When it comes to our health, taking one person’s word as doctrine might not be the best idea, whether they are a doctor or not. What one person truly believes to be the best course of action in treating an illness may be the last thing someone else recommends, depending on a complex range of factors, including where and how they were educated, and, in particular, who funded that education. Indeed, many concerns have been raised about the use of industry-accepted pharmaceuticals, often by the very doctors who were told to use them. We now have, moreover, an overwhelming amount of evidence to corroborate what many of these professionals have been trying to tell us for decades:
The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.
There is a reason why the most widely accessed article in the history of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is entitled, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. In the report, researchers stated that most current published research findings are false, and this was more than 10 years.
Dr. Peter Gotzsche, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration (the world’s most foremost body in assessing medical evidence), hopes to make clear this very problem. He is currently working to inform the world about the dangers associated with several pharmaceutical grade drugs. Based on his research, he estimates that 100,000 people in the United States alone die each year from the side-effects of correctly used prescription drugs, noting that “it’s remarkable that nobody raises an eyebrow when we kill so many of our own citizens with drugs.” He published a paper last year in the Lancet arguing that our use of antidepressants is causing more harm than good, and taking into consideration the recent leaks regarding antidepressant drugs, it seems he is correct.
The most recent example of this kind of corruption in relation to antidepressants comes from a study that was published last week in the British Medical Journal by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen.
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