Statin Drugs Are A Scam. You Need Cholesterol.

The Edgy Truth

The Big Pharma madness machine churns out roughly $29 billion a year. That’s an insane amount of money, and if there is anything we know about Big Pharma, they are driven by money, certainly not by our improving health.

Heart Disease is the number one killer in the United States, even surpassing cancer. Big Pharma produces a series of drugs called “statins” which target cholesterol by lowering it. The idea that is being pushed by Big Pharma is that higher cholesterol leads to heart disease. Almost 25% of people in the United States are on a statin regimen. So often times we are focused on the mass prescribing of antibiotics, SSRI’s, and weight loss concoctions that we forget about the insane market share statins possess.

The problem is two-fold: 1) Cholesterol is not the villain it is pitched to be. 2) Statins have health ramifications that often times aren’t discussed.

Read more...

30 Holistic Doctors Poisoned With Powerful Psychedelic at Health Conference

Free Thought Project

It was reported last week that holistic doctors meeting at a conference in northern Germany were poisoned and taken to the hospital. It was said that 30 different doctors, aged 25 to 55 were poisoned with a psychoactive drug at the conference. During the conference, people began staggering and complaining of cramps, while others had more severe reactions and strong hallucinations.

15 ambulances, a helicopter and some 160 rescue personnel were called to the scene to rush the doctors to the hospital.

Read more...

Former Merck Rep: Mandatory Vaccination Is For Profit, Not Public Health

UPDATE:  SOMEONE ATTEMPTING TO INTIMIDATE BRANDY VAUGHAN


Investment Watch
by Carol Adl

In this video a former Merck rep, who is also a concerned Mother, explains how mandatory vaccination is making big profits for big pharma at the expense of our children.


‘Brandy Vaughan is a former sales rep for Merck & Co. – a vaccine maker – and she details how vaccine companies are using vaccines as a vehicle for massive profit and not public health.
Brandy researched the safety of vaccines and found that not only do vaccines contain known toxins that can cause neurological damage, but that vaccine makers do not create the same safety studies for vaccines as they do for other drugs.

This lack of true safety research of vaccines combined with the known adverse reactions to vaccination has helped Brandy to decide to never vaccinate her own child.

Brandy says giving children a vaccine is like playing Russian roulette with our children and that mandatory vaccination is simply a way for vaccine makers to profit off of our children. Don’t be fooled: we do not need mandatory vaccination.’

Dr Peter Gøtzsche Exposes Big Pharma as Organized Crime

RINF

Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD is a Danish medical researcher, and leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has written numerous reviews within the Cochrane collaboration.

Dr.Gøtzsche has been critical of screening for breast cancer using mammography, arguing that it cannot be justified; His critique stems from a meta-analysis he did on mammography screening studies and published as Is screening for breast cancer with mammography justifiable? in The Lancet in 2000. In it he discarded 6 out of 8 studies arguing their randomization was inadequate.

In 2006 a paper by Gøtzsche on mammography screening was electronically published in the European Journal of Cancer ahead of print. The journal later removed the paper completely from the journal website without any formal retraction. The paper was later published in Danish Medical Bulletin with a short note from the editor, and Gøtzsche and his coauthors commented on the unilateral retraction that the authors were not involved in.

Measles, Back In The Days Before The Marketing Of The Vaccine

YouTube

Measles is not a serious illness.  Don't let Big Pharma fool you.

Trace Amounts - Official Trailer

YouTube



During the past two decades, the diagnosis of autism occurring in children has risen dramatically from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 68 and our scientific community is no closer to determining a cause. But one thing they automatically do is emphatically deny a possible link between autism cases and something found in our vaccines.

Top anti-GMO scientists band together in film exposing threats and secrecy

Minds
YouTube

"Árpád Pusztai and Ignacio Chapela have two things in common. They are distinguished scientists, and their careers lie in ruins. Both chose to investigate the phenomenon of genetic engineering. Both made important discoveries. Both are now suffering the fate of those who criticise the powerful vested interests that dominate big business and scientific research. Statements made by scientists themselves suggest that 95% of those researching in the area of genetic engineering are funded by industry. Only 5% are independent. This situation presents a major threat to the freedom of science – and to our democracy. Can we, the public, still trust our scientists?"

For more information about the film, please visit:
http://www.scientistsunderattack.com

Nearly 80% of supplements found to contain NONE of herbal supplement claimed on label.

Refreshing News

A warning to herbal supplement users: Those store-brand ginkgo biloba tablets you bought may contain mustard, wheat, radish and other substances decidedly non-herbal in nature, but they’re not likely to contain any actual ginkgo biloba.

That’s according to an investigation by the New York State attorney general’s office into store-brand supplements at four national retailers — GNC, Target, Walgreens and Wal-Mart. All four have received cease-and-desist letters demanding that they stop selling a number of their dietary supplements, few of which were found to contain the herbs shown on their labels and many of which included potential allergens not identified in the ingredients list.

“Contamination, substitution and falsely labeling herbal products constitute deceptive business practices and, more importantly, present considerable health risks for consumers,” said the letters, first reported today by the New York Times.

The tests were conducted using a process called DNA barcoding, which identifies individual ingredients through a kind of “genetic fingerprinting.” The investigators tested 24 products claiming to be seven different types of herb — echinacea, garlic, gingko biloba, ginseng, saw palmetto, St. John’s wort and valerian root. All but five of the products contained DNA that was either unrecognizable or from a plant other than what the product claimed to be.

Additionally, five of the 24 contained wheat and two contained beans without identifying them on the labels — both substances are known to cause allergic reactions.
Of the four retailers, Wal-Mart was the worst offender: None of its six supplements that were tested was found to contain purely the ingredient they advertised. Target’s supplements were the least misleading of the lot — though that isn’t saying much, since tests on six of the brand’s products resulted in only one unqualified positive. Two of Target’s other supplements contained DNA from other plants alongside their purported ingredients, while the remaining three tested negative.

Harvard Medical School assistant professor Pieter Cohen, who is an expert on supplement safety, told the New York Times that the test results were so extreme he found them hard to accept. He suggested that the manufacturing process may have destroyed some of the ingredients’ DNA, rendering the DNA barcode test ineffective.

On the other hand, he said, “if this data is accurate, then it is an unbelievably devastating indictment of the industry.”

This investigation is just the latest in a series of blows against the dietary supplement industry. Supplements are not considered food or drugs, so they have long been only loosely regulated. Federal guidelines require companies to ensure that their products are safe and accurately labeled, but the FDA has little power to enforce that rule.
A 2012 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association warned that this lack of regulation of the supplement industry could lead to “adverse events.” In the past five years, tainted supplements have been associated with kidney failure, hepatitis and other problems.

Also in 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services released a report saying that supplements’ claims about their structure and function often lack scientific support. HHS recommended that the FDA seek “explicit statutory authority to review substantiation for structure/function claims” — essentially, it should subject the health claims made by supplement manufacturers to the same kind of scrutiny that drugs must undergo.

The New York attorney general’s letters also cited a 2013 Canadian study of 44 common supplements, in which one-third of herbal supplements that were tested contained no trace of the plant advertised on the bottle.

Here are 8 invented diseases Big Pharma is banking on

Raw Story

Since direct-to-consumer drug advertising debuted in 1997, pharma’s credo has been When The Medication Is Ready, The Disease (and Patients) Will Appear. Who knew so many people suffered from restless legs? Now pharma is back to creating new diseases, patients, risks and “awareness campaigns.” Check out these eight new diseases they’ve invented.

