Homeopathy Papers

Tidbits 19 — Myths about Modern Medicine

Written by Elaine Lewis

Elaine sets the record straight.

  1. It’s Evidence-Based Medicine

There is evidence, of a sort: cherry-picked, manipulated and riddled with conflict-of-interest!   According to world-renowned meta-researcher Dr. John Ioannidis and his team of scientists, 90% of the published information doctors rely on is flawed.1/

Ioannidis (pronounced Yo-need-eez), in going through major medical journals, was struck by how often gold-standard findings would later be retracted.  Examples: mammograms, colonoscopies and PSA tests are now in disfavor; Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, gold-star antidepressants, now heralded as no better than placebo; aspirin once a day to protect against heart attacks–now seen as ineffective and dangerous.2/

OMG.  And now, I have to update this, because incredibly, a major cancer hospital associated with Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the #4 cancer hospital in the country, has been caught faking its animal research, using photo-shopped images to suggest that certain mice were progressing in a way that they weren’t.  Here’s the headline from Nature.com:

Dana-Farber retractions: meet the blogger who spotted problems in dozens of cancer papers

The prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, acknowledged yesterday that it would seek retractions for six papers and corrections for an additional 31 — some co-authored by DFCI chief executive Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer William Hahn and several other prominent cancer researchers. The news came after scientific-image sleuth Sholto David posted his concerns about more than 50 manuscripts to a blog on 2 January.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00202-9

Note that this fraud goes all the way to the top at Dana-Farber, including the Chief Executive Officer and the Chief Operating Officer.  Why would this be happening?  One possible explanation:  Medical journals want sensational articles.  A study that’s “sensational” is going to sell the magazine.  Medical journals reject 90% of submissions and being published is essential to researchers who want to keep their funding; so, the pressure is on to make an outlandish or “ground-breaking” claim and back it up by skewing the results if necessary; hence, so many “never mind!” (as they call them) articles appearing months or years later as the truth finally comes out.

Ioannidis honed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research articles of the previous 13 years, only to find that almost half of them (41%) had been demonstrated to be wrong!  (What you saw in a previous issue about taking an aspirin a day?  Well…. “Never mind!”)

Ioannidis’ findings were published in JAMA.3/

As if to confirm this information, Glen Begley, former drug company researcher, and a team of scientists, selected 53 trial results from top medical journals and couldn’t replicate 47 of them! 4/  I’m sure you know that one of the criteria that makes for a genuinely scientific finding is something called “repeatability”.  If the research is there, you can repeat an experiment and get the same result.  Well, it seems that the overwhelming majority of these “studies” can’t be repeated!

So what does that mean, then?  An 89% failure rate?  89% of the studies in journals are unreliable?  That comports with Ioannidis’ findings that 90% of published information doctors rely on is flawed!  

Again, incredibly, when biotech company, Amgen, tried to confirm 53 published journal studies, they found that they could only replicate six of them! 5/  Once again, that’s an 89% failure rate!  These 53 studies had been considered “landmark”!

Unbelievably, yet again, drug company, Bayer, in conducting a similar study, found that they could only confirm 25% of published studies, the majority of which had to do with cancer research.  

So here’s what happens: trials start piggy-backing on the flawed studies; they become the foundation for whole new levels of research and whole new drugs and protocols!  Before you know it, cancer patients are taking chemotherapy drugs predicated entirely on the faulty premise of the original study!  As recounted in the journal Nature:

“Some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original [faulty] observation….”6/

It’s just mind boggling!

 

  1. It’s Been Tested

Yes, it’s been tested, alright; but, I don’t think you want to know where!  It’s not what you think!  Big Pharma is testing drugs mostly in China, India, Estonia, Argentina, Nigeria, Moldavia… pretty much anywhere you can find the poor, the illiterate, the unsophisticated and the uneducated.  Why?  You can tell them anything (like the reason they’re there is to get medical treatment) and pay them next to nothing.  However, since this is a wind-fall for most of these people, they’re frequently “professional drug trial volunteers”, skewing the results by being in so many trials and on so many drugs at the same time!  

Of course, there’s no over-sight of trials outside of the United States, and no one cares!  No one is over-seeing these trials, no government agency, not even the drug company, which has farmed the trial out to for-profit independent contractors, and they do everything!  They recruit the subjects, set up the rules, conduct the trial, write the reports, ghost-write journal articles and guess what?  They can do as many trials as they want until they finally get one to turn out “right”, then they can submit that trial and bury all the others that failed including all the subjects and children who died or were injured during the trial–and yes, plenty of drugs are tested on children, even babies!

