Tag: failure

Expensive Life-Saving Drugs: Would £84m-a-year extra cash help?

The NHS could easily afford more life-saving drugs if it just stopped wasting vast amounts of cash on nicotine replacement therapies that don’t work any better than willpower in the long run, as the Borland Report clearly demonstrated in 2005.

by Chris Holmes

Primary Care Trusts are “failing in their duty of care” in blacklisting 19 drugs on the basis of cost alone, according to a report this week in the Metro newspaper (Thursday 24th November, page 8).  Political Editor John Higginson reports that this “appears to go against the NHS constitution, which gives patients the right to receive any drug recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence if their doctor believes it is clinically appropriate.”

The list includes drugs with proven efficacy in the treatment of cancer and also epilepsy – but the PCTs concerned have decided that these drugs cost too much.

The very same Primary Care Trusts also decided it was perfectly okay to spend £84,000,000 in England alone last year (not the whole of the UK, that figure is even higher) on a treatment service which they know from their own research DOES NOT WORK any better than willpower alone when the results are assessed at one year.  I’m talking about the NHS Stop Smoking Services and particularly the nicotine replacement products which we now know for sure have a 6% success rate at the 12 month stage – exactly the same as willpower.

My suggestion is simple: Take that vast amount of money and spend it on life-saving drug therapies that have been proven to be effective, and leave smoking cessation to experts like myself.  I’m a hypnotherapist by the way, and nearly all my smoking clients have already tried willpower, nicotine gum, patches, lozenges, the little inhalator-thingy… some have tried Zyban and the latest (non) wonder drug Champix… then they come to me, convinced that they “have failed” repeatedly and that it is “really hard to stop smoking”!  No, it’s really hard if you try to do it via the NHS.  It’s really easy with hypnotherapy, provided it’s done well.

But I’m not suggesting the PCTs should fund that.  They should be funding those life-saving drugs, not wasting tens of millions every single year on a service that clearly doesn’t work at all.

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

86% Failure Rate for Champix

“In a multicenter, randomized, double-blind phase II clinical trial, 638 men and women aged 18-65 who smoked an average of 10 cigarettes per day during the previous year, without a period of abstinence of more than 3 months, where put on placebo, bupropion (another drug used as a smoking cessation aid, brand name Zyban®), or different treatment schedules of varenicline for 7 weeks. Subjects were tested for continuous quitting by measuring exhaled carbon monoxide. After one year, the success rates were 14.4%, 6.3% and 4.9% for varenicline, bupropion and placebo, respectively.”

That was from WikiNews, August 15 2006. Link to this article at the end of this post.

This is interesting because it demonstrates what we can expect in long-term results from new medications (boosted by hype and fresh expectations) compared to old ones which no longer are. Elsewhere on this site I have quoted results for willpower alone from various studies giving us figures of anywhere between 4% to 8% when the results are reviewed at one year. So the placebo (dummy medication) figure given above, 4.9%, is entirely consistent with that. But look how Zyban (bupropion) had also fallen within the normal placebo or willpower range by 2006, whereas earlier reports had suggested it had long-term outcomes of around 13% to 14% – same as the new varenicline (champix, chantix) scores here. So will Champix too fall back within the expected range for willpower or dummy pills once all the hype has passed?

It seems likely. We have certainly seen that with Nicotine Replacement products which were credited with 10% to 20% success rates when the University of Iowa study was carried out in 1992, but we now know from several different independent studies that the current outcomes at one year are a miserable 5% to 6%, once again well within the willpower range.

So this indicates that even in 2006, the long-term outcomes of this so-called “new wonder drug” were no better than the previous “wonder drug” Zyban, which is no longer even managing a miserable 14% success rate now that it isn’t regarded by anyone as a wonder drug any more. Clearly, the difference is entirely accounted for by suggestion and heightened expectation.

That’s not science. That’s marketing. And a complete waste of precious NHS resources.

WikiNews August 15 2006

Hypnotherapy works best, according to the study by the University of Iowa. Find out more in the Evidence section of this site, and here.

Meanwhile, the reports of bad reactions are piling up just as I predicted last year (link).

 

Site Launch!

This campaign is not attacking the medical profession. It is attacking the cosy collusion between medical authorities, the pharmaceutical industry and also the Department of Health, because they are all actively promoting methods that fail the vast majority of smokers, misrepresenting the facts and telling lies about alternative methods like hypnotherapy and acupuncture – all of which is costing lives and wasting resources.

by Chris Holmes

Well now, this should be interesting. It’s not every day a humble therapist takes on the pharmaceutical industry, the Department of Health, the B.M.A. and the Royal College of Physicians… but it has got to be done.

The book was the first step: that had to be written and published initially so that anyone in the world could get hold of a copy and assess the evidence for themselves. I couldn’t just come out and say: “Actually, the whole basis for Nicotine Replacement is false, which explains its abject failure!” …because nobody would have listened. Everyone would assume that it must have been properly tested, surely, in well-designed scientific trials?

Then again, you could just ask yourself: “Who has any faith in nicotine gum these days, really?” And of course, we now know that clinical trials ain’t what they used to be, and the whole process of getting products approved as medicines has been hijacked by the drug companies, who now run all the clinical trials themselves and tend to be very selective about the ‘evidence’ they present to approval bodies.

I challenge anyone – anyone with an open mind, that is – to read the evidence on this site and tell me they are quite happy to have their tax money squandered on the poison nicotine for a few more years. The Department of Health has got the NHS Stop Smoking Services proclaiming ‘success rates’ that bear no relation to the real, long term outcomes – and they know it! They just don’t want the public to know it.

I am quite sure there will be many people working in the healthcare system who will be in full agreement that precious NHS resources should not be wasted on a poison posing as a medication, just because the manufacturers managed to swing it in such a way that the very short-term results were passed off as the real results. That’s bogus, and if you turn a blind eye to things like that, you can hardly be surprised when you later see embarrassing headlines like the ones posted on this site (see Trust me, I’m a Doctor). And if you find yourself doubting that nicotine products could possibly have won approval in that way, you really should read the Daily Mail article there by leading psychiatrist Professor David Healy from February 2007, which is reproduced in that section of the site. In fact everyone should read that, before they allow their doctor to precribe them any new “wonder drug”.

This campaign is not attacking the medical profession. It is attacking the cosy collusion between medical authorities, the pharmaceutical industry and also the Department of Health, because they are all actively promoting methods that fail the vast majority of smokers, misrepresenting the facts and telling lies about alternative methods like hypnotherapy and acupuncture – all of which is costing lives and wasting resources. And all because they don’t want to admit they were wrong, which is a pretty pathetic reason to carry on like that. Or to maintain the status quo because it suits all three parties, which is worse, since it maintains at enormous human cost.

So if you find yourself in agreement with the Truth Will Out Campaign, please help by spreading the word in any way you can! This Campaign is opposed to any kind of violence, intimidation or criminal damage in pursuit of its aims – this is an information war, challenging misinformation and the covering-up of failure on a massive scale. On behalf of smokers everywhere, we welcome all genuine assistance in spreading the word! The Truth Will Out!

the book that blew the whistle on the nicotine scam

hypnotherapy info