1. SERM deficiency

A pill to prevent postmenopausal osteoporosis packs the “magic three” of drug sales– fear, forever and faith–since you never know if it’s working or you need it but fear stopping. But 15 years after women began swallowing bisphosphonates like Boniva and Fosamax because pharma-planted bone density machines in medical offices revealed they had “osteopenia,”* bisphosphonates are linked to jaw bone death, esophageal cancer and causing the fractures they were supposed to prevent. Sorry about that. Now pharma is hawking Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs) like Evista and Tamoxifen to prevent osteoporosis and even some cancers. Unfortunately they can cause others…

2. Statin Deficiency

If it seems like the whole world is on statins, it’s not your imagination. Last year the FDA approved AstraZeneca’s Crestor for children as young as 10 and in March it approved Crestor for 6.5 million people who have no cholesterol or heart problems at all! (See: fear, forever and faith.) Many say, since lead investigator of the Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention study Paul Ridker of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston is co-patent holder/inventor of the C-reactive protein (CRP) test which “proves” Crestor’s effectiveness, there’s a conflict of interest. Others say, since CRP isn’t necessarily even a marker for heart disease and statins can cause Type 2 diabetes, it’s bad science along with a conflict of interest.)

3. Circadian Dysrhythmia

Insomnia is a gold mine for pharma because everyone sleeps — or watches TV when they can’t. But Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata and Rozerem have reached market saturation, so pharma is rolling out subcategories like nocturnal, middle-of-the-night (MOTN) and terminal insomnia and sleep eating, sleep walking and sleep sweating (yes sweating) to boost the franchise. Meanwhile another demo is swelling Circadian Dysrhythmia numbers: Thanks to restless legs syndrome, sleep apnea, shift work sleep disorder, people who skimp on sleep and of course insomnia meds themselves, there’s an epidemic of excessive sleepiness! Enter Provigil –”a mood-brightening and memory-enhancing psychostimulant which enhances wakefulness and vigilance,” — Adderall and Vyvanse, known in the days of Lenny Bruce — also an “excessive sleepiness” sufferer — as speed.

4. Adult Autism, ADHD and Refusal to Play Nicey

Having marketed adult diseases like depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in 4-year-olds to death, pharma is now finding childhood diseases in adults. Adults with ADHD have hyperactivity, impulsivity, “executive function deficits” and “difficulty with organization and time management,” says Harvard Medical School’s Joseph Biederman, in a 2004 JAMA. The disease, found in most people’s brother-in-laws, requires “lifelong” medication says Biederman, who was accused of pushing Risperdal and hiding pharma income by Congress in 2008. Adults may suffer from autism too says a 2008 article in Psychiatric News, if they’re “unsociable, extremely rigid, given to angry outbursts” and “acutely sensitive to light, heat, and pain.” Luckily, in two studies “SSRI antidepressants led to a decrease in repetitive behaviors and to somewhat more socializing,” in adults with autism says Psychiatric News.

5. Asthma That Requires “Two Drugs”

Leave it to pharma to develop an asthma drug–the long-acting beta2-agonists (LABAs)– that triples the rate of asthma deaths, especially in African-Americans. And leave it to the FDA to approve LABA’s on the basis of a trial, the 2003 SMART trial (Salmeterol Multicenter Asthma Research Trial), that was stopped early because of so many deaths. In March, after more deaths, especially in children, a sheepish FDA recast LABAs as a last resort medication with or without use of a concomitant inhaled steroid. But AstraZeneca doesn’t want to stop selling its LABA with a steroid, Symbicort — and GSK its LABA with a steroid, Advair — just because they’re correlated with death. So the LABA drugs are being billed as safe and able to treat “both” causes of asthma (see: Vytorin) and projected to earn billions this year.

6. “Treatment Resistant” Conditions

If an engine additive or laundry product didn’t work, who would chase it with another product–or two– because the manufacturer told them to? Who would pay $300 to $900 a month out of their pocket for antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers and mood brighteners some of which don’t work? (see: fear, forever, faith.) Increasingly, pharma is approving drugs as add on or “adjunctive therapy” like AstraZeneca’s antipsychotic Seroquel, approved last year “for patients who had failed to respond adequately to an antidepressant alone.” Also last year, the FDA approved Eli Lilly’s Symbyax, a combination of the SSRI antidepressant Prozac and controversial antipsychotic Zyprexa — do patients gain 100 pounds but feel great? — for “treatment resistant depression.” Why are diseases “treatment resistant” instead of the drugs “ineffective” or diagnoses “wrong”?

7. Low T

Men are you feeling run down and over the hill? Is your hair falling out, skin wrinkling and abdomen developing its own zip code? Have you lost interest in sex or worse, has your partner? (With you?) Do you need reading glasses, dental implants and heel splints? You’re not getting old, you just have Low T and are ready for the aging-is-really-just-low-hormones con that women have lived with for 60 years: hormone replacement therapy. Like 50 million women before you, you can be Forever Masculine even though, to (quote hormone giant Wyeth) you have outlived your testes if you start replacing your lost testosterone. You’ll get both kinds of zips back in your life, and it won’t change your prostate-specific antigens. Pharma promises.

8. “Spectrum” Disorders

Nothing proves pharma’s when-the-medication-is-ready credo better than the legions of people who have fibromyaglia now that Cymbalta, Savella and Lyrica are available to treat it. Still, a “grassroots” pharma front group is conducting a Fibromyalgia Is Real awareness campaign like it did for depression and bipolar disorder, just to make sure. Pharma has also rolled out the term “depression spectrum disorder” for fibromyalgia to make sure patients who have some but not all of the symptoms seek treatment. And speaking of spectrums, “Epilepsy Spectrum Disorder” was rolled out in January’s JAMA — a disorder which is not just about seizures anymore but has “shared mechanisms” with “depression, autism.., and other cognitive comorbidities.” Spectrum disorders are Real–which is pharma for Reimbursable.

* a pharma contrivance like “perimenopause” to widen the patient pool

No Child Left Unmedicated

Investment Watch
by Dave Hodges

The pharmaceutical industry has completely taken over the treatment of medical and psychiatric treatment. Everything, and I am mean everything is geared towards getting every American on medication and keeping them on medication for the rest of their lives. There is no more vulnerable population, to this medical tyranny, than our children.

There is no greater example of this medical tyranny than the latest craze in unscientific psychiatric diagnostics than the brand new condition now being referred to as “Sluggish Cognitive Tempo” (SLT). I. As a former mental health therapist, I can barely hold back my laughter at this thinly veiled attempt to separate parents from their hard earned money by making them think that the their perfectly normal child is mentally ill.

Sluggish Cognitive Tempo (lol)

This is a remarkably ridiculous name for an even more ludicrous diagnosis. The main characteristics of SLT are vaguely described but include some combination of daydreaming, lethargy and slow mental processing, you know, like we do when we watch television.

The advocates of this diagnosis contend that SCT afflicts about two million children. And that great pharmaceutical whore, Eli Lilly, is waiting in the wings preparing to medicate the developing and highly vulnerable brains of these two million children with the latest in dangerous and mind-destroying psychotropic medications which will leave the user with a brain damaged future and a medical treatment history which will render many of these children with an uninsurable medical insurance future.

The Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology has sold its professional soul and its professional ethics to Big Pharma as it is seriously promoting this voodoo form of diagnostics. The latest issue of their publication donates a record 136 pages to the topic of SLT. And where do we find children with SLT? Probably standing next to the adults who have Restless Leg Syndrome.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)-Edition IV & V 

DSM is the Bible of mental illnesses. The book serves a training guide for graduate and the PhD students as well as serving as a professional guide for treatment intervention amongst mental health practitioners.

By the time a child is 21 years of age, under DSM -IV guidelines, 80% of all young adults qualify to be diagnosed as mentally ill and, as such, are subject to being medicated.

The newest version of DSM has made this problem far worse. Normal temper tantrums have been turned into a diagnosable and pharmacologically treatable illness called ‘Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder”. Normal adolescent rebellion is now being labeled as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder”. Normal childhood restlessness is now diagnosed as “ADHD” in children as early as two years of age. Childhood Autism and childhood Bipolar Disorder are pharmaceutical goldmines and have increased forty fold in the last 20 years.