Half of all clinical trials have never been published.7/  

Take the popular flu drug, Tamiflu.  Eight of the 10 trials done on Tamiflu have never been released by Roche.8/

As for the antibiotic, Ketek, it couldn’t be approved based on the trial done in Alabama because that trial, conducted for Aventis by Dr. Anne Kirkman-Campbell, was outed as a fraud.9/  The data from 91% of her patients were falsified!  Nonetheless, the drug was approved based on the results that came in from what they call the “rescue countries”— in this case, Tunisia, Morocco, Hungary and Turkey.

After a while, reports of people suffering side effects began crossing the desks of the FDA. Eventually, FDA’s own researchers began to complain, saying 4,000 infants and children were recruited into trials for Ketek’s effectiveness in ear infections and tonsilitis and the whole thing was unethical.  The internal squabble was leaking out of FDA’s tightly knit confines, there were inquiries from Congress.  The day before a Congressional hearing on the Ketek matter was to start, FDA finally ordered a black-box warning to be placed on the antibiotic in 2006.  By then the agency had received 93 reports of severe adverse reactions and 12 deaths.

When FDA’s chief reviewer, David Ross, explained the reasons for his objections to Ketek, he told the congressional committee that it was… “Because FDA broke its own rules and allowed Ketek on the market, because dozens of patients have died or suffered needlessly, because FDA allowed Ketek’s maker to experiment with it on children over reviewers’ protests, because FDA ignored warnings about fraud, and because FDA used data it knew were false to reassure the public about Ketek’s safety.”10/

Anne Marie Cisneros, who had been hired to monitor Kirkman-Campbell’s trial, insisted to congress that the drug company, Aventis, had not been a victim of fraud as they claimed. “What brings me here today is my disbelief at Aventis’ statements that it did not know that fraud was being committed.  Mr. Chairman, I knew it, PPD knew it, and Aventis knew it.”11/

In the same vein, in the mid-’90’s, Glaxo conducted trials on Paxil.  The trials showed no beneficial effects on teenagers, some of the trials showed that placebo was more effective!  A Glaxo internal memo surfaced saying how important it was to “effectively manage the dissemination of these data in order to minimize any potential commercial impact. … It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy had not been demonstrated.”12/  Yikes!  

Here’s my favorite!  Astra Zeneca’s drug trial comparing Seroquel with Haldol produced an internal email in which a company executive praised the project physician by saying she had done a great “smoke-and-mirrors job” by putting a positive spin on “this cursed study.”13/  Good grief!

 

3.  The FDA Is Overseeing the Whole Thing!

If by “overseeing” you mean “ignoring”, then, yes, they are overseeing the whole thing!

In 2008, the FDA (which stands for the Food and Drug Administration) inspected less than 2% of trial sites inside the United States and less than 1% of trial sites outside the United States.14/  It’s also supposed to inspect drug manufacturing plants, which it also doesn’t do!  Proof being the 2008 Heparin contamination scare when the FDA had no idea where the Heparin was coming from!  Months and 200 deaths later, it was finally found to be coming from China!15/

The FDA is terrified of whistle-blowers.  It spies on its own employees.  FDA drug reviewer for 10 years, Ronald Kavanagh, says in an interview with Truth-Out, “While I was at FDA, drug reviewers were clearly told not to question drug companies and that our job was to approve drugs. …  If we asked questions that could delay or prevent a drug’s approval, which of course was our job, management would reprimand us, reassign us, hold secret meetings about us, and worse. … Sometimes we were literally instructed to only read a … summary and to accept drug company claims without examining the actual data, which on multiple occasions I found directly contradicted the summary document.  Other times I was ordered not to review certain sections of the submission but invariably, that’s where the safety issues would be. … On another occasion, a company clearly stated in a meeting that they had ‘paid for an approval’.”16/  Yikes!

Why does the FDA act like its client is the drug industry?  Because it is!  What is a client but someone who pays for your services?  Do you know who funds the FDA?  Tax dollars?  No.  The drug companies!  I know that’s hard to believe!  David Graham, another FDA whistle-blower said in 2005, “As currently configured, the FDA is not able to adequately protect the American public.  It’s more interested in protecting the interests of industry.  It views industry as its client.”17/

Are there any questions?  Is there anything you don’t understand?  I’ll sum it up for you:  

It’s a fraud.  It’s just about making money, it has nothing to do with health!  If you want to be healthy?  Start eating whole foods, stop eating at McDonald’s, stop eating processed food, switch to whole grains, buy a juicer! 

I know some of you are finding this hard to accept, but, maybe you’ll believe John Oliver:

I’ll be back again next month with more Modern Medicine “Marvels”!

Until then, if you need medicine?  Look into Homeopathy, Reiki, Acupressure, traditional Chinese herbal medicine, juicing…things that actually work!

See you in October.

