Dear friends,
The below article from the Observer, one of England's top newspapers, clearly demonstrates the amazing power all of us have through the use of the Internet. As the article's subtitle says, "The web has helped consumers turn tables on the drug giants." In case you don't have time to read the entire article, here is a key excerpt on past practices of the drug companies:
"Bit by bit, health activists in Britain and America have uncovered the core of pharma might: a sinister mesh of hidden influences in the regulation and practice of medicine. In both countries, clinical drug tests are paid for by the pharmas, who tweak the trials' design for the best possible results. Until recently, only the most favourable findings got published in the
20,000-odd biomedical journals, many of them dependent on pharmas for funding. The drugs are approved for marketing by regulators, whose salaries are mostly financed by [the pharmaceutical companies]. The medicines are then prescribed by doctors routinely courted with pharma gifts - from free pens to family skiing holidays - meant to persuade them to change their prescribing habits."This article shows how the Internet has forced the drug companies to begin to report the all the facts on their studies and funding. It is through the Internet, and more specifically through email that we are spreading news rapidly to all of our friends and colleagues and forcing those in power to take responsibility. Together, we are helping to pressure the world's decision makers to think less about money and special interests, and more about the good of all who share this planet. Each of us is much more powerful than we might think, especially when forward this kind of information to our friends, and they forward it on to their friends, etc... Thanks for caring, and thanks for helping to build a better future by spreading the news far and wide!
With very best wishes, Fred
P.S For an incredibly revealing summary of information along these lines, www.WantToKnow.info/deception10pg
Big Pharma snared by net
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1312765,00.html
The web has helped consumers turn tables on the drug giants, says Cheryll Barron
Sunday September 26, 2004 The Observer
What if ants could turn the microscopes on the scientists studying them and, after beady-eyed surveillance, demand a revolution in their scrutinisers' accustomed ways? This is more than a variation on Lilliputians for a new Jonathan Swift to consider; it's a metaphor for a real-life reversal of multinational power that has no precedent.
Management tomes of the late 1990s - like Bill Gates's droning Business, the Speed of Thought - explained how the internet might be used to study customer behaviour minutely, through, for instance, 'data mining'. Companies, they said, could use the intimate understanding so acquired to address customers' needs and preferences, on the companies' terms.
What no one foresaw was the shocking extent to which the internet would change the terms of trade between corporations and society. Certainly not that one of the world's largest drug companies, which is among the richest and most influential industries of all time, would be the first victim of the shift.
The crisis that began the containment of pharma power is a runaway rate of drug injury. In England alone, reactions to drugs that led to hospitalisation followed by death are estimated at 5,700 a year and could actually be closer to 10,000, according to a study in The British Medical Journal in July. The researchers reckon that adverse drug reactions are costing the NHS £466m [US$ 850 million] a year.
King of kings' Bible Galatians 5:19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are [these]; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
5:20 Idolatry, PHARMACY, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,
5:21 Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told [you] in time past, that they which do such things shall NOT inherit the Kingdom of God.
Drug injury has been worrying experts for decades. But after the thalidomide tragedies of the 1950s, the subject failed to catch fire for politicians and the public until the recent antidepressant controversy. Last month, that debate made headlines when Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, the world's second-largest pharma, denied any wrongdoing, but agreed to pay $2.5m to settle a lawsuit filed by the State of New York accusing it of fraud for concealing evidence of its antidepressant Seroxat's potential for harming children, while doing them no measurable good. In a sequel last week, a group of about two dozen American parents sued GSK seeking refunds for treatment of their children with the drug.
The GSK suit created the tipping point in the pharmas' change of fortune and has revealed the force behind it. The formal complaint drew heavily on research by public health campaigners and consumer advocates about the hazards of antidepressant use. These activists had toiled in deepest obscurity - some of them, for a decade - until their discoveries were featured on a Panorama programme, 'Secrets of Seroxat', in Autumn 2002. A follow-up broadcast the next spring, 'Emails from the edge', analysed 1,370 messages from viewers about the first programme, mostly from people reporting antidepressant withdrawal reactions including shock-like sensations in their heads, and thoughts about self-mutilation, violence and suicide.
The outcry that followed forced GSK to make a stunning admission. In June 2003, it corrected its prescribing instructions for Seroxat, revising its estimate of the risk of withdrawal symptoms from one in 500 to one in four.
Infinitely more frightening than that reluctant confirmation of a drug's potential for harm was that in the years GSK spent denying it, this pharma had the backing of institutions that we, the public, rely on to protect us from poisoning by prescription. The Royal College of Psychiatrists had insisted only a year earlier that 'there is no evidence that antidepressant drugs can cause dependence syndromes'; a patient information leaflet approved by a regulatory body also said as much.
The events that led to Seroxat's exposure would seem to suggest that it was television power that forced GSK to recant. But it was really the internet that allowed public health activists to do an end run around GSK's and the medical authorities' denials of the drug's risks. An explosion of websites dedicated to vivid accounts of antidepressant reactions told these campaigners about hundreds of thousands affected by a problem that officially did not exist.
The internet was 'groaning with evidence'; over time, the 'cover-up became more obvious as the weight of scientific evidence got stronger and public protest grew'. Those are quotations from a magisterial history and analysis of the antidepressant crisis by two leading campaigners, Charles Medawar and Anita Hardon, in Medicines Out of Control?, a new book recommended by the Lancet as essential reading for members of the parliamentary committee examining pharma influence on health policy, whose hearings began last week.
Health campaigners trying to decide what the pharmas could reasonably be blamed for shared vast stores of data by - among other means - encyclopaedic technical postings on their websites. Some of these sites also feature open access to years of correspondence between the activists and regulatory officials and pharma executives. Postings like these have allowed rapid international co-ordination between the campaigners.