The ADHD Scam

More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines and professional medical practices, according to data recently presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to the CDC, 11% of the country’s children are diagnosed with ADHD. This is ludicrous and is just not possible. These children have ADHD according to whom? The answer to this question consists of two parts. First, Big Pharma is using its influence to “push” the diagnostic criteria in the direction of many more positive diagnoses. More diagnoses means more profit-making pill pushing. Second, there is no illness, with these kinds of unsustainable rates of diagnosis that could impact the population to this degree. If there really were an 11% rate of autism in this country, we would be forced to change what is considered to be normal behavior since most mental illness models are loosely based upon a bell curve distribution. Therefore, just based on the surface evidence, these diagnostic rates cannot justified.

If these medications are dangerous for children, we would not know because very few scientific studies have examined the use of ADHD stimulant medications in young children. A widely referenced 2006 study found that the ADHD medication, methylphenidate, could “somewhat” mitigate ADHD like symptoms in preschoolers. However, the study’s conclusions were based on researched derived from insufficiently sized researched groups. Only about a dozen 3-year-olds were included in the study, and there were no 2-year-olds, yet we continue to medicate these young vulnerable minds. Most researchers on that study, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, have significant financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that made ADHD medications.

A multitude of studies indicates that children who are prescribed psychotropic drugs are much more likely to become drug addicts as adults.

Parents Are the First Line of Defense

If you have ever sat in the waiting room of your child’s pediatrician’s office and you have seen well-dressed, attractive young adults enter the office armed with notebooks as they are ushered in to see the doctor ahead of the waiting patients, then there is a very good chance that your doctor is a Big Pharma whore. The well-dressed pill pushers are there to your child’s doctor in order to “make deals” and promise bonuses for prescribing certain drugs. The odds are stacked against your child before they ever their doctor.

In combating this medical tyranny, parents are the only line of defense. However, parents must be very careful in how they express their refusal in not allowing their children to be diagnosed with bogus conditions and treated with dangerous drugs.

When your doctor offers to put your child on mind-numbing drugs, seek a second opinion. However, be very, very, careful how seek that second opinion as it could cost you custody of your child.

Beware of CPS

There is no system ever devised by mankind that is guaranteed to rip husband and wife or father, mother and child apart so bitterly than our present Family Court System.

Judge Brian Lindsay 

Retired Supreme Court Judge  

New York, New York 

Just ask Jodi Ferris, Anna Nikolayev, or Justina Pelltier’s parents what happens when a parent dares to question the almighty doctor and seek a second opinion for their child. The doctor and his wounded ego will frequently call CPS and the parent’s problem goes from bad to worse.

My advice is simple if you desire to seek a second medical opinion for your child. Do not tell your child’s pediatrician that is your intention. Take the prescription that the doctor writes, just do not fill the prescription. Then schedule a second opinion visit with another doctor. If you get a disconfirming diagnosis, then make immediate arrangements to change doctors. Once your child has a different doctor, the authorities are powerless in seizing your child for medical neglect when the complaining doctor is no longer the physician of record and the second doctor is not making a recommendation to medicate.

Conclusion

Thirty million adults, about 40% of the adult population, are on anti-depressants. Twenty million, or about 66% of this group, should not be on anti-depressants. Adults can say no, it is not the same issue when it comes to medicating your child. However, your child doesn’t have that same choice. You, as the parent, must make that choice for them.

Truthstream News: About All Those Vaccines…

Truthstream News

In this special double episode of Truthstream News, Aaron and Melissa take on the CDC whistleblower and MMR-autism scandal (and that’s just for starters) — exposing the lies and obfuscations that have hurt untold numbers. Recently released audio of the good doc has now been leaked where he says he would NEVER shoot his pregnant wife up with a thimerosal-containing vaccine.

YouTube


It’s shameful, but that’s just the icing on the vaccine cake. The evidence that the CDC “hid the decline” of skyrocketing autism rates in connection with a vaccine is just the beginning. Did you know the government’s health agencies never even tested thimerosal, the 50% ethylmercury preservative shot into thousands of children daily for decades and still given to pregnant women in the form of a flu shot? In fact, the CDC says some vaccines given to children still contain trace amounts…

There is evidence that the chickenpox vaccine has caused more cases of shingles — a much more dangerous, painful and debilitating condition — while the HPV and flu vaccines are just the latest to put corporate profits and insider connections above human health and vaccine safety. In the “Olds,” we take a startling look at the SV40 contamination of the polio vaccine — a massive and deeply unsettling scandal of immense proportions that may have caused cancer in tens or even hundreds of millions of people!

From potentially dangerous ingredients to undisclosed Big Pharma ties and more, this episode will change the way you look at vaccine “science” and leave you with questions that the government won’t soon answer but that we need to keep asking until they do!

Inside the FDA Mafia

Activist Post

by Jon Rappoport

I post this piece now and then to show how personal things can get inside a terminally corrupt government agency.

It’s not all about remote decisions made from a great height.

These decisions can come about through the rank intimidation the Mafia exercises with a member who wants to leave the mob and go straight.

As in: “We know where your wife and kids are.”

This article is based on a Truthout interview of a man who did drug reviews for the FDA. He examined applications to approve new medical drugs for public consumption.

Pharmaceutical companies must have their new drugs certified as safe and effective before they can enter the market, before doctors can prescribe them. The FDA does this certification. Thumbs up or thumbs down. The drug is okay or it isn’t.

Here’s the story:

In a stunning interview with Truthout’s Martha Rosenberg, former FDA drug reviewer, Ronald Kavanagh, exposes the FDA as a relentless criminal mafia protecting its client, Big Pharma, with a host of mob strategies.

Kavanagh: “…widespread racketeering, including witness tampering and witness retaliation.”

“I was threatened with prison.”

“One [FDA] manager threatened my children…I was afraid that I could be killed for talking to Congress and criminal investigators.”

Kavanagh reviewed new drug applications made to the FDA by pharmaceutical companies. He was one of the holdouts at the Agency who insisted that the drugs had to be safe and effective before being released to the public.

But honest appraisal wasn’t part of the FDA culture, and Kavanagh swam against the tide, until he realized his life and the life of his children were on the line.

What was his secret task at the FDA? “Drug reviewers were clearly told not to question drug companies and that our job was to approve drugs.” In other words, rubber stamp them. Say the drugs were safe and effective when they were not.

Kavanagh’s revelations are astonishing. He recalls a meeting where a drug-company representative flat-out stated that his company had paid the FDA for a new-drug approval. Paid for it. As in bribe.

He remarks that the drug pyridostigmine, given to US troops to prevent the later effects of nerve gas, “actually increased the lethality” of certain nerve agents.

Kavanagh recalls being given records of safety data on a drug—and then his bosses told him which sections not to read. Obviously, they knew the drug was dangerous and they knew exactly where, in the reports, that fact would be revealed.

We are not dealing with isolated incidents of cheating and lying. We are not dealing with a few isolated bought-off FDA employees. The situation at the FDA isn’t correctable with a few firings. This is an ongoing criminal enterprise, and any government official, serving in any capacity, who has become aware of it and has not taken action, is an accessory to mass poisoning of the population.

Fourteen years ago, the cat was let out of the bag. Dr. Barbara Starfield, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, on July 26, 2000, in a review titled, “Is US health really the best in the world,” exposed the fact that FDA-approved medical drugs kill 106,000 Americans per year.

In interviewing her, I discovered that she had never been approached by any federal agency to help remedy this tragedy. Nor had the federal government taken any steps on its own to stop the dying.