***

Footnotes

  1. Freedman, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science”: the Atlantic, 2010.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/

  1. Ibid.
  1. Ibid.
  1. Mercola, “Publication Bias”, 2013

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/02/13/publication-bias.aspx

  1. Mercola, “Male Scientists’ Threat to Intregity of Research”, 2014

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/05/14/scientific-research-bias.aspx

  1. Ibid.
  1. Mercola, “Publication Bias”, 2013
  1. Ibid.
  1. Bartlett and Steele, “Deadly Medicine”: Vanity Fair, Jan. 2011, p. 1

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/deadly-medicine-201101

10. Ibid., p.2

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p.3

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 2

15. Ibid., p. 3

16. Mercola, “Shocking Story Reveals How the FDA Is Recklessly Abandoning Drug Safety”: Health Impact News Daily, 9/15/2014

http://healthimpactnews.com/2012/shocking-story-reveals-how-the-fda-is-recklessly-abandoning-drug-safety/

17. Ibid

——————————————-

Elaine Lewis, D.Hom., C.Hom.

Elaine takes online cases! Write to her at [email protected]

Visit her website: elaineLewis.hpathy.com

About the author

Elaine Lewis

Elaine Lewis, D.Hom., C.Hom.
Elaine is a passionate homeopath, helping people offline as well as online. Contact her at [email protected]
Elaine is a graduate of Robin Murphy's Hahnemann Academy of North America and author of many articles on homeopathy including her monthly feature in the Hpathy ezine, "The Quiz". Visit her website at:
https://elainelewis.hpathy.com/ and TheSilhouettes.org

9 Comments

  • Thanks Alan! Deception. I agree. I loved the internal email from Astra Zenica executive to Project Physician of Seroquel trial, “Great job of smoke-and-mirrors!” Unbelievable!

  • Blood curdling ! As I read this article, chills moved up and down my spine!

    What humans could do to fellow humans for sake of money ! Money is akin to white ants that destroy the wood in which they live! Money eats up the soul of the human, make him a robot working at the command of the desire called ‘ MONEY” !

    God save Humanity !

  • What is the take-home message for homeopaths/homeopathy. Can homeopaths convene an international FDA equivalent that promises the quality of remedies. How can a homeopath be sure that he “really” gets a 200C or 10M or MM remedy from a supplier. How can the reliability of homeopathic process and contamination be assured across all remedies. Why, even after all these years, homeopaths are still not in a position for a FHA (Federal Homeopathic Association) that monitors the Homeopathic Pharma Industry, especially since most remedies come from India and China?

    • Onnulla, homeopathy may have a lot of issues of its own to come to terms with, but, as our editor Alan Schmukler wrote recently, the problem with allopathic drugs is that even when prescribed correctly and for the right disease, these drugs kill! As far as I know, the only way you can be hurt by a homeopathic remedy is to take it not according to the Organon and Hahnemann’s instructions. You ask what can homeopaths take away from this. I think an awful lot of homeopaths have been just as taken in by what Alan has called the “Pharma deception” as everyone else; homeopaths are just as likely to tell their client, “You should be on an antibiotic, you should see a doctor, you should be on anti-inflammatories….” A lot of homeopaths have told me, “I don’t take acute cases,” and send people to doctors for things a homeopath should be able to handle; they need to see how they’re putting their clients at risk by being so in awe of allopathy. I’d be interested in hearing what other people have to say.

  • Dear Elaine,

    Love how you put it! Your article could also be titled “Modern Marvels” as one can not help but marvel at how the medical establishment allows the state of medicine in this country to continue unchecked!

    I think that after a medical student has spent so many painstaking hours becoming a full fledged M.D. it is really a hard pill to swallow to admit that much of what they have been taught in regards to treating illness is ineffective, suppressive and in the end will harm the patient which is against the hippocratic oath. Rather than ADMIT this it is clearly less painful to DENY what is really going on.

    I find it crazy that when someone is sick in the hospital that they are not ever prescribed vitamin C! How can that even be possible?

    You are a great writer. Thank you for bringing your article to all of us, Caralyn

  • Thanks, Caralyn! Yes, it’s really hard to believe that after all these years, they are still digging in their heels against Vitamin C and almost any natural approach to healing! And when they finally hit a wall, they would rather tell a patient, “Sorry, you just have to learn to live with it,” rather than say, “You know, there are other kinds of medicine out there, there’s acupuncture, there’s Traditional Chinese herbal Medicine, there are lots of things, you really ought to investigate.” They’d rather say, “There’s no hope.” It took me a long time to realize that when a doctor says, “There’s no cure for this disease,” what they really mean is, “There’s no drug.” That’s all that statement means! As far as they’re concerned, there are only drugs in this world, nothing else is real.

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