Drugs Only Do What A Healthy Body Can Do For Itself! So Why Is America The World's Most Pharmaceutically Intoxicated Nation? If everyone followed the Live To Be 90 Lifestyle Plan, need for our exorbitantly overpriced medications would be dramatically reduced.
Every year, medications save millions of lives in the U.S. Pharmaceuticals have saved billions of dollars in annual health care costs by shortening hospital stays and allowing many more patients to be treated on an outpatient basis. Medical drugs have reduced disability among older Americans , allowing tens of thousands more to live independently.
New personalized medicines tailored to fit an individual patient with a specific strain of disease are increasingly replacing traditional drugs with their shotgun (one drugs fits all) approach. An entirely new branch of medical science is emerging which first tests a patient's genetic and biological patterns , then matches the patient to an existing drug. . . or to one of a new family of drugs which, for example, can hone in on specific tumor cell proteins that flourish only in people with a certain type of cancer.
No one denies the benefits of many modern drugs. . .even though it's fairly obvious that if everyone followed the Live To Be 90 Lifestyle Plan, need for these increasingly-expensive medications would be dramatically reduced. Yet it's an open secret, and a troubling concern within the drug industry, that many of the drugs they produce are ineffective in most patients.
In a recent Reuter's news report , for instance, a senior executive at Glaxo-Smith-Kline, Britain's largest drug company, reportedly stated in a December, 2003 interview that:
"Most modern prescription drugs do not work on people who take them. " The report goes on to say that fewer than half the people prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derive any benefit from them.
The review, posted on the website of CommonDreams, added that statistics reveal that drugs for people with Alzheimer's work on fewer than 1 in 3 patients; Cancer drugs are effective only on 1 patient in 4; while drugs for Osteoporosis and Bone Density Loss work on only half of all patients.
Part of this is due to the new family of drugs we just described, drugs that are targeted to a small number of patients with specific genes that respond to that drug. When one of these highly-specialized drugs fails, doctors try one after another of the same type of drugs in a trial and error approach. While it's true that new, hi-tech genetic diagnostic clinics will help match patients more closely to a drug that works, that day isn't here yet. Meanwhile, doctors hope that eventually, one of the drugs they try will pass a patient's genetic barrier and finally succeed.
So if you're alarmed by the soaring cost of drugs and health insurance, this is one of the reasons. Another reason is due to doctors being pressured by drug company salesmen to prescribe new and more expensive drugs in place of older, cheaper drugs that are just as effective.
America: The Only Modern Country Without Universal Health Insurance
More than 45 million Americans currently lack any health insurance, with the number growing daily due to job losses and soaring medical costs. And according to an article in the New York Times (November 15, 2003) health insurance is becoming a luxury for even fairly affluent middle class families.
Medicare beneficiaries are being lured into HMOs where they can no longer consult the doctor of their choice, or into private plans like the new Medicare Drug Insurance Plan which is clearly designed to boost drug company profits far more than it benefits older Americans.
Yet America's employer-funded health care system is so fragile that having health insurance is still no guarantee you will be given good health care or the best drugs. A recent study posted in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM--June, 2003) found that the average U.S. doctor fails to take many of the recommended steps for treating most common illnesses, especially Hypertension and Diabetes. The study documented a broad range of lapses where doctors ignore guidelines for preventing and treating common diseases. Once you do get to see a doctor, there is no assurance you will receive the full treatment recommended by medical specialty organizations.
Thus it's not surprising that a landmark study, documented in the Journal of the American Medical Society (JAMA--July 30, 2000) reported that doctors were the third leading cause of death in the U.S. In each of the previous years, approximately 225,000 deaths were attributed to "iatrogenic" causes, meaning hospital and medication errors, hospital infections, unnecessary surgery, and adverse side effects of drugs. While risk of being given an overdose or the wrong drug may be reduced by a computerized system of medication control now being developed, this safeguard is still in its infancy in American hospitals.
All this doesn't even begin to address the reckless overuse of common drugs by American doctors. Antibiotics, for example, are so over-prescribed that common infectious diseases-- once easily curable by first-line antibiotics like penicillin --have developed strains with a powerful resistance to all but the newest and most expensive antiobiotics.
The result: American hospitals have become notorious hotbeds of drug-resistant infections. It's commonplace for hospital patients to develop infectious diseases they did not have when they entered a hospital. Repeat operations may have to be done to re-instal infected joint replacements. And drug resistance is constantly intensified by the thousands of patients each week who fail to take the full regime of pills in their prescription.
So if you don't have health insurance, or even if you do, it's smart to cut your risk of ever needing hospitalization or medical treatment or a drug, by adopting and following the Live To Be 90 Lifestyle Plan endorsed by this website. Or if you prefer, by closely following the guidelines for healthy eating and living recommended by the Seventh Day Adventist Church (See our report "Where People Live Longest and Why" on Home Page menu.)
We definitely do not recommend giving up health insurance you may have or are considering buying. The Live To Be 90 Lifestyle or Adventist Lifestyle are merely suggested as a Natural form of Auxiliary Insurance freely available to anyone who is willing to follow them.
How To Minimize Your Need For Medical Drugs Throughout Life
With or without health insurance, these healthy lifestyles can help keep you healthy and free of many of the common age-related diseases that plague most Americans aged 65 and over. Many people who follow these lifestyles go through almost their entire lives without needing a pharmaceutical drug. By comparison, of all other Americans aged 65 or over, 80 percent have at least one chronic disease, 50 percent have two or more, 20 percent have Diabetes, and 10 percent have some kind of cognitive impairment like senility or poor memory.
The result is that health care facilities across the U.S., are overwhelmed by huge increases in Obesity, Diabetes, Heart Disease and Cancer. Yet each of these disease could be easily prevented or even reversed by lifestyle modification such as exercising, losing weight and upgrading your diet.
Instead, most Americans prefer to pop a pill, thereby inviting many of the risks involved with taking drugs that we've been discussing so far. These risks apply to both OTC and prescription drugs and to some herbal remedies and supplements, especially those advertised as anti-aging medicines.
Whether OTC or prescription, every drug is a two-edged sword with adverse side effects that can offset any benefits the drug itself may offer. Medicines intended to prevent one disease can cause or worsen another. Doctors are becoming increasingly aware that any new health problem in an older person taking medications is often drug-induced. In people over 65, a wide range of ailments and diseases, from gallstones to ulcers, cancer or heart disease, may all be caused or worsened by the adverse side effects of medications they are taking. And medication-induced ailments are notoriously difficult to diagnose.