Ronald Kavanagh’s story, exposed in Truthout, never jumped the rails and made it into the mainstream press as the explosive revelation it was.

Too hot to handle. Too many bodies buried. Too many media outlets bought off by pharmaceutical advertising money. Too close to bought-off government officials. Too likely to shake the pillars of the medical cartel. Too real.

It was the kind of story that could actually wake people up from their mind-controlled slumber.

It still is.

Related:  Former FDA Reviewer Speaks Out About Intimidation, Retaliation and Marginalizing of Safety

Remembering Heidi Stevenson of Gaia Health

Activist Post/Natural Blaze
by Heather Callaghan

It is with great sorrow and a heavy heart to inform you that the world lost a dear and tenacious warrior for truth and freedom on March 12, 2014. If you didn’t know who she was, please take this time to get to know her, because all I can say is that the vast majority of us would be seriously lacking without her investigative articles exposing propaganda, lies and corruption.

If you are even a passing reader on this site or many others in non-corporate media, you can be sure that you have benefited from her intensely thorough research and her tireless work at the website she founded in 2009 - Gaia Health.

While she wrote at her own expense and time, her hundreds of articles were shared far and wide, benefiting other writers trying to piece the big puzzle together. She contributed to well-known natural health websites, most recently to Green Med Info. Many writers could refer back to her articles with confidence because they were solid and heavily resourced. She was also known for exposing statistical manipulation via her painstaking time taken to crunch the numbers herself. She inspired many of those writers to keep going in truth.

She was excited to finally appear on The Alex Jones Show in August and had hoped to be on again. In recent years, she was asked to do many interviews. Amazingly, she dedicated spare moments, even into the wee hours of the morning to answer people who wrote to her. If asked, she shared her wisdom but as though an equal and a friend.

She did not care for self-adulation or flattery. Truth and altruism was her driving force. She once called herself a “muckraker.” Although she did care about natural health, it’s the injustices of the world that compelled her to keep investigating subjects like vaccines, Big Pharma and the medical system. The narrowed down topics, however, are too many to list. She was indeed, “Allopathy’s Gadfly.”


Most people did not know about the kinds of obstacles Heidi faced to answer her calling; health problems being perhaps the biggest thorn. Iatrogenic illness (doctor-induced injury) nearly extinguished her life around 10 years ago, while in her fifties. To put it mildly, it came with a lot of physical pain. Before that she was an expert in computer science, research and writing. It was her husband Lane, whom she met during this time, who convinced her to try alternative healing methods like homeopathy which began a healing process that kept her going long after she was expected to pass. She then developed an expertise in homeopathy, too.

She spoke of being happily married to her husband and his singular kindness and support. She leaves behind other close family members and lots of good friends.

She cared deeply for her readers and fellow writers. She had a sharp wit. She also made room on her website for satire and would create her own poignant pictures for her articles, some of them laugh-inducing. She was just the type of friend a lot of people say they want in their lives. A dedicated, caring, loyal one who cares about you enough to tell the truth, and then makes sure you know they’ve been wondering how you have been. It is hard to believe that new writings from her will not be appearing on Gaia Health any longer.

Heidi – we honor and miss you. Our hearts go out to your family. There simply aren’t enough words to describe the trail you blazed and the impact you left.

Memorial Facebook page to keep the torch burning:
We Honor Heidi Stevenson of Gaia Health

10 Health Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be Real

Investment Watch Blog
by Michael Snyder

Do you believe in any “health conspiracy theories”? Do you believe that there are “natural cures” for diseases that the medical establishment is not telling you about? Do you believe that vaccines, cell phones or the fluoride in the water can have a harmful impact on the health of your family? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are not alone. According to one recent survey, approximately half of all Americans believe in at least one “medical conspiracy theory”. Thanks to the Internet, more people than ever are questioning the established dogma of the medical community. As a result, more people are starting to make their own health decisions, and this has resulted in quite a backlash from the medical establishment. They are spending a lot of time, effort and money to combat these “health conspiracy theories”, but as you will see below, quite a few of them have turned out to be real.

But before we get to that, I wanted to share with you some of the specific results of the survey that I mentioned above. The following comes from USA Today…

The online survey of 1,351 adults found:

• 37% agree the Food and Drug Administration is keeping “natural cures for cancer and other diseases” away from the public because of “pressure from drug companies.”

• 20% believe health officials are hiding evidence that cellphones cause cancer.

• 20% believe doctors and health officials push child vaccines even though they “know these vaccines cause autism and other psychological disorders.” • Smaller numbers endorse theories involving fluoride, genetically modified foods and the deliberate infection of African Americans with HIV.

• 49% believe at least one of the theories and 18% believe at least three.

Oh my.

So there are actually Americans that believe that “natural cures” exist and that vaccines and fluoride might have some very harmful side effects?

Oh the horror!

Of course I am being facetious. The truth is that it is wonderful that people are starting to research these things for themselves.

The medical community has a huge incentive to protect their turf. If the U.S. health care system was a separate nation, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year are at stake, and so it is very important that they maintain control over what people believe about their health.

Fortunately, the truth is starting to get out there. The following are 10 health conspiracy theories that turned out to be real…

Unvaccinated Children Are Far Healthier Than Vaccinated Children

Evidence continues to mount that vaccines can have some very harmful side effects – especially for children.

For example, a study that was conducted in New Zealand discovered that unvaccinated children are generally much healthier than vaccinated children…

A study from the 1990s has come to light, proving that compared to unvaccinated children, vaccinated children were more likely to suffer from asthma, eczema, ear infections, hyperactivity and many other chronic conditions. Furthermore, the study identified that there was a ten-fold increase in the incidence of tonsillitis in the children who were vaccinated, and a total lack tonsillectomy operations among the children who were unvaccinated.

And a similar study that was conducted in Germany came up with similar results…

Asthma, hay fever and neurodermatitis are seen very frequently today. A recent German study with 17461 children between 0-17 years of age (KIGGS) showed that 4.7% of these children suffer from asthma, 10.7% of these children from hay fever and 13.2% from neurodermatitis. These numbers differ in western countries, i.e. the prevalence of asthma among children in the US is 6% whereas it is 14-16% in Australia (Australia’s Health 2004, AIHW).

The prevalence of asthma among unvaccinated children in our study is around 2.5%, hay fever, 3%, and neurodermatitis, 7%. According to the KIGGS study more than 40% of children between the ages of 3 and 17 years were sensitized against at least one allergen tested (20 common allergens were tested) and 22.9% had an allergic disease. Although we did not perform a blood test, around 10% stated that their children had an allergy.

Most parents don’t realize this, but when you allow vaccines to be injected into your children, they are getting all kinds of nasty things injected directly into their bloodstreams where there is no filter.

That is why so many people keep screaming about “the mercury in the vaccines”. The truth is that it can cause brain damage…

“In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to ethylmercury, the form of mercury in thimerosal, suffered brain damage years later. Studies on thimerosal poisoning also describe tubular necrosis and nervous system injury, including obtundation, coma and death. As a result of these findings, Russia banned thimerosal from children’s vaccines in 1980. Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have also banned the preservative”

So why is thimerosal still found in so many vaccines in the United States?

Today, in some areas of the nation more than 30 vaccines are being given to young children before the age of 3.

30 vaccines.

That is utter insanity.

The Use Of Antidepressants By Mothers Has Been Scientifically Linked To Autism In Their Babies

When women take things when they are pregnant, it can have a very serious impact on their unborn children.

For example, even CNN is now reporting on the link between taking antidepressants during pregnancy and autism…

Children whose mothers take Zoloft, Prozac, or similar antidepressants during pregnancy are twice as likely as other children to have a diagnosis of autism or a related disorder, according to a small new study, the first to examine the relationship between antidepressants and autism risk.