Pharmas bent on redeeming their reputations have suddenly begun to use the internet to publish what they once fought for the right to conceal. GSK's first notable response to the filing of the recent lawsuit was to start posting both negative and positive findings from drug tests on its web site. But it is far from the only pharma with a history of secretiveness about trials, and at least three of its rivals have copied its turnabout, with Eli Lilly and Merck making the most radical moves towards transparency.
Bitter pills
Bit by bit, health activists in Britain and America have uncovered the core of pharma might: a sinister mesh of hidden influences in the regulation and practice of medicine that is painstakingly dissected in Medicines Out of Control? In both countries, clinical drug tests are paid for by the pharmas, who tweak the trials' design for the best possible results. Until recently, only the most favourable findings got published in the 20,000-odd biomedical journals, many of them dependent on pharmas for funding. The drugs are approved for marketing by regulators, whose salaries are mostly financed by the subjects of their evaluations - since pharmas pay to have their products vetted. The medicines are then prescribed by doctors routinely courted with pharma gifts - from free pens to family skiing holidays - meant to persuade them to change their prescribing habits.
P. S. See the end portion too, from my article about the Protocols.
16 Quotes On Drugs
1-30-3
1. "The cause of most disease is in the poisonous drugs physicians superstitiously give in order to effect a cure." Charles E. Page, M. D.
2. "Medicines are of subordinate importance because of their very nature they can only work symptomatically." Hans Kusche, M. D.
3. "If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity" O. W. Holmes, (Prof. of Med. Harvard University)
4. "Drug medications consists in employing, as remedies for disease, those things which produce disease in well persons. Its materia medica is simply a lot of drugs or chemicals or dye-stuffs in a word POISONS. All are incompatible with vital matter; all produce disease when brought in contact in any manner with the living; ALL are POISONS." R. T. TraIl, M. D., in a two and one half hour lecture to members of congress and the medical profession, delivered at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D. C.
5. "Every drug increases and complicates the patient's condition." Robert Henderson, M. D.
6. "Drugs never cure disease. They merely hush the voice of nature's protest, and pull down the danger signals she erects along the pathway of transgression. Any poison taken into the system has to be reckoned with later-on, even though it palliates present symptoms. Pain may disappear, but the patient is left in a WORSE condition, though unconscious of it at the time." Daniel. H. Kress, M. D.
7. "The greatest part of all chronic disease is created by the suppression of acute disease by drug poisoning." Henry Lindlahr, M. D.
8. "Every educated physician knows that most diseases are not appreciably helped by medicine." Richard C. Cabot, M. D. (Mass. Gen. Hospital)
9. "Medicine is only palliative, for back of disease lies the cause, and this cause no drug can reach." Wier Mitchel, M. D.
10. "The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine." William Osler, M. D.
11. "Medical practice has neither philosophy nor common sense to recommend it. In sickness the body is already loaded with impurities. By taking drug - medicines more impurities are added, thereby the case is further embarrassed and harder to cure." Elmer Lee, M. D., Past Vice President, Academy of Medicine.
12. "Our figures show approximately four and one half million hospital admissions annually due to the adverse reactions to drugs. Further, the average hospital patient has as much as thirty percent chance, depending how long he is in, of doubling his stay due to adverse drug reactions." Milton Silverman, M. D. (Professor of Pharmacology, University of California)
13. "Why would a patient swallow a poison because he is ill, or take that which would make a well man sick." L. F. Kebler, M. D.
14. "What hope is there for medical science to ever become a true science when the entire structure of medical knowledge is built around the idea that there is an entity called disease which can be expelled when the right drug is found?" John H. Tilden, M. D.
15. "The necessity of teaching mankind not to take drugs and medicines, is a duty incumbent upon all who know their uncertainty and injurious effects; and the time is not far distant when the drug system will be abandoned." Charles Armbruster, M. D.
16. "We are prone to thinking of drug abuse in terms of the male population and illicit drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. It may surprise you to learn that a greater problem exists with millions of women dependent on legal prescription drugs." Robert Mendelsohn, M. D
Galatians 5:19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are [these]; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
5:20 Idolatry, PHARMACY, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,
5:21 Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told [you] in time past, that they which do such things shall NOT inherit the Kingdom of God. http://jahtruth.net/kofkad.htm
Extract from my article about the Protocols:-
In 1492, Chemor, Chief Rabbi of Spain received the following reply from the Grand Sanhedrin (Elders of Zion) to his plea for advice on how to deal with their threatened expulsion under Spanish Law; it illustrates well how the same ancient agenda was still being adhered to by the elect at this time:
N. B. Clause 3.
The advice of the Grand Satraps and the Rabbis is the following:
1. As for what you say that the king of Spain obliges you to become Christians: do it, since you cannot do otherwise.
2. As for what you say about the command to despoil you of your property: make your sons merchants that they may despoil, little by little, the Christians of theirs.
3. As for what you say about making attempts on your lives: make your sons doctors and apothecaries (pharmacists/chemists), that they may take away Christian's lives.
4. As for what you say of their destroying your synagogues: make your sons canons and clerics in order that they may destroy their churches.
5. As for the other vexations you complain of: arrange that your sons become advocates and lawyers, and see that they always mix in affairs of State, that by putting Christians under your yoke you may dominate the world and be avenged on them.
6. Do not swerve from this order that we give you, because you will find by experience that, humiliated as you are, you will reach the actuality of power.
(Signed) Prince of the Jews of Constantinople'
(Julio-Inigrez de Medrano - 'La Silva Curiosa' 1608 my emphasis)
The ONLY solution is to enforce The Plan:- http://jahtruth.net/plan.htm