Meanwhile, several studies found that the pain relief provided by these expensive Cox-2 inhibitors was often no better than that of much cheaper OTC drugs like aspirin, ibuprofen or naproxen. The only advantage of the Cox-2 inhibitors was that they were less likely to cause internal bleeding or ulcers.
Then new research revealed that regular use of these OTC painkillers also carries risk. Long-term use of all 3 types of OTC painkillers may lead to internal bleeding and ulcers. And neither aspirin nor ibuprofen are suited for long-term use by older people. Moreover, almost half the people who take either prescription or OTC painkillers fail to get satisfactory pain relief.
All these drugs are, or were, widely used to mitigate arthritis pain and inflammation levels. But arthritis pain and symptoms can also be relieved by stretching exercises, applying hot or cold compresses, or by rubbing on analgesic creams or lotions like those designed to relieve muscle ache (such as Thermogesic and its cheaper copies, often available in supermarkets for a few dollars per large tube}. Chiropractic treatment or massage therapy also has a good reputation for relieving back pain.
Anti-depressants, another grossly overused class of drugs, have also been linked to increased risk of suicide and other serious side effects, not only in adults but in teenagers as well. (Again, depression in teenagers can be treated by nondrug therapies.) And the widely popular statin drug Crestor has been under the microscope lately as a possible cause of health problems, including severe muscle and kidney disease. (More about statin drugs later.)
But that's just the beginning. A variety of decongestants, antacids, anti-histamines, bisphosphonates for replacing lost bone, and drugs for relieving asthma and obesity are also being checked for possible serious side effects.
The Beginning of the End for many Superdrugs began several years ago, when HRT or Hormone Replacement Therapy--used by millions of American women to prevent loss of bone density and the symptoms of menopause--proved to also increase risk of heart disease and stroke. Along with liver and kidney injury, heart disease and stroke are the most frequent reasons for withdrawing approved drugs from the market. Virtually all prescription and OTC painkillers pose some risk, even when used properly. The risk is multiplied when patients exceed the recommended dosages.
FDA officials are responsible for the safety of medications. But guaranteeing that a drug is safe for long-term use requires long-term testing. Although new drugs are tested on a few thousand patients before being approved as "safe", a serious side effect may not be fully recognized until its users number hundreds of thousands.
"To a real degree, the people who get the drug in the first few years after its approval are being experimented on," is how Dr. Brian L. Strom, professor of bio-statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, reportedly puts it. Many other concerned authorities now caution against taking any drug that has been on the market fewer than 5 years.
Newer Drugs Riskier
Nowadays, competition between drug companies is so intense that new drugs are constantly being marketed that turn out to be no better than existing drugs. . . just more profitable and expensive. Many adverse drug side effects are not apparent until a drug has been on the market for several years. Thus the adverse side effects of most older drugs are well-known and doctors avoid prescribing them to people they feel may be harmed.
This translates into there being considerably more risk in taking the newer drugs. In many cases, these newer drugs may be 10-to-100 times as expensive as older, proven drugs and they are often no more effective.
For treating Schizophrenia, for example, a cheaper, older drug is proving as effective as a costlier new drug that causes some people to gain weight and has been linked to Diabetes. The study, reported in JAMA, found that taking the newer drug cost the average patient $9,000 more annually and the only significant difference was that the newer drug did slightly improve memory and cognitive function.
Then in its June 2004 Health Newsletter, Public Citizen reported that the drug Ceftin (cephalosporin), often used to treat urinary tract infections, is no more effective than the generic drugs Trimethoprim or Sulfamethoxazole, but costs 12 times as much.
In a landmark study by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, reported in JAMA (Dec 18, 2003), more than 33,000 Americans and Canadians 55 and older with hypertension were tested with old-fashioned water pill Diuretics, or with newer, more expensive drugs like Calcium Channel Blockers or ACE Inhibitors. The study clearly showed that the older, cheaper Diuretics were still the best choice for treating Hypertension and reducing risks of its complications.
Drugs taken to treat Obesity often cause adverse side effects that require still more drugs to relieve them. By comparison, losing weight naturally by lifestyle modification rids you of the need for all obesity drugs with huge savings in cost and a huge increase in health and well-being. By losing weight naturally, a typical monthly bill of $300 for obesity drugs can drop to $30 and then to zero.
But the most worrisome problem is drugs designed to allow people to avoid exercise and eating healthy food so that they can go on living the same health-wrecking lifestyle that caused their illness in the first place.
Statins: Are They Really Necessary?
For a classic example, consider the cholesterol-lowering Statin drugs, the most popular and most frequently-prescribed class of drug in the U.S. Partly due to pressure by drug companies on doctors to prescribe Statin drugs as a quick fix, these cholesterol-lowering drugs are frequently overprescribed and often used aggressively.
For the average person, Statins are a powerful drug that can lower cholesterol and associated heart disease risk by up to 33 per cent. But are they really necessary when, for most people, a change of diet and lifestyle could be just as effective?
For proof, a study by researchers at the University of Toronto, published in an August 2003 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, concluded that a plant-based diet that included foods high in fiber such as leafy green vegetables, nuts, soy protein, olive oil, peanut butter and whole grains, reduced cholesterol levels by 29 per cent versus just 31 per cent with a low-fat diet plus Statin drugs .
"Who needs Statin drugs when we've got the grocery store?" proclaimed Time Magazine in its August 4, 2003 issue. The University of Toronto study used only diet. When exercise is added, as in the Live To Be 90 Lifestyle Plan or the Adventist Lifestyle endorsed in these pages, the resulting diet-exercise combination is almost certainly better at lowering cholesterol than any Statin drug--and far less expensive!.
Tens of millions of Americans are on Statin drugs or on medications for Hypertension, Diabetes and Heart Disease. But the pills often fail to lower risks to ideal levels. And while they may ameliorate symptoms, they seldom cure the underlying problem.
The glaring truth is that the cause of almost all these age-related diseases is the over-mechanized, over-medicated, exercise-robbing, junk food society in which most Americans are trapped. In many cases, these diseases could be prevented, slowed or even reversed by replacing our health-harming habits with daily exercise and a healthy diet.
But in some people--for one reason or another--risks from Hypertension, high-cholesterol or Insulin-related diseases may still outweigh the drawbacks of taking medication. . .while others may have levels too high to control through lifestyle modification. So check with your doctor--preferably a sports medicine physician--to be sure you are fit enough to switch to a healthier lifestyle.