This class of antidepressants, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), may be especially risky early on in a pregnancy, the study suggests. Children who were exposed to the drugs during the first trimester were nearly four times as likely to develop an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared with unexposed children, according to the study, which appears in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

The Fluoride In Our Water Is Really Bad For Us

It just isn’t “crazies on the Internet” that are warning about the fluoride in the water anymore.

These days, even Harvard is publishing studies about the harmful effects of fluoride…

A newly published study in Harvard’s The Lancet weighs in on the toxins causing autism and ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) say that along with these numerous environmental toxins, fluoridated water is adding to the higher incident of both cognitive and behavioral disorders.

But “cognitive and behavioral disorders” are far from the only things that we have to worry about when it comes to fluoride. Just consider the following…

Even small amounts of fluoride consumed from tap water can damage your bones, teeth, brain, disrupt your thyroid function, lower IQ and/or cause cancer, according to evidence revealed in a groundbreaking 2006 National Research Council (NRC) fluoride report produced by a panel of experts who reviewed hundreds of published fluoride studies.

Do you want any of those things to happen to you?

If not, you might want to find out if there is fluoride in the water that you are drinking.

The Natural Health and Longevity Resource Center has published a list of 10 of the most significant health problems that scientific studies have discovered that fluoride causes…

1. Fluoride exposure disrupts the synthesis of collagen and leads to the breakdown of collagen in bone, tendon, muscle, skin, cartilage, lungs, kidney and trachea. 

2. Fluoride stimulates granule formation and oxygen consumption in white blood cells, but inhibits these processes when the white blood cell is challenged by a foreign agent in the blood. 

3. Fluoride depletes the energy reserves and the ability of white blood cells to properly destroy foreign agents by the process of phagocytosis. As little as 0.2 ppm fluoride stimulates superoxide production in resting white blood cells, virtually abolishing phagocytosis. Even micro-molar amounts of fluoride, below 1 ppm, may seriously depress the ability of white blood cells to destroy pathogenic agents. 

4. Fluoride confuses the immune system and causes it to attack the body’s own tissues, and increases the tumor growth rate in cancer prone individuals. 

5. Fluoride inhibits antibody formation in the blood. 

6. Fluoride depresses thyroid activity. 

7. Fluorides have a disruptive effect on various tissues in the body. 

8. Fluoride promotes development of bone cancer. 

9. Fluorides cause premature aging of the human body. 

10. Fluoride ingestion from mouth rinses and dentifrices in children is extremely hazardous to biological development, life span and general health.

For even more on all of this, please check out the following article: “15 Facts Most People Don’t Know About Fluoride“.

Taking Vitamins And Supplements Can Help Cure Disease

Every few months, there is an article in the mainstream media that tries to convince us “that vitamins don’t work”.

But scientific study after scientific study has shown that they do work.

The following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Dr. Lee Hieb…

Folate supplementation reduces the risk of colorecral adenomas, the precursor lesion to colorectal cancer (“Public Health Nutrition”) 

Vitamin D intake reduces lung cancer in women (“American Journal of Clinical Nutrition”) 

500 mg of vitamin B12, 800 mcg of folic acid and 20 mg of B6 slowed shrinkage of the whole brain volume by 50 percent over two years. In a follow up in 2013, the gray matter area of the brain associated with Alzheimer’s had shrinkage reduced up to seven fold on the vitamin combination (“PNAS online”)

… but vitamins “don’t work. 

CoQ10 protects against beta-amyloid induced mitochondrial malfunction (“Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry”) 

L-Carnitine has been shown to prevent the damaging effects of statins on the mitochondria (“Frontiers in Physiology”) 

Calcium, vitamin D, inulin and soy isoflavones improves bone metabolism in post-menopausal women (“Aging Clinical and Experimental Research”) 

Higher serum folate levels were correlated with higher cognitive test scores in children (“Nutrition”) 

… but vitamins “don’t work.”

The Overprescription Of Antibiotics Is Causing The Rise Of Antibiotic-Resistant “Superbugs”

These days, doctors are prescribing antibiotics at the drop of a hat.

For a long time that worked, but now we are seeing the rise of a new generation of “superbugs” that are totally resistant to antibiotics.

The reason that this is a problem is that we don’t have anything that can fight these new superbugs.

It has become such a problem that now even the CDC is warning about it…

The overuse of antibiotics for patients in U.S. hospitals is contributing to the rise of so-called superbugs, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“This is a real public threat,” said Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director for health care-associated infection prevention programs at the CDC, who spoke to CNBC by phone. 

The dangers from overprescribing antibiotics in hospitals are twofold, Srinivasan explained. First, patients may not need them and could suffer side effects. More important, however, is the danger of creating drug-resistant bacteria, known as superbugs, that are becoming increasingly commonplace.

For much, much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “Scientists: We Can’t Do Anything About The Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs That Will Soon Kill Millions Of Us“.

Hospitals Are Massively Overcharging Their Patients

For a long time, it has been an open secret that hospital bills contain absolutely outrageous overcharges.

But now even the mainstream media is admitting this. For example, the following is an excerpt from a recent article in the New York Times…

Luckily for anyone who has ever needed an IV bag to replenish lost fluids or to receive medication, it is also one of the least expensive. The average manufacturer’s price, according to government data, has fluctuated in recent years from 44 cents to $1.

Yet there is nothing either cheap or simple about its ultimate cost, as I learned when I tried to trace the commercial path of IV bags from the factory to the veins of more than 100 patients struck by a May 2012 outbreak of food poisoning in upstate New York.

Some of the patients’ bills would later include markups of 100 to 200 times the manufacturer’s price, not counting separate charges for “IV administration.” And on other bills, a bundled charge for “IV therapy” was almost 1,000 times the official cost of the solution.

And below, I have posted a short excerpt from a Time Magazine article. One man that had been diagnosed with cancer accumulated nearly a million dollars in bills at one California hospital before he finally died…

By the time Steven D. died at his home in Northern California the following November, he had lived for an additional 11 months. And Alice had collected bills totaling $902,452. The family’s first bill — for $348,000 — which arrived when Steven got home from the Seton Medical Center in Daly City, Calif., was full of all the usual chargemaster profit grabs: $18 each for 88 diabetes-test strips that Amazon sells in boxes of 50 for $27.85; $24 each for 19 niacin pills that are sold in drugstores for about a nickel apiece. There were also four boxes of sterile gauze pads for $77 each. None of that was considered part of what was provided in return for Seton’s facility charge for the intensive-care unit for two days at $13,225 a day, 12 days in the critical unit at $7,315 a day and one day in a standard room (all of which totaled $120,116 over 15 days). There was also $20,886 for CT scans and $24,251 for lab work.

Thanks To The Big Pharmaceutical Companies, Americans Are The Most Drugged Up People On The Face Of The Earth

There is nobody on the planet that is more drugged up than the American people are.

And I am not talking about illegal drugs.

I am talking about legal drugs.

Just consider these statistics…

#1 An astounding 70 million Americans are taking legal mind-altering drugs right now.

#2 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doctors wrote more than 250 million prescriptions for antidepressants during 2010.

#3 According to a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, nearly 70 percent of all Americans are on at least one prescription drug. An astounding 20 percent of all Americans are on at least five prescription drugs.

#4 Americans spent more than 280 billion dollars on prescription drugs during 2013.

#5 According to the CDC, approximately 9 out of every 10 Americans that are at least 60 years old say that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last month.

You can find the rest of this list in my previous article entitled “19 Statistics About The Drugging Of America That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe“.

And the truth is that all of this drug pushing is actually killing people. The following is a brief excerpt from a Vanity Fair article entitled “Deadly Medicine“…

Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves?

Caffeine Addiction Is Real And It Can Be Incredibly Difficult To Break

If you have ever been addicted to coffee or soda, you probably know how hard it can be to try to give it up for even a few days.

