Daily Mail article

It is really “evidence-based” medicines that are killing and harming people in ever-increasing numbers, not any sort of complementary medicine. Drugs are what the public need protecting from, not alternative approaches which hardly ever harm anyone!

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 former 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 in suggesting things like chiropractic and homeopathy are “dangerous”? He says nothing – nothing – about the thousands of innocent people being damaged or killed by the very medications he was 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 sneaky little Professor Against Complementary Medicine? If you really wanted to protect the public, you could do a better job of it by warning people about the real dangers of some of the medications that should never have been passed in the first place, like Champix for example. But protecting the public isn’t your real concern, is it Eddie? That’s just a pose. That’s why you keep referring to pharmaceutical products as “evidence-based”, when the real evidence is that they are killing and damaging more people than ever before, whereas complementary medicine obviously isn’t. You’re a Misinformation Machine, you are. Shame on you, Edzard. Shame on you and all your smug “quackbuster” buddies – you’re PROTECTING the real quacks (Pfizer, GSK et al) by creating this anti-CAM smokescreen in the media, and people are dying as a result.

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 way back when they were a genuinely independent body, before they were controlled by the evil and utterly ruthless pharmaceutical industry.

“How to Stop Your Doctor Killing You”

Even by my forthright standards, this is a provocative title but it is not hyperbole. Former GP and hospital physician Dr Vernon Coleman has published this book, which warns the public that: “The person most likely to kill you is not a burglar, a mugger, a deranged relative or a drunken driver. The person most likely to kill you is your doctor. This book explains how to protect yourself from this serious threat to your life and good health.”

This echoes the sentiments of Dr Malcolm Kendrick, whose 2007 book The Great Cholesterol Con warns that Statin drugs are dangerous and don’t really work, and the comments of leading psychiatrist Professor David Healy (see Trust Me, I’m a Doctor elsewhere on this site). He is dismayed by the total lack of accountability in the drug industry:

“In other organisations, when evidence of disregard for public safety emerges, heads roll. But there have been no resignations following these drug disasters – barely a flicker of embarrassment. The distortion and lack of corporate accountability makes me much slower to hand out new drugs. I even feel apprehensive if someone I know has to go to the doctor.”

What has all this to do with Nicotine Replacement Poisoning? Same system. Same approval bodies. Same drug giants. It’s just that NRT was approved so long ago, you are just supposed to assume that it was all properly tested and it wouldn’t have been passed if it didn’t work. Professor David Healy knows better than to assume that, because he has personally sifted through boxes concealing thousands of confidential internal company documents concerning other medications that had already been passed by the system as if they were both safe and effective:

“No-one outside the two companies, and few within them, knew what the boxes contained; I saw them because I was an expert witness in a court case.” These experiences have left him feeling:

“…apprehensive if someone I know has to go to the doctor”.

Still confident that nicotine products are safe and above board? Where medications are concerned, it is no longer safe to assume anything, as Dr Coleman wants everyone to be aware for the sake of their safety and indeed their life.

safer alternative