Anti-Aging Pills That Aren't
Around the world, research labs are working feverishly to unravel the secrets of aging and to discover how to manipulate genes and hormones into a pill that may, one day, extend life.
But don't hold your breath!
Some substances may extend the life of bacteria or fruit flies or even mice. But humans are much larger mammals with complicated multiple levels of metabolism. And even if significant discoveries are made, it takes years or decades to transform them into a safe and affordable pill for the public to use. Such a pill might also be unpleasant to take or have serious adverse side effects or be too expensive or require one or more injections.
Aging is so complex, and works on so many mind-body levels, that it is actually naive to expect a genuine anti-aging pill to appear anytime soon.
But if you lack the genes for longevity, there's still a proven way to add 7-10 healthy, active years to your life expectancy (as based on average U.S. tables). . .all without adverse side effects and absolutely free. That is by adopting and staying with the Live To Be 90 Lifestyle Plan or the Adventist Lifestyle. A large, well conducted study in California has already demonstrated--without any question of doubt or debate--that men who follow one of these lifestyles can expect to outlive the typical California man by 9.5 years of active, healthy living free of most chronic diseases and with a sharp mind, youthful reflexes and a good memory.
This is the only safe, proven, tested way to significantly extend your personal life expectancy. And no drugs, hormones or anti-aging nostrums are needed.
False Claims: The Dark Side Of Aging
All this has led several health advisory agencies to regard any product claiming to halt or reverse the aging process with extreme skepticism and doubt. For instance, the Internet is full of ads making extravagent and spurious claims for male hormones, memory enhancers and various herbal tonics.
According to several leading university medical centers, none of these products has ever been found to retard aging and their claimed benefits fade away under careful scrutiny.
Health authorities advise men to be extremely cautious in taking hormones claimed to fight aging. One problem is that many men in their later years have a small cluster of inactive and dormant Prostate Cancer cells that are stable and extremely slow to grow. Most of these men die with Prostate Cancer rather than from it, and most die from another unrelated cause.
But when a powerful hormone is injected or taken. it could jump-start these cells into forming an active cancerous tumor. Testosterone can theoretically revitalize some men by raising their level of male sex hormones. Yet most erectile difficulties in older men are caused by blocked arteries rather than a hormone deficiency. Still, tens of thousands of American men continue to take testosterone or human-growth-hormone because of unproven claims they renew energy, vigor and muscle. All too often, say many physicians, most of these benefits exist only in the imagination
No confirmed proof exists that these hormones can youthify the body or extend life expectancy. DHEA is another popular but unproven OTC anti-aging supplement, but it is also suspected of increasing risk of heart disease. And Melatonin, another OTC pill claimed to fight aging, is probably OK for short-term use as a sleep-inducer but its ability to modify jet lag is dubious, and adverse side effects may appear if it is taken long term.
A Cheap Youth Drug That Works
Far more effective as a "youth drug" than any of the popular anti-aging medications is plain, old-fashioned and dirt cheap aspirin. While it has not been demonstrated to extend life directly, its indirect effects in reducing inflammation cushions the harm caused by many diseases and it may, indeed, save you from dying prematurely.
For example, two recent studies cited in the NEJM (February, 2003) clearly showed that taking a half-sized 160 mgs tablet daily (or even 80 mgs) reduces the number and size of colon polyps. Polyps may be precursors of Colo-Rectal Cancer that becomes a life-threatening tumor. Larger doses of aspirin gave no better results than the smallest dose. One small, baby-sized 80 mgs or 160 mgs aspirin tablet is also frequently recommended to be taken daily to prevent other types of Cancer and Heart Disease.
Caution: even in very low doses, aspirin can cause a minor risk of internal bleeding or stomach ulcers or even hemorrhagic stroke. Actual risk is low with baby-sized doses. But check with your doctor to be sure. A recent French study reported that even with baby aspirin, stopping a daily dosage suddenly might increase risk of stroke. All of which goes to show that no drug is truly risk-free.
Check On A Drug's Safety Before You Take It
Emergencies excepted, before deciding to take any drug, we strongly advise you to look it up in the current edition of:
WORST PILLS, BEST PILLS, A Consumer's Guide To Avoiding Drug-Induced Death or Illness, authored by Public Citizens' Health Research Group and published by Pocket Books. It's available in most public libraries or can be purchased On-Line from www.worstpills.org. The On-Line edition costs less than buying the book and is available on your computer within minutes. The current edition reviews 181 pills it says you should not use and recommends 296 safer alternatives.
Before taking any drug, we should bear in mind that, according to the Public Citizen Health Group, 100,000 Americans die annually from adverse drug reactions, and every year another 1.5 million are so harmed by their medication that they require hospitalization. An additional 700,000 develop adverse drug reactions after being hospitalized for other reasons.
Such scary statistics are not surprising when you consider that, according to the CDC, more than 44% of the U.S. population is taking at least one long-term prescription drug--mainly to lower cholesterol, relieve depression, reduce inflammation, prevent pain or to keep diabetes in check. At least one drug is taken on a long-term basis by 25% of Americans under 18, by 35% of Americans aged 18-44, by 62% aged 45-64, and by 84% of people aged 65 or over.
Many older people take 3 or more different drugs and it's not unusual for people aged 70 and over to take as many as a dozen different medications. When you realise that, on average, each prescription drug costs around $100 a month, our astronomical medical bills are not surprising.
As Worst Pills, Best Pillspoints out in its newest edition:" For many people in the U.S., the price of prescription drugs is unaffordable. Many drugs cost $500, $1,000, $2,000 or more per drug and many people are taking more than one. Although the majority of these drugs have not yet come off patent and generic equivalents are therefore not available, the lack of the kind of price controls that exist in all other developed countries (and in the U. S. Department of Defense and the Veteran's Administration ) presents an undue financial burden for too many people.
Five Ways to Save Money On Prescription Drugs
Worst Pills, Best Pills (WPBP) offers the following five ways you can save money on the high cost of prescription drugs.
#1: If appropriate for your condition, ask your doctor to try a non-drug treatment first.
#2: Avoid drugs classified in WPBP as DO NOT USE drugs.
#3: Avoid drugs classified in WPBP as DO NOT USE UNTIL SEVEN YEARS AFTER RELEASE, waiting at least seven years to take any new drug unless it is one of the rare BREAKTHROUGH drugs.
#4: When you can, buy generic drugs.