It has been estimated that up to 90 percent of all Americans consume beverages that contain caffeine, and most people never stop to think about how it might affect them in the long run.

Well, experts are now openly acknowledging that we have a major caffeine addiction problem on our hands. The following is an excerpt from a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle…

Cardiologists have told patients to cut back on coffee because they’re having heart palpitations, and psychologists have warned people that their caffeine habit may be adding to their anxiety problems. Yet some people have trouble letting go of the caffeine – or even cutting back – because it feels like a necessity.

Even sleep experts say patients will complain of insomnia but shudder at the idea of quitting caffeine.

“There are people who have chronic reflux, stomach acid pain, bleeding, hemorrhoids – all because of coffee. They’re suffering a lot,” said Keith Humphreys, a Stanford addiction expert. “But they try and they fail to stop.”

Eating Pork Is Really Bad For You

Americans have a love affair with pork. We consume massive amounts of bacon, ham, sausage, pepperoni, etc.

But is that actually healthy for us?

Most people have never stopped to consider this, but they should. The following is an excerpt from a paper entitled “The Adverse Influence Of Pork Consumption On Health” by Professor Hans-Heinrich Reckeweg…

The fact that pork causes stress and gives rise to poisoning is known. It is obvious that this does not only apply to preparations of fresh pork such as cold cuts, knuckles, feet, ribs and cutlets, etc., but also to cured meats (ham, bacon, etc.) and to smoked meats prepared for sausages.

Consumption of freshly killed pork products causes acute responses, such as inflammations of the appendix and gall bladder, biliary colics, acute intestinal catarrh, gastroenteritis with typhoid and paratyphoid symptoms, as well as acute eczema, carbuncles, sudoriparous abscesses, and others. These symptoms can be observed after consuming sausage meats (including salami which contains pieces of bacon in the form of fat).

And here are some more reasons why you should think twice about eating pork…

A pig is a real garbage gut. It will eat anything including urine, excrement, dirt, decaying animal flesh, maggots, or decaying vegetables. They will even eat the cancerous growths off other pigs or animals.

The meat and fat of a pig absorbs toxins like a sponge. Their meat can be 30 times more toxic than beef or venison.

When eating beef or venison, it takes 8 to 9 hours to digest the meat so what little toxins are in the meat are slowly put into our system and can be filtered by the liver. But when pork is eaten, it takes only 4 hours to digest the meat. We thus get a much higher level of toxins within a shorter time.

Unlike other mammals, a pig does not sweat or perspire. Perspiration is a means by which toxins are removed from the body. Since a pig does not sweat, the toxins remain within its body and in the meat.

Pigs and swine are so poisonous that you can hardly kill them with strychnine or other poisons. Farmers will often pen up pigs within a rattlesnake nest because the pigs will eat the snakes, and if bitten they will not be harmed by the venom.

When a pig is butchered, worms and insects take to its flesh sooner and faster than to other animal’s flesh. In a few days the swine flesh is full of worms.

Swine and pigs have over a dozen parasites within them, such as tapeworms, flukes, worms, and trichinae. There is no safe temperature at which pork can be cooked to ensure that all these parasites, their cysts, and eggs will be killed.

Pig meat has twice as much fat as beef. A three-ounce T-bone steak contains 8.5 grams of fat; a three-ounce pork chop contains 18 grams of fat. A three-ounce beef rib has 11.1 grams of fat; a three-ounce pork spare rib has 23.2 grams of fat.

Cows have a complex digestive system, having four stomachs. It thus takes over 24 hours to digest their vegetarian diet causing its food to be purified of toxins. In contrast, the swine’s one stomach takes only about four hours to digest its foul diet, turning its toxic food into flesh.

The swine carries about 30 diseases which can be easily passed to humans. This is why God commanded that we are not even to touch their carcass. (Leviticus 11:8).

The trichinae worm of the swine is microscopically small, and once ingested can lodge itself in our intestines, muscles, spinal cord or the brain. This results in the disease trichinosis. The symptoms are sometimes lacking, but when present they are mistaken for other diseases, such as typhoid, arthritis, rheumatism, gastritis, MS, meningitis, gall bladder trouble, or acute alcoholism.

If You Are Eating Seafood Caught In The Pacific Ocean, There Is A Very Good Chance That It Is Polluted With Nuclear Radiation From Fukushima

Are you sure that the fish, shrimp and other seafood that you are eating are safe?

Most people are aware that the destroyed nuclear facility at Fukushima is still releasing massive amounts of nuclear radiation into the Pacific Ocean, but most people don’t stop to think that it could be getting into their food.

One fish that was recently caught off the coast of the Fukushima prefecture was discovered to have 124 times the safe level of radioactive cesium.

But we don’t have to worry about that in North America, do we?

Actually, the evidence is starting to mount that we should be taking a closer look at our seafood. The following are just a few facts from one of my previous articles entitled “36 Signs The Media Is Lying To You About How Radiation From Fukushima Is Affecting The West Coast“…

-The population of sockeye salmon along the coastlines of Alaska is at a “historic low”.

-Something is causing Pacific herring to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs.

-Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.

-One test in California found that 15 out of 15 Bluefin tuna were contaminated with radiation from Fukushima.

-Back in 2012, the Vancouver Sun reported that cesium-137 was being found in a very high percentage of the fish that Japan was selling to Canada…

• 73 percent of the mackerel

• 91 percent of the halibut

• 92 percent of the sardines

• 93 percent of the tuna and eel

• 94 percent of the cod and anchovies

• 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

You can read the rest of that article right here.

When it comes to your health, it pays to do your own research and to do your own thinking.

Don’t blindly trust me, your doctor or anyone else. Look into these things for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

In the end, you will be very happy that you did.

RIP, psychiatry: the “chemical-imbalance” theory is dead

No More Fake News
by Jon Rappaport

This one is big.

Dr. Ronald Pies, the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, laid the theory to rest in the July 11, 2011, issue of the Times with this staggering admission:

“In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend — never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”

Boom.

Dead.

The point is, for decades the whole basis of psychiatric drug research, drug prescription, and drug sales has been: “we’re correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain.”

The problem was, researchers had never established a normal baseline for chemical balance. So they were shooting in the dark. Worse, they were faking a theory. Pretending they knew something when they didn’t.

In his 2011 piece in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Pies tries to cover his colleagues in the psychiatric profession with this fatuous remark:

“In the past 30 years, I don’t believe I have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous claim [about chemical imbalance in the brain], except perhaps to mock it…the ‘chemical imbalance’ image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies, often to the detriment of our patients’ understanding.”

Absurd. First of all, many psychiatrists have explained and do explain to their patients that the drugs are there to correct a chemical imbalance.

And second, if all well-trained psychiatrists have known, all along, that the chemical-imbalance theory is a fraud…

…then why on earth have they been prescribing tons of drugs to their patients…

…since those drugs are developed on the false premise that they correct an imbalance?

Here’s what’s happening. The honchos of psychiatry are seeing the handwriting on the wall. Their game has been exposed. They’re taking heavy flack on many fronts.

The chemical imbalance theory is a fake. There are no defining physical tests for any of the 300 so-called mental disorders. All diagnoses are based on arbitrary clusters or menus of human behavior. The drugs are harmful, dangerous, toxic. Some of them induce violence. Suicide, homicide. Some of the drugs cause brain damage.

Psychiatry is a pseudo-pseudo science.

So the shrinks have to move into another model, another con, another fraud. And they’re looking for one.

For example, genes plus “psycho-social factors.” A mish-mash of more unproven science.

“New breakthrough research on the functioning of the brain is paying dividends and holds great promise…” Professional gibberish.

Meanwhile, the business model demands drugs for sale.

So even though the chemical-imbalance nonsense has been discredited, it will continue on as a dead man walking, a zombie.

