Big Pharma: the fox guarding the henhouse
Emergency medicine – from life-saving surgery to things like blood-clotting drugs that can keep someone from bleeding out after an accident – is pretty impressive. But when it comes to lifestyle medications, we have to ask some important questions.
First of all, there are massive conflicts of interest. For instance, like the fox guarding the henhouse, the pharmaceutical companies themselves pay for much of the work of the FDA in approving their drugs (not to mention payments to FDA advisers following drug approvals).[2] Big Pharma also pays for the studies needed for these approvals.
Research sponsors?
In one way, this sounds great – it keeps the taxpayers from covering the cost. But we also know what happens when someone commissions a study, don’t we?
They get the results they’re after, often by throwing out data that doesn’t fit their needs or cherry picking results. This is exactly what happened with Big Tobacco, when doctors were telling people that smoking was good for them and the truth was hidden from the public for decades. As one article points out, “Some estimates suggest the results of half of clinical trials are never published. These missing data have, over several decades, systematically distorted perceptions of the efficacy of drugs, devices and even surgical procedures.”
Another article explains: “In 2010, three researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug – antidepressants, ulcer drugs and so on – then measured two key features: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found over five hundred trials in total: 85 per cent of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50 per cent of the government funded trials were. That’s a very significant difference.”
In short, companies that sponsor research make sure that they get what they pay for. Industry-funded research is marketing research, not scientific research.
A quick search online for “medical drugs no better than placebo” will bring up plenty of examples of medicine that could be replaced with dummy pills and get the same results. Yet the actual drugs carry side effects that a placebo presumably would not cause.
Marketing machine
Even if a drug does demonstrate a benefit, the marketing machines push it through doctors and advertisements far beyond its appropriate use. Data from 2013 shows 9 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies spending more on marketing and sales than on research and development, with many of them spending twice as much on selling than on developing. And much of this money is spent directly on doctors in the form of speaking fees, consulting fees, etc.
In other words, they’re purchasing medical bias.
As one example, over the last several years, studies have shown that antidepressant drugs don’t relieve depression any better than placebos.
In 2018, though, a new study suggested that they do provide more benefits than placebos, but only when used in serious cases of depression. Unfortunately, doctors have pushed these medications on more and more people, and for more and more “off label” uses (what the drugs weren’t originally intended for). Because of this, earlier studies literally couldn’t see the benefits. Any positive results were getting lost in the sea of people who never should have been taking them.
And it not only leads to higher costs, but to the many side effects that those people should never have faced. Plus, for those who did suffer side effects – from a drug they never should have taken – in many cases, their doctors no doubt prescribed still other medications to deal with the side effects from the first medications. So the drug lifestyle feeds itself.
Follow the Money
Suffice it to say, there’s reason to question our reliance on pharmaceutical drugs. Follow the money and it’s not hard to see that there’s a lot on the line that has nothing to do with human well-being and happiness.
Big Pharma is one of the biggest special interests in Washington, DC, and that influence allows it to continually expand the number of drugs in people’s lives. Plus, medically speaking, health problems like “high blood pressure” and “high cholesterol” are redefined to get more people onto related medications, while children are exposed to scores of vaccinations for which the drug companies literally have zero liability. (Due to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) passed by Congress in 1986). So from a bottom-line perspective, the more vaccinations they can bring to market, the more their profits soar.
Now I’ll leave the vaccination debate to others – I’m pointing out the conflicts of interest here and offering reasons for asking questions. But on this topic, I’ll mention that one group has begun raising money to study the contents of vaccines in the marketplace, and their first result was nothing short of astonishing.
Reviewing a 6-in-1 vaccine, they not only found 65 toxins – of which they could only identify 35% – but they also found none of the expected antigens that should have been the foundation of the vaccine. (The antigens are what are supposed to trigger immunity to a disease).
In other words, even for those who believe in the value of vaccinations, this one literally could not provide any protection and meanwhile involves injecting nothing but toxins into your body.
If we have faith in Western medicine, these results should shock us to the point of hoping, at least, that this was an isolated case. But based on these findings, the same group studied two more vaccines and found similar results. Again, we can leave the discussion of safety and effectiveness of vaccines to other settings, but these findings alone should demand much greater scrutiny into “medicine” that’s being increasingly forced on the global population.
Medical drugs don’t Heal
Even if medical science were perfect – which it’s clearly not – it’s obvious that pharmaceutical drugs fail to actually get people healthy, even if they do help to manage some symptoms.
Simply put, pharmaceutical drugs aren’t designed to heal anything in the body. They’re only designed to provide some symptomatic benefit, and they do this by stopping functions of the body.
These functions are only symptoms of a deeper problem, and the design of medicine isn’t to address the deeper problem; it’s only to stop the symptom. This is why medicine doesn’t cure. It only manages symptoms.
The body has a miraculous ability to heal itself from just about anything, but only when we support it in doing so. Unfortunately, medicine’s entire approach is to fight the body’s attempts to heal, which we see as symptoms.
Yes, sometimes fighting the body’s attempt is necessary – like when the immune system is purposely suppressed to keep the body from rejecting an organ transplant. This is life-saving medicine. But lifestyle medications will never help someone truly get well.
Holistic approaches to wellness, on the other hand, don’t treat symptoms. They look for the deeper cause and seek to support its correction. When the deeper cause is corrected, then the body’s own incredible healing system can begin to fix the body.
Medicine may be valuable when facing emergency situations and symptoms must be addressed. But for long-term wellness, it’s critical to find out what’s really going on beneath those symptoms.