#5: Use caution when purchasing drugs on the Internet and importing drugs from Canada.
Below, Public Citizen's Health Research Group reviews, in its November 2005 Health Letter, the first 3 categories listed above. More have been reviewed since.
Category #1: Nondrug Treatments
For many conditions, such as mild-to-moderate high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type-2 diabetes, obesity and insomnia, changes in lifestyle are just as effective , safer, and less expensive than prescription drugs for many people. In fact, in many instances, non-drug interventions are recommended as the first line treatment for these conditions before drugs are tried.
It may be easier to take pills but pills may not be the safest or best management for your condition, and they are certainly more expensive than nondrug treatments.
Category #2: Avoid DO NOT USE drugs
Avoiding drugs listed in WPBP as DO NOT USE can both save you money and help you to avoid needless drug-induced injury or death. Most of the DO NOT USE drugs are listed as such because they are more dangerous than a safer alternative. Safer alternatives are listed in WPBP along with all DO NOT USE drugs and many of the alternative drugs are available in a less expensive, generic form. Thus, avoiding such drugs combines reducing risks and, in a large number of cases, of saving money as well.
A smaller subset of DO NOT USE drugs are listed as such because--taking advantage of weaknesses in the drug patent laws--they are shameless copies of other drugs already on the market and usually available in a generic form.
How is such a sleight of hand possible? "Smoke and mirrors" describes the technique. The smoke consists of phony "breakthrough" advertising and the mirrors are represented by a gimmick involving isomers.
An isomer is a molecule containing identical atoms to another molecule but arranged as a mirror image. So it is with many pharmaceuticals. Many exist as equal parts of a chemically-identical compound that are mirror images of each other. All of the atoms in the drug molecule are the same only their spatial orientation is different. Separating these mirror images and selling only a single mirror image as a "new" drug is a successful business scheme, not a strategy to improve public health. This may be likened to selling one glove and claiming it is as good or better than two.
This low class "research" activity by the pharmaceutical industry is almost always done because the patent on the first drug is about to expire and the company wants the "new" drug to compete with lower-priced generic versions of the original drug.
For example, WPBP lists several pairs of drugs, one of each pair having been apporoved in the U.S. since the mid 1990s. The older of the pair is the original mix of mirror images while the new drug is only one of the mirror images. In each case, the single mirror image has never been shown to be therapeutically superior to the original mixture of mirror images.
According to Public Citizen's Health Research Group:-
The new "purple pill" esomeprazole (Nexium) is really only one of the two mirror images that make up the old "purple pill" omeprazole (Prilosec).
The new Escitalopram (Lexapro) is one half of the mixture that constitutes Citalopram (Celexa), antidepressants now on the U.S. market. Several similar drugs are also involved in the mirror-image marketing rage while Escitalopram has also been listed by WPBP as a DO NOT USE drug because, for practical purposes, it is the same drug as Citalopram and has no therapeutic or safety advantages over Citalopram or similar antidepressants.
Dexmethylphenidate (FOCALIN) approved by the FDA November 2001 for attention-deficit hyperactivity is simply one-half of the chemically-identical mixture of mirror images that make up the 40-year old drug methylphenidate (Ritalin).
In addition to the "smoke and mirrors" scheme, another patent-ending avoidance scam involves metabolites. For example, when you swallow loratadine (Claritin) your body metabolizes it to desloratadine, which is actually the active form of the drug. As Schering-Plough started feeling the despair of the end of the patent on their big-selling, heavily advertised drug Claritin, the business heads there arranged for the testing and ultimate approval of the main metabolite desloratidine and came up with the sound-alike name of Clarinex.
Not surprisingly, there is no evidence that Clarinex is any better than Claritin because Clarinex is exactly the same substance as what your body turns Claritin into when you swallow it.
A former drug company executive who also was a physician, noted while testifying before the U.S. Senate, that the pharmaceutical industry is "unique" in that it can make exploitation appear as a noble purpose. The testimony was given 40 years ago and is as true today as it was then. Capitalizing on their decades-old charade of nobility, the pharmaceutical industry is increasingly selling "new" patented drugs that are identical to the old drugs they replace. Remarkably, physicians prescribe them and patients pay exorbitant prices , both groups somehow believing while being exploited, that an old drug with a new name is a therapeutic breakthrough.
Category #3: Avoid DO NOT USE UNTIL SEVEN YEARS AFTER RELEASE Drugs which implies waiting at least 7 years to take any new drug unless it is one of the rare "Breakthrough" drugs.
In addition to abusing the drug patent laws by gaining patents on the optimal isomers or metabolites of other drugs as just described, the drug industry is also quite prone to modifying just a few atoms in a complicated molecule and getting a patent on a so-called "Me Too" drug.
The alternatives (the molecules from which they made the modification) to many of these new drugs are increasingly generically available and will therefore be less expensive. In addition, the decision not to use these drugs will also have a safety benefit in many instances.
For many years, WPBP has warned patients not to use newly approved drugs unless they are one of the decided minority of new drugs with evidence that they are a breakthrough beyond existing treatments. A study involving Dr. Sidney Wolfe (Director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group) as one of the authors provides clear evidence why this caution of waiting seven years is well-founded. A total of 548 new chemical entities were approved in 1975-1999. By 1999, 45 drugs (8.2%) had acquired one or more black box warnings and 16 (2.9%) were withdrawn from the market.
The estimated probability of acquiring a new black box warning or being withdrawn from the market over a period of 25 years was 20%. Half of those black box warnings changes occurred within seven years of drug introduction; half of the withdrawals occurred within two years. The report concluded that serious adverse drug reactions commonly emerge after FDA approval. The safety of new agents cannot be known with certainty until a drug has been on the market for many years.
Public Citizen's Health Research Group strongly advises that you wait at least seven years from the date of release to take any new drug unless it is one of those rare "breakthrough" drugs that offers you a documented advantage over older proven drugs. New drugs are tested on a relatively small number of people before being released and serious adverse side effects or life-threatening drug interactions may not be detected until the new drug has been taken by hundreds of thousands of people. A number of new drugs have been withdrawn within their first seven years after release. Also, warnings about serious new adverse reactions have been added to the labeling of a number of drugs, or new drug interactions have been detected, usually within the first seven years after a drug's release.