Big Pharma isn’t going to back off. Trillions of dollars are at stake.

And in the wake of Aurora, Colorado, and Sandy Hook, and the Naval Yard, the hype is expanding: “we must have new community mental-health centers all over America.”

More fake diagnosis of mental disorders, more devastating drug prescriptions.

As Dr. Peter Breggin explains in his classic, Toxic Psychiatry, half a century ago the psychiatric profession and the drug companies began to shape a deal.

Psychiatry was dying out. Patients didn’t want to talk about their problems to MD shrinks.

So the deal was this: psychiatry would go along with and promote chemical-imbalance propaganda. In turn, the drug companies would turn out the pharmaceuticals, and they would bankroll psychiatry, sponsoring conferences, taking out massive numbers of ads in journals, offering grants to universities.

The deal paid off.

Psychiatry experienced a resurgence. “Talk therapy is useless. Mental problems are all about the brain, and the brain must be drugged.”

But now, the charade is exposed.

You can be sure major Pharma players are meeting behind closed doors with leaders of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The mafia is making a house call.

They are reminding the APA that they have a deal. No cancellation allowed.

“You guys promoted the chemical-imbalance theory. That was the arrangement. So keep promoting it. We don’t care how many lies you have to tell. Don’t try to develop a conscience all of a sudden. This is business.”

The mafia doesn’t like it when people try to interrupt business.

NEJM editor: “No longer possible to believe much of clinical research published”

The Ethical Nag

Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell is the author of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. But more to the point, she’s also the former Editor-in-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably one of the most respected medical journals on earth. But after reading her article in the New York Review of Books called Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, one wonders if any medical journal on earth is worth anybody’s respect anymore.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Dr. Angell cites the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. She explains:

“Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose, and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.”

Biederman’s own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, “so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive.”

In June 2009, an American senate investigation revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in “consulting” and “speaking” fees between 2000 and 2007.

“Two of Biederman’s colleagues received similar amounts. After the revelation, the president of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the chairman of its physician organization sent a letter to the hospital’s physicians expressing not shock over the enormity of the conflicts of interest, but sympathy for the beneficiaries: “We know this is an incredibly painful time for these doctors and their families, and our hearts go out to them.”

Biederman’s failure to disclose his Big Pharma payments to his employers ar Harvard (as is required for all Harvard employees) has been under investigation* for the past two years by Harvard Medical School, in as journalist Alison Bass describes this: “what must be the longest investigation in that school’s history”).

Dr. Angell’s article contains bombshell after bombshell, all gleaned during her tenure as NEJM editor. For example, on the subject of doctors who are bought and paid for by Big Pharma, she writes:

“No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top 9 U.S.-based drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year in North America alone.By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.”

Revelations like this from medical profession insiders cast serious doubt on more than what’s printed on the pages of these medical journals.

Your physician reads these journals, treatment decisions are changed, care is affected, drugs are prescribed – all based on Big Pharma-funded medical ghostwriter-prepared journal articles from physicians who fraudulently claim to be the study authors. Then you walk out of your doctor’s office with a prescription for a drug that may or may not kill you, based on treatment protocols written by doctors like Biederman who are on the take from Big Pharma. A very recent example of the sad reality over at the once-prestigious New England Journal of Medicine is their decision to publish a drug company-funded review article. This review attempts to discredit emerging research suggesting that many years of using Merck’s Fosamax or Procter & Gamble’s Actonel (both osteoporosis drugs in a class called bisphosphonates) could actually result in more leg bone fractures. Not surprisingly, drug manufacturers of bisphosphonates are fighting back ferociously against this emerging (independent) research. A Merck-funded review paper published in the NEJM on March 24, 2010 concludes:

“The occurrence of fracture of the subtrochantericor diaphyseal femur was very rare, even among women who had been treated with bisphosphonates for as long as 10 years.”

Sounds promising for Big Pharma. But if you look very, very closely, the article’s fine print confesses:

“The study was underpowered for definitive conclusions.”

You might justifiably ask yourself why a medical journal would stoop to publishing a meaningless scientific paper that the paper’s own authors admit lacks any conclusion. Even more troubling than a journal article that was itself bought and paid for by Merck, is the conflict of interest disclosure list at the bottom of this NEJM article. It reads like a Who’s Who of Big Pharma.

Of the 12 study authors listed in the NEJM article, at least three are full-time employees of Merck or Novartis. Each one of the other nine admit owning equity interests in or receiving cash, travel expenses, or “consulting and lecture fees” from companies including Merck, Novartis, Amgen, Roche Nycomed, Procter & Gamble, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Medtronics, Nastech, Nestle, Fonterra Brands, OnoPharma, Osteologix, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Sanofi-Aventis, Tethys, Unilever,Unipath, Inverness Medical, Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, OSIProsidion, or Takeda.

Why is the New England Journal of Medicine or any other credible medical journal accepting for publication articles submitted by paid employees of pharmaceutical companies?

As a cardiac patient, I’m gobsmacked by what appears to be this systemic corruption of not only medical journals who continue to publish what they clearly know is tainted research linked to drug marketing, but of the very doctors whom patients trust to look out for us.

Since my heart attack in 2008, I take a fistful of cardiac meds every day, and I have no clue which of them were prescribed for me based on flawed research or tainted medical journal articles funded by the very companies that make my drugs.

And worse, neither do my doctors.

Happily, there are other decent physicians out there who, like Dr. Angell, are just as outraged as she is. Her targets are not just guilty of unethical conflict of interest – they are criminals who should be charged with endangering our health while padding their wallets.

Read Dr. Angell’s article from the New York Review of Books, called Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption.

* NEWS UPDATE: “Massachusetts General Hospital Discloses Sanctions against Three Psychiatrists for Violating Ethics Guidelines”, July 1, 2011: The Boston Business Journal said today that three psychiatrists have been sanctioned for failing to adequately report seven-figure payments they received from drug companies.

Drs. Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens disclosed the disciplinary actions against them in a note to colleagues. According to a copy of the note made public upon request by the hospital, the three doctors:

• must refrain from “all industry-sponsored outside activities” for one year

• for two years after the ban ends, must obtain permission from Mass. General and Harvard Medical School before engaging in any industry-sponsored, paid outside activities and then must report back afterward

• must undergo certain training

• face delays before being considered for “promotion or advancement.”

The three doctors have been under the political microscope since June 2008 when Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, began investigating conflicts of interest involving clinicians. Biederman and Wilens have since admitted to accepting $1.6 million from drug companies whose drugs they were promoting; Spencer took $1 million.

Senator Grassley said, according to an online version of the Congressional record:

“These three Harvard doctors are some of the top psychiatrists in the country, and their research is some of the most important in the field. They have also taken millions of dollars from the drug companies.”

Magic trick: promoting diseases that don’t exist

No More Fake News
by Jon Rappoport

The disease/treatment/profit machine requires more and more diseases, even if they aren’t real.

Here is an unspoken but largely accepted medical notion of what a disease is:

A group of physical symptoms shared by many people, which has a single cause.

For example, take the flu. Wikipedia lists the common symptoms: chills, fever, muscle pains, headache, coughing. For each type of flu, there is single virus announced as the cause. E.g., Swine Flu; H1N1 virus.

Drug companies develop medicines and vaccines to kill the virus or prevent it from gaining a foothold in the body. They sell the drugs and vaccines. Profits soar. Nice and neat.

Of course, many doctors don’t bother to test patients to see if they have a disease like seasonal flu. It’s too time consuming to take a blood sample and send it to a lab and wait for the results.

So the doctor makes an eyeball diagnosis based on symptoms and the season of the year.

As I explained in my previous article, “What happens when only 16% of flu patients have the flu?”, a cursory investigation of this practice can lead to embarrassing results.

