Bob Livingston Alerts: Do Pharmaceuticals Work? By Mrs Vera West

My apologies but I haven’t the internet link for this one, getting these informative newsletters on health issues by Bob Livingston by email. But the latest one is tremendous. He notes that in the past safety concerns were often raised about drugs, and in some cases, these proved correct, and the drug was removed from the market. That is not occurring today, as the mRNA vaxxes show, where even on conventional estimates, more people have died from thee vaccines, than from other vaccines over the same time period. The reason, in general, for the failure to pull drugs, is not because standards have improved so much, but rather, clinical test trials are not being conducted due to expense. As well, Big Pharma is active in burying discussion of clinical trials that cast doubt on its brews. This results in wide-ranging publication bias, as in the case of the pharmaceutical companies that do the research, being private companies, they simply do not release negative results, as Pfizer wanted to do with its Covid mRNA vax trials.

This does not inspire confidence, to put it mildly.

“From 2012 through 2021, the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research approved 430 new medicines, up 73 percent from the preceding decade and 25 percent more than the one before that. This is why you see advertisements for so many drugs... because there are so many and because they need to be marketed and sold.

One thing you don't see very much is a drug being removed from the market, as Davocet and Vioxx famously were over a decade ago. In the early 2000s over 20 drugs were removed from the market. It's alarming that so many made it to market (more on that in a minute) but at least many were exposed and banned.

Matthew Herper of statnews.com explains that there "was a period of several years when safety concerns were raised about one new medicine after another. The antidepressant Paxil was linked to suicidal thoughts in adolescents (this link is still controversial). The antibiotic Ketek saw its use plummet after it was linked to acute liver failure. Avandia, the best-selling diabetes pill of its time, saw sales crash after concerns were raised that it, too, might be linked to heart problems. Big sellers like Zelnorm, for irritable bowel syndrome, Bextra, for arthritis, and Meridia for weight loss were withdrawn from the market entirely. It seemed biology was teaching medicine a cruel lesson: trying to use a chemical to treat a disease always came with a cost of side effects."

"This period now seems like it happened in an alternate reality. Big drug safety controversies are now rare. But that's not because scientists have somehow figured out how to develop drugs that don't come with safety tradeoffs. It's because, in a way, we've stopped looking for them."

Why does it seem like that? Because clinical trials are exceedingly expensive, the people conducting the trials are not always qualified (or willing, or efficient), and the results are mixed at best, unrepeatable at worst, and also buried if they are not positive or if there are safety and efficacy concerns.

"It's getting harder and harder to do a randomized trial for some of these precision drugs," said Otis Brawley, a professor of oncology and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University. "There's a leap of faith that the drug actually works."

Unfortunately, it gets worse

Big Pharma has been very aggressive at trying to bury negative trials. And it uses its lobbying power to shut down public discussion on the subject.

Then it goes after critics like me and accuses me of cherry-picking studies that show the awful side effects of its drugs.

But there have been two separate scientific investigations of Big Pharma and its skill at hiding the effects of its drugs.

The first study estimated that half of all clinical trials on pharmaceuticals in development have never been published. That's just the investigators' best guess. The number may be much higher.

As I read further into the investigative report, I found something even worse: Studies with negative findings are twice as likely to get buried. That means no one ever hears about them... not your doctor, not the FDA and certainly not you.

Then the open-source journal PLOS One did its own investigation and found much the same thing. Hiding clinical trial results is common, even routine. Of the 600 trials with results posted at ClinicalTrials.gov, PLOS One found almost half (297) had no corresponding published article.

This is referred to as "publication bias," in which scientists conceal negative or inconclusive findings and publish or publicize only the positive ones.

The pharmaceutical companies that do the research are private corporations, not government agencies (and as the link above showed us, even those can be outsourced to yet another company). So they never have to reveal bad results.

Also, as we have written to you in the past, most scientists in general can't replicate the results of the studies done by their peers. Drug trial results are specifically and notoriously difficult to repeat successfully.

What's more, it's not just that doctors don't have information about the drugs they prescribe. A lot of what they know comes from the drug companies themselves. Very often, medical practitioners know only what a drug does because they've been told about it by a representative of the drug company pushing it.

Pharmaceuticals spend more than $57 billion a year marketing their drugs to doctors. That includes about $14 billion a year for what the industry calls "unmonitored promotion." Those are the posh parties and conferences passed off as continuing education where the drug companies tell your doctor how great their drugs are.

Meanwhile, as my colleague Dr. Al Sears pointed out in his Health Confidential, "How many drugs that were used 50 years ago are still around today? I bet you can't name more than one or two. We hardly use any of the drugs today that we used 50 years ago. Where have they gone? They've all been exposed for what they are. And were quietly withdrawn from the market."

The next time a doctor wants to write you a prescription, ask them these three questions before "listening to your doctor" and rushing off to your local pharmacy:

1. Are there any natural alternatives?
2. What are the most common side effects of this drug?
3. How long have you been recommending this drug or had your patients taking it?

Instead of only "listening to your doctor," as all the advertisements tell you to do, you have a responsibility to your body to ask your doctor to explain why any drug is a good choice. It's your body, and you have a right to refuse any prescription.

A Warning: The pharmaceutical corporations are not going down without a fight. They are stocking the aisles of Internet storefronts with drugs right next to natural supplements. "Now in non-prescription strength!" is the new battle cry of the pharmaceuticals. Be careful not to turn down a prescription and fall right back into Big Pharma's clutches there are so many natural remedies that do your body good and help control your symptoms — or in some cases alleviate them altogether — that are much better for your health."