36 Other Countries Have Better Health Care Systems Than the U.S.
Despite spending far more per capita on health care than other modern nations, WHO recently ranked the U. S. Health Care System as the 37th best in the world, behind Colombia (#22) and Saudi Arabia (#26) and trailing nearly every other modern western nation. That's largely because one in every six Americans is deprived of health insurance which is universal in almost every other modern country. As a result, it was pointed out that a young man in Bangladesh can expect to live longer than his African-American counterpart in Harlem while a wealthy woman living in an affluent neighborhood of Washington D.C., has a life expectancy 40 years longer than a man living in a poor neighborhood just ten blocks away.
Even if you have health insurance, the treatment you are given by your doctor may not be in your own best interests but, instead, to protect the doctor against a possible malpractice suit. To protect themselves from malpractice suits, most doctors follow a locally-recognized protocol for each disease. Thus in some states, twice as many patients are given by-pass operations for the same heart disease condition as in other states.
When physicians practice this type of Defensive Medicine, it leads to over-prescribing of drugs and over-treatment, ordering unnecessary and inappropriate tests, and even carrying out unnecessary surgery to avoid being sued. The explanation? The Courts frequently look more favorably on physicians who cause more medical interventions than on one who has taken a more reasoned approach to patient care.
This epidemic of litigation has caused many general practitioners and specialists--especially in obstetrics and neuro-surgery--to cease private practice because of fear of a malpractice suit (for which the insurance premium often exceeds $100,000 annually).
Even if you have health insurance, it doesn't guarantee your medical bills will all be met, especially if your policy is for a high-deductible, private catastrophic plan which are so popular nowadays with employers. A recent Harvard study found that nearly half of the approximately 4,000,000 bankruptcies in the U.S. each year were caused by serious illnesses that led to job loss and, with it, loss of health insurance.
Surprisingly, most people claiming medical bankruptcy were middle income Americans with high-deductible catastrophic health insurance policies issued by well-known private insurance companies. Despite being insured, a high deductible plus co-payments and bills for uncovered services bring financial disaster to almost 2,000,000 Americans each year. As one of the study researchers put it," Our study is frightening. Unless you're Bill Gates, you could be just one serious illness away from financial ruin.".
Actually, so many Americans are already turning away from conventional treatment by drugs, surgery or radiation that it has caused a significant decline in demand for these medical therapies, particularly those for high cholesterol, hypertension, Type II diabetes and prostate cancer. So much so that many physicians, surgeons and radiologists in these fields are feeling the economic pinch. Some of these health professionals also serve as advisors to regulating bodies like the FDA and NHI and some are reported to have suggested lowering the cut-off point at which each of these diseases is deemed to exist.
These below-the-belt blows--manipulating levels to create a new "disease" where there was no disease before (how about pre-diabetes or pre-hypertension?)--are an effective way to rake in millions more patients and to sell still more drugs and expensive surgery or radiation treatments.
We could continue on and on, revealing a health care system riddled at every level by a vast complex of corruption and bribery. Despite claims that the high cost of U.S. drugs is due to research expenses, the big U.S. drug manufacturers consistently spend twice as much on marketing and sales as on research. Many of the truly innovative drugs are developed in Europe while American firms focus on "Me Too" and "Lifestyle" drugs which, all too often, are merely slight modifications of already existing drugs--but at 12 times the price.
And if you wonder why your government forbids Medicare from regulating America's skyrocketting drug prices, or from negotiating for cheaper drugs from Canada and other countries, it's because Big Pharma has enormous influence in Congress and the administration through contributing heavily to political campaigns.
We could go on and on to describe the duplicity and dishonesty at every level of our broken health care system. . .a system based on mass profit and greed rather than on improving your personal health. So instead, let's end with the following piece of medical wisdom.
Except in emergencies, take a drug only if you must, then always endeavour to take the smallest effective dose for the shortest possible period of time.
Meanwhile, read the two short letters below . Then click on the following links to thought-provoking reports about why millions of Americans are taking expensive prescription drugs simply to allow them to continue living a lifestyle of gluttony and sloth.
Overlooked Ways To Curb High Prescription Drug Costs
The following two readers' letters from the December 2003 AARP Bulletin, are in response to an article in the October issue concerning high drug costs.
While many of the people you cite in your October article about drug costs are in dire straits, it is interesting to note that no one mentioned losing weight, getting more exercise or stopping smoking as a way to combat high drug costs. Many of these drugs are for high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, all conditions that can be improved by these "free" measures. If we took more responsibility for our own health, we wouldn't be so dependent on government = Katherine D., Wheaton Ill.
Out of the top 10 drugs that Americans take, most can very easily be avoided by making healthy lifestyle changes. For example, the cholesterol-lowering drugs, the statins. Studies show that by eliminating animal foods in the diet, total serum cholesterol levels drop just as effectively as taking statins but with NO side effects. = Ruth H., Honolulu, Hawaii.
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Why is Life Expectancy Falling
in the United States?
From Dr. Mercola's Website, May
15, 2008
Life expectancy has declined for many U.S. women, according to a joint study by the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Washington.
Nearly one in five women had decline of life expectancy hold steady, starting in the 1980s.
About half of the 2,000 county units studied were poor, rural areas, and the decline was blamed on chronic diseases related to smoking, overweight and obesity, and high blood pressure.
Those worst affected by the downturn live in the south, the Appalachians, southern parts of the Midwest and areas of Texas.
“The fact that this is happening to a large number of Americans should
be a sign that the US health system needs serious rethinking," said the
study's co-author Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health
Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Sources:
Yahoo News April 22, 2008
PloS Medicine April 22, 2008; 5(4):e66 (Free Full Text Article)
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
Considering the fact that life expectancy in the United States as a whole has actually risen by more than six years for women, and seven years for men in the same period of time (from 1961 to 1999), this study highlights the problem of poverty combined with unhealthy lifestyles, lack of preventive care and the exorbitant cost for mediocre health care.
An Unsustainable “Health” Paradigm
"There is now evidence that there are large parts of the population in the United States whose health has been getting worse for about two decades," said Majid Ezzati, lead author of the study. Well, let’s take a look at some of the financial reasons for this discrepancy.
According to the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) -- which tracks health care spending -- the U.S. national health expenditure (NHE) grew 6.7 percent in 2006 to $2.1 trillion ($7,026 per person), and accounted for a whopping 16 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Private spending, i.e. people paying out of pocket, accounted for 54 percent of the total NHE, or $1.1 trillion. Prescription drug spending increased by 5.8 percent that same year.
If we look back, based on SMS’ historical data, the national health expenditure in 1980 was $253.4 billion, or $1,100 per person, accounting for 9.1 percent of the GDP at the time.