Every year, many blood samples from patients are, in fact, sent to labs, and only a small fraction of these “flu cases” turn out to reveal any flu virus at all.

But this fact is blithely ignored.

You have hundreds of thousands of people in the US who display the general “flu symptoms,” but it turns out most of them don’t have the flu. They have a variety of other problems.

But admitting this is bad for business. How can drug companies justify making flu drugs and vaccines when most “flu cases” don’t have the flu?

The solution? Fake it. Pretend all people diagnosed with the flu actually have it.

Bottom line? Just because you have a group of people who have the same general symptoms…that doesn’t mean they have the same disease…and it doesn’t mean the same germ is causing their symptoms.

Consider Autism. If you were to Google “Diagnostic Criteria for 299.00 Autistic Disorder,” at autreat.com you would read through a whole menu of behaviors. These behaviors are, in fact, the definition of Autism. They are the entire definition.

There is NO cause listed. There is no single cause. No germ or fungus or mold or errant gene or neurological defect.

So in this instance, the medical cartel pretends they already somehow know Autism (the collection of behaviors) is a single disease, and “they will eventually find the single cause.”

But again, just because you have a great many children who have the same GENERAL symptoms (behaviors)…that doesn’t mean they have the same disease…that doesn’t mean the cause of disease is the same across the board.

Nowhere in the definition of Autism will you find a single cause or any sort of bottom-line physical explanation. You will only find lists of behaviors.

So…how do they know Autism (or each sub-category in the so-called spectrum) is a single disease?

THEY DON’T KNOW.

YES, the children are suffering. YES, they have serious problems. Yes, they are not like other children. YES. But is Autism a single disease? Is it even a spectrum of different types of “developmental disorder,” as advertised? No persuasive evidence exists to affirm that.

I chose Autism for a special reason: the vaccine connection.

I’ll try to boil it down. The medical bosses assert that vaccines COULD NOT be the cause of Autism. On what basis do they say this?

Follow closely. There are diagnosed cases of Autism where the child did not receive any vaccines. Or the child didn’t receive any vaccine containing the neurotoxin mercury.

And since vaccines are demonstrably not the cause IN EVERY CASE OF AUTISM, vaccines are not the cause at all.

You might want to read that last sentence again.

Single cause of a single disease means: the cause is the same in every case of the disease.

This is how the medical bureaucrats refute vaccines as the cause of Autism. This is their “proof.” “Okay. We know (pretend) Autism is a single disease. So it has to have one cause across the board, in every case. Let’s see. Can we find any diagnosed cases where the child didn’t receive vaccines with mercury in them? Yes. We can. All right, end of story. Vaccines couldn’t cause Autism.”

But is Autism (or any sub-type of Autism) a single disease? Is there any convincing proof? Is there a single cause in all cases?

No. If there were, you would find it in the official definition of Autism, and it isn’t there.

At this point, people repeat familiar medical-propaganda slogans: “We’re on the cusp of a breakthrough in finding a genetic cause.” “We’re closer than ever.” “It could turn out to be a virus.” “It might relate to early childhood infections.” “Its roots are neurological, and these days we understand that system at a deeper level than ever before.” “We’re seeing similar patterns in brain scans.”

All supposition. All speculation.

No reason under the sun to accept the idea that what is called Autism is one thing with one cause.

In many cases of what is called Autism, we are looking at vaccine damage, pure and simple. Then CALL IT VACCINE DAMAGE, NOT AUTISM.

In other cases, the cause would be chemical poisoning from a variety of non-vaccine sources. SO CALL IT CHEMICAL POISONING, NOT AUTISM.

In other cases, a severe oxygen deficit. CALL IT OXYGEN DEFICIT.

In other cases, major nutrient deficiencies. CALL IT NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCY.

In other cases, all four of these. CALL IT ALL FOUR OF THESE.

Call “it” what it is found to be, in that given child.

Look into the life and body of each unique child.

Stop using the generalized label, Autism.

Ah, but if that happened, doctors would be forced to do things they aren’t trained to do. And drug companies, the last time I looked, don’t have a safe and effective drug to reverse vaccine damage.

These companies wouldn’t be able to make billions on a drug aimed at some single mythical cause for “Autism.”

If Autism isn’t one disease with one cause, there is no single way to treat all children diagnosed with Autism.

The diagnosis itself is a misnomer and a deception. The label is a deception. A lie.

“Then what’s wrong with my child?” a parent says. “If it isn’t Autism, what is it?”

The answer could only come with a truly honest and competent and skillful examination of the child. That unique child.

Holding out for one grand solution to a problem that isn’t one general problem is doomed.

Many children are waiting for a successful universal treatment that will never come.

There are reports that, in some of cases of “Autism,” hyperbaric oxygen has shown good results.

But what about cases where the real problem is severe nutritional deficit?

It comes down to this: do parents want a solution to what their unique child is really suffering from? If so, then someone has to discover what that is. And then that practitioner has to come up with an answer that truly helps.

Calling all children who have similar generalized symptoms “Autistic” doesn’t help.

But it does provide an avenue of profit for drug companies. Their paid researchers can announce “breakthroughs” and “partial answers” and come in behind that with new drugs.

And then they can even say, “We’ve found the cause,” when they haven’t. They can market a whole raft of drugs that “alleviate the cause.” And make billions of $$, while children still suffer.

Here’s a real-life illustration. The parents of a young boy are at their wit’s end because he has withdrawn from the world. He can’t communicate. His physical coordination is lacking. He has other problems.

The doctor says: Autism.

But another doctor, someone who practices medicine but also has human instincts and a genuine desire to go the distance and help that boy, investigates.

And he finds several crucial things. The boy, who has never had vaccines, has severe nutritional deficiencies. On top of that, he’s extremely sensitive and reactive to certain artificial colors and dyes in processed foods. He has bowel problems, debilitating gastrointestinal infections. He almost strangled on the umbilical chord at birth.

Suppose the the doctor can prepare a comprehensive non-drug program to correct these problems. And after a time, the boy begins to emerge from his isolation. Into the world.

Did he have Autism?

This is like asking whether the victim of an automobile accident had Broken Bone Syndrome.

There is a simplicity at the bottom of all this. When the doctor says, “Your son has VCR$#S or some other label, the parent can say, “Do you have a treatment that will correct the situation?”

If the answer right now is no, there is no reason to buy the label and walk down the tortuous path the label implies.

If later on, the doctor says yes, we definitely do have a cure, then the parent can look at it through a high-power magnifying glass of intelligence and justified skepticism, to find the fine print, and understand what the doctor is really talking about.

Is he telling the truth? Is he lying? Does the supposed cure have such dire adverse effects the child is merely trading one set of crises for another? Are the new crises just masking the old ones?

Here is the rule: if someone claims that a cluster of symptoms adds up to a disease label for many people with that cluster, but the doctor has in his hands no cause for the cluster, there is no reason to assume the label means anything.

Yet still, the parent says, “All right, but the doctor said my son is Autistic. What am I supposed to do?”

Yes, and the doctor probably also says Autism is a neurological disorder and much research is underway, and the prospects are looking better…

But does the doctor have the cause of Autism? Does he have a treatment that really works? Is the parent in better shape by assuming her boy has “Autism,” whatever that is supposed to mean? Is the boy helped in any way by this?

Or is the mother of that child simply assuaged and relieved, because the doctor has put a label on her child who, up to now, was a troubling mystery?

I know people are going to write me with alt. solutions for Autism. They are going to assume there is such a thing (across the board) as Autism and it has a single cause, and there is a brilliant treatment for all of it.

To them I would suggest reading this article again and thinking about what it actually means.

People are also going to say, “But Autism researchers are making progress. They may not have the single cause yet, but they’re getting closer.”

Really? They SAY they’re getting closer. That’s different. What do you expect them to assert? They’re getting farther away?

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