all there is to say about that. We have proved our claims entirely true with scientific reports eventually prised out of the clutches of the Department of Stealth. NRT simply doesn’t work at all and not a penny more of public cash should be squandered on it. Q.E.D.
***2nd update 16/07/10: This week on UK television there was a documentary investigating mail order drugs, and that included the shocking news that even heart medications were being sold with free Viagra tablets, which is particularly dangerous as a combination or it would be if any of these tablets actually contained what they were supposed to contain. Some do, some don’t – but even some of the ones that do were found to vary alarmingly in strength according to this documentary.
What I found particularly ironic in this programme was that one of the experts they turned to for a scientific commentary on the dangerous aspects of these criminal practices was the head of Pfizer’s fake medicines department, if I heard it correctly. Pfizer make Champix, which they know damn well is currently killing people and destroying lives and relationships and damaging people’s health all over the world but they’re making so much money out of it that they won’t withdraw it, and they’re commenting on the reckless profiteering of the pharma-pirates? What’s the difference, really? It was like watching that old TV clip of Harold Shipman being interviewed by an unsuspecting reporter years before he was discovered to be a mass murderer. Of course I’m not comparing the woman concerned to Shipman, I’m sure she’s very professional in that post – but Pfizer as a company. They are killing people with that medication right now, and they fully intend to go on doing that until somebody else forces them to stop.