And, looking at the historical picture in its entirety, U.S. health care costs have leapfrogged: DOUBLING about every seven years ever since 1960.
The study’s findings suggest that beginning in the early 1980s and continuing through 1999 those who were already disadvantaged did not benefit from any of the life expectancy gains experienced by those who were better off financially. The authors state that their results are troubling because the stated aim of the US health system is to improve the health of “all people, and especially those at greater risk of health disparities.”
So, on the one hand, Americans have been spending more and more money on health care over the past decades, yet the life expectancy of certain groups is going down. Clearly, the system is not designed to care for anyone except those who can afford to pay an arm and a leg for what little it does offer (because as I’ll show you later, wealthy Americans are still worse off than many in less affluent countries).
The researchers explain the decline in life expectancy in these worst-off areas as being primarily caused by a rise in a number of diseases, such as lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and diabetes.
Need I mention the sadly ironic fact that these are also some of the diseases that are completely preventable?
Diabetes, for example, is both preventable and treatable through simple, inexpensive lifestyle changes. But no, instead these people are led to believe they need drugs – which they can’t afford – and so nothing is done and they die prematurely.
What Does Health Care Spending Have to do With Longevity?
Amazingly, other countries manage to achieve longer life expectancies than the United States while paying a mere fraction of the U.S. healthcare cost per capita.
U.S. life expectancy is just under 78 years – one of the lowest life expectancies among developed nations. Lower than Cuba’s, and just marginally higher than the super power of Slovenia, according to figures from the United Nations.
So what impact does the U.S. health care spending have on Americans' life expectancy?
Apparently, not much!
And, quite frankly, it is this way by design, not by some bizarre fluke or mere stupidity.
High Time to Identify the Driving Force Behind U.S. Abysmal Health Statistics
Please understand that the drug companies are THE primary force behind the terrible health statistics of the U.S. This is not an accident at all, or some terrible oversight. This is by design.
If you haven’t been reading this newsletter that statement may come as a surprise, but from my perspective this is the unfortunate truth.
They have been able to control the U.S. Congress and manipulate it to pass just about any and every law they want. Once you understand how they control the government, you realize how they are diverting hundreds of billions of dollars for their hyperinflated drug prices. This goes into their own coffers; for their own good -- NOT for the good of the public. Not for the good of those in need.
It is this diversion of funding that is the primary reason why American health is so poor. If these funds were spent wisely and not stolen, there is no doubt in my mind the United States would lead the world in health stats.
This year the US will spend $2.5 trillion dollars on health care, but by 2017, health care spending is projected to exceed $4 TRILLION. This is largely due to the costs of drugs and surgery and a reliance on a medical system that treats only symptoms and never the cause of disease.
How To Survive in a Diseased Health Paradigm
So what can you do?
Simple.
Take Control of Your Health. You don't have to stand for this nonsense anymore, ever. Learn what you need to stop being deceived by drug company lies and deceptions. Tell your family, friends and neighbors, and be a beacon of light.
I am confident that with tools like the Internet, the days are numbered for the drug companies, and collectively we will defeat them. It is a massive David vs. Goliath battle, but there is no doubt in my mind that the victory will be ours.
There are a number of basic strategies you can use to avoid getting sucked into the current disease-care paradigm. Following these guidelines will be a powerful way to avoid premature aging, and improve your health in your old age so you can far exceed the U.S. national average life expectancy.
Eat a healthy diet that’s right for your nutritional type (paying
very careful attention to keeping your insulin levels down)
Drink plenty of clean water
Manage your stress
Exercise
Sunlight
Limit toxin exposure
Consume healthy fat
Eat plenty of raw food
Optimize insulin and leptin levels
Get plenty of sleep
Maintain a Healthy Weight - If you are having problems with sticking
to your diet then use the hypnosis program I recommend.
Related Articles on www.mercola.com/:
Rising Obesity Rates Annihilate Previous Life Span Forecasts
Long Life: How to Beat Nature At Its Own Game
America Spends More For Mediocre Health Care Than All Other
Nations
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By Andre Damon , 3 December 2005
A Penetrating Analysis of Medicare's New Prescription Drug Plan Reveals That Its Real Goal Is To Develop Windfall Profits for Big Pharma and Private Health Insurers and To Eventually Destroy Medicare Altogether
Registration for Medicare's new prescription drug plan opened November 15, provoking widespread anger and confusion among its potential beneficiaries. The drug benefit, also known as Medicare Part D, is a government-subsidized, privatized insurance program that covers a portion of prescription drug costs.
Under the new program’s guidelines, eligible citizens must choose between dozens of private insurance plans, each offering access to a specific list of drugs and pharmacies, and each with its own distinctive premiums, deductibles, and co-pay rates. But first, beneficiaries must decide whether to participate in the plan at all.
In many cases, Medicare recipients could end up paying more for insurance coverage than they stand to benefit, but this option must be balanced against the fact that the price of coverage goes up permanently by one percent for each month that a recipient waits before joining the program after the official deadline of May 15, 2006. Thus, many elderly people are forced to decide whether they should purchase coverage that they don’t need now, or risk paying more in the future for the same plan if their health declines.
Further complexity is added by the “donut hole” in the plan’s benefits gradient. According to the model insurance plan proposed by the government, after paying a deductible and premiums, recipients must pay for 25 percent of their prescription drug expenses up to $2,550. Between $2,550 and $5,100—the donut hole—co-payments jump to 100 percent of expenses, before returning to 5 percent for expenses exceeding $5,100. According to the bill, insurers must offer a plan along these lines or one that is “actuarially equivalent.” The explicit purpose of this provision is to force beneficiaries to still pay a substantial portion of their drug costs.
The plan’s complexity is especially problematic for Medicare beneficiaries, a large percentage of whom have cognitive, hearing, and/or visual difficulties. Needless to say, Medicare recipients are finding themselves overwhelmed and frustrated by the absurd complexity of the benefit plans. Many are unable to effectively select between plans that will determine what kind of drugs they can take, which pharmacies they can go to, and how much of their limited income they must pay on premiums and deductibles.
The frustration that the plan has created for many of its potential beneficiaries is a reflection of the actual interests that the new bill was crafted to serve. The legislation was written largely by and for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, which stand to gain billions of dollars.
In the short term, it is estimated that the program would cut the average senior’s drug costs by only 25 percent. However, even these limited gains would be rapidly erased by rising costs. According to the AARP, drug prices rose 7 to 8 percent in 2004, three times faster than the general rate of inflation. The very structure of the program, including a prohibition against Medicare negotiating lower drug prices, is designed to prevent any curbs on cost inflation.
Moreover, some three-quarters of the 6.4 million beneficiaries who now qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid stand to pay more under the new plan, as it eliminates Medicaid coverage for premiums that must be paid under Medicare.
In addition to a direct handout to sections of corporate America, the new drug benefit is part of a longer-term strategy to privatize the Medicare program.
Medicare is a federal entitlement program that provides health insurance for over 40 million elderly and disabled Americans. The program was created in the 1960s as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” reforms, which also included Medicaid and a variety of other social programs. At the time, many had hoped the program would grow to eventually form a universal healthcare system.
The Medicare program enjoys overwhelmingly support from the vast majority of Americans. However, a major shortcoming of the program has always been the absence of prescription drug coverage. Due to the high rate of drug price inflation prevalent in the United States since the 1980s, there has been popular pressure for a Medicare prescription plan to ease the financial burden on the elderly and disabled.
The Bush administration and its congressional allies are now exploiting this weakness in the program—the lack of prescription drug coverage—in order to promote their right-wing social agenda. Medicare Part D was created under the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MPDIMA). The US House of Representatives approved the measure by the narrowest possible margin in November 2003, amid allegations that the House Republican leadership participated in outright bribery and intimidation to secure its passage.
The cost of the plan over ten years, which was originally estimated at under $380 billion, has ballooned to $724 billion. The pharmaceutical companies have the most to gain from the bill. These corporations generate huge profits, while expending most of their resources on marketing and lobbying instead of researching innovative new drugs. In 2002, the ten pharmaceutical companies on the Fortune 500 list made more profit than the other 490 corporations combined ($39.5 vs. $33.7 Billion).
However, these profits do not reflect an underlying health within the industry as a whole, as the recent mass layoffs announced by drug giant Merck demonstrate. American pharmaceutical companies are in the midst of a crisis inherent to their method of doing business. Their primary focus is to patent and market “blockbuster” drugs, which become unprofitable once their patents run out. A cluster of such patents began expiring in 2001, a trend that continues through next year, when patents for blockbuster drugs from Pfizer, Merck, and Bristol-Myers Squibb are set to expire.
Nevertheless, the pharmaceutical industry has leveraged its profits to achieve enormous influence in Congress, and the industry also has close ties to the Bush administration. According to the consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen, “Drugmakers and HMOs hired 952 individual [federal] lobbyists in 2003—nearly half of whom had ‘revolving door’ connections to Congress, the White House or the executive branch. That’s nearly 10 lobbyists for every US senator.” With the new Medicare reforms, the millions that big pharmaceuticals have spent in lobbying will be paid back in spades.
In addition to assuring the big pharmaceuticals a profit windfall, the MPDIMA also banned Medicare from either negotiating lower drug prices from these companies or re-importing drugs from Canada, where prescription drugs are on average 50 percent less expensive due to price controls. Instead of regulating the pharmaceutical corporations’ economically destructive price-gouging, the Republican right is directly supporting the inflationary trend in drug prices via the obstruction of trade, an action that flies in the face of all rhetoric about the importance of “free markets.” For the political forces that pushed for Medicare Plan D, veneration of the free market is secondary to the drive to secure profits for their corporate sponsors.
Big profits for private insurance corporations
Next to pharmaceutical corporations, the insurance industry will take home the biggest slice of the $724 billion pie. Medicare part D subsidizes dozens of private insurance companies to offer competing plans for prescription drug coverage. These corporations can count on even greater profits in the coming years, as other sections of Medicare become privatized.
Private insurance is inherently inefficient. According to Public Citizen, “The Medicare program [prior to the new drug plan] spends a mere 2 percent on administrative costs, according to the Medicare Board of Trustees. By contrast, according to the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), HMOs [Health Maintenance Organizations, which are privately-run health service providers and insurers] on average spend 15 percent of their revenue on administrative costs rather than on health care. Some HMOs spend as much as 32 percent of their revenue on administration.”
While part of this 13 to 30 percent disparity is lost to the inefficiencies of competition (marketing, administration, etc), the remainder goes directly into the coffers of the stockholders and executives.
In addition, the managed care organizations (MCOs) that handle privatized Medicare decrease the efficiency of the entire medical economy by creating profit-driven restrictions as to which procedures, doctors, pharmacies, and drugs are covered. Managed care organizations (including HMOs) have final say over what procedures and medicines will be paid for, essentially superseding the decisions of doctors in judging the types of treatment patients require. Owing to their existence as profit-making entities, MCOs are innately stingy, paying for quick (often pharmaceutical) fixes at the expense of patients’ overall health.
Pharmaceutical and insurance provider interests dovetail neatly with the plans of the most right-wing sections of the ruling elite to scrap Medicare altogether as an entitlement program. In 1995, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich bluntly stated the Republican right’s agenda for traditional Medicare: “Now, we don’t get rid of it in round one because we don’t think that’s politically smart and we don’t think that’s the right way to go through a transition. But we believe it is going to wither on the vine because we think people are voluntarily going to leave it—voluntarily.”
For politicians who support Medicare privatization, the problem with Gingrich’s proposal is getting people to voluntarily leave Medicare. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 introduced the option of leaving Medicare for private managed care plans. Less than 10 percent of the Medicare population elected to exercise this option, known first as Medicare + Choice and now called Medicare Advantage. Even this percentage is rapidly shrinking. Medicare part D strengthens the thrust toward privatization by economically obligating seniors who don’t have separate insurance to join private plans if they wish to have any protection at all from escalating drug costs.
One provision of the 2003 bill prohibits an increase in corporate or income taxes to fund future Medicare costs beyond a certain threshold. This means that, with the inevitable escalation of drug prices, either payroll taxes or premiums will be increased, or there will be cuts in other Medicare services. The future costs associated with the new drug plan will be used to justify scaling back the Medicare entitlement program as a whole.
Among those who favor the “reform” of Medicare, there are divisions over how this should be done. There is opposition to the prescription plan from those who see it as a distraction from the drive to privatize the whole system as quickly as possible.
A November 26 editorial in the Wall Street Journal highlighted the nature of these divisions. After noting the large number of insurance plans that have been offered by private companies to cover the drug benefit, the newspaper stated that “our more optimistic friends say this all shows that competition can work in Medicare and that the drug benefit will pave the way for systemic reform down the road,” that is, that it will eventually lead to the destruction of Medicare as it exists today. However the editors expressed their doubts: “No matter how efficiently the private sector runs the drug benefit, it is still going to be a hugely expensive new taxpayer liability. And we suspect more direct price controls will be a first, not a last, political resort.”
Instead of the drug benefit, the Journal pointed to Medicare Advantage, which it called the “model for overall reform” of Medicare. Rather than create a new benefit, no matter how limited, the Journal advocates new measures to push people off Medicare altogether.
The next step in the privatization agenda is the introduction of health insurance vouchers in six major metropolitan areas in 2010. In these areas, eligible citizens will be given a dollar amount to purchase medical insurance, and will have the choice of paying for either Medicare or private plans. Even though private managed care organizations are far less efficient than Medicare, insurance providers will inevitably cherry-pick the healthiest and least costly customers, much as they have in the Medicare Advantage program, where Medicare is left with twice the percentage of members with cognitive and physical disabilities in comparison to private plans.
The Bush administration is also pushing for the reduction of doctors’ Medicare fees by 4.4 percent next year, even as medical costs are set to rise by 1.5 percent. As a direct result of this fee reduction, many doctors may deem it unprofitable to provide services to Medicare patients in the future.
Meanwhile, the other major medical entitlement program, Medicaid, is also on the chopping block. Most states across the country have enacted sharp cuts in eligibility and services, while the federal government is moving to cut billions from its spending obligations. In Florida, Governor Jeb Bush has gained federal approval for a Medicaid plan that resembles the new Medicare drug plan, substituting government-guaranteed services with subsidized private insurance schemes. This plan is being hailed as a model for other states to follow.
While the Republican Party has been leading the campaign to gut entitlement programs, including in the still on-going budget negotiation process in Congress, the attack on these programs is a decidedly bipartisan affair. The 1997 Balanced Budget Act was passed under the Clinton administration with significant bipartisan support, as was the 1996 welfare “reform” measure. At the state level, Democratic Party governors have participated just as much as Republicans in cutting Medicaid services. No section of the political establishment has offered any proposals that seriously address the immense social and medical needs of modern society.
The fact that the wealthiest nation in the world can find no reasonable way to provide for the basic health of its population is a scathing indictment of the obsolete and irrational nature of the capitalist system as a whole. . .
. . .and an increasingly powerful reason to adopt our Live to Be 90 Lifestyle Plan without delay (NDF) .
Downloaded from the WS Website under the Fair Use Provision of the US Copyright Act.
Click On These Important Links
Beyond Dollars:The Real Cost of the U.S. Health Care System. Learn how organized medicine will eventually bankrupt America at every level.
Dr. Mercola's Website (www.mercola.com) is packed with authentic reports about drug adverse side effects, the pitfalls of modern medical care, and the deceptive tests and corrupt marketing of medications and even some supplements. On this site, Dr. Mercola posts a twice-weekly newsletter with the latest updates and you can have it sent to you by email.
Dr. Mercola maintains a huge backlog of reports you can access of which those listed below are particularly recommended (but new and more up-to-date ones are posted in every Newsletter). TIP: be sure to click on the links at the end of each report for even more helpful information.
To access these archives, go to Dr. Mercola's Home Page (www.mercola.com) , locate the SEARCH field box at top right of page, and type into it any one of the following reports exactly as printed below. Then click on the SEARCH button and Google's Search Engine will take you there. (TIP: you may also type in your own queries, for example type in the word "Cholesterol" or "Arthritis" or "Insulin".)
Recommended Mercola Reports
Medicalisation: Disease Mongering (look in Mercola Archives for Dec 17 2005 Newsletter 730)
Drug Spending Out of Control (look in Mercola Archives for April 13 2006 Newsletter 780)
Secrets of the FDA revealed by Top Inside Doctor
The Broken Promise of American Medicine
Modern Health Care System is Leading Cause of Death
U.S. Health Care System No Longer World's Best
Death By Medicine
The Doors of Perception: Why Americans Will Believe Almost Anything
New Brand of Medical Consumerism
How Big Pharma Distorts Medical Research
New Cholesterol Guidelines--Even More Money for Drug Companies
Ever Buy Drugs From a Drugstore? Beware of New Stealth Marketing
A Non-Profit Drug Company: Fact, Not Fantasy
Spin and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Proudly Protecting Profits by Scaring You
Is Your Doctor Moonlighting--As a Drug Rep
More Evidence of Doctors Over Prescribing Drugs
Drug Company Empire Ready to Fall
After Vioxx Recall, Other Drugs Under the Microscope
Finally--FDA Admits That ALL Anti-Inflammatories May Kill You
Drug Giant Admits Another Arthritis Painkiller Increases Heart Attack Risk
The Dangers of Statin Drugs
Dangers of Prednisone and How to Avoid Steroids
Alzheimer's Drugs Don't Work
FDA is "Virtually Incapable of Protecting You From Unsafe Drugs"
Can You Really Trust the FDA to Protect You From Harm
Think Prescription Drugs Are Safe and More Scientifically Proven Than Supplements? Think Again
---And Many Others Have Been Posted Since!
Other Non-Mercola Links
British Medical Journal (www.commondreams.org/views04/0114-05.htm) The public is being regularly deceived by tests and studies, funded by pharmaceutical companies to generate the results they need.
Center for Medical Consumers (www.medicalconsumers.org ). Frequent reports on the harmful effects of various drugs and medical treatments.
Dr. Rath: Business With Disease (www.dr-rath-foundation.org ). Website of a major medical consumer activist.
Medical Breakthroughs (www.ivanhoe.com) Daily reports keep you right up-to-date on the latest breakthroughs regarding drug adverse side effects and safety; the success or failure of medical treatments; plus reviews of alternative therapies.
CAUTION: Though these reports are based on documented studies in professional journals or on advisories from leading university medical schools and research institutes, they are intended for information only and should not be regarded as medical advice or instruction. For diagnosis and treatment of specific symptoms and diseases, disorders or dysfunctions, consult your physician. If you smoke or are over 35 or have symptoms of--or are at risk for--any chronic or degenerative disease, you should check with your doctor before beginning to exercise or making any changes in lifestyle or diet. However, fitness organizations like the American College of Sports Medicine invariably believe that the risk of NOT exercising far exceeds any risk in beginning a gradually increasing program of daily exercise. Thus if you experience any pain or problem while exercising, or making any other lifestyle change, stop and see your doctor at once.