Quotes about Drug Companies from the world's top natural health / natural living authors
Email this page to a friendpage 1 of 15 | Next ->
 "You may have noticed the deluge of advertisements from drug companies in the media in the past several years. Direct-to-consumer ads is a new trend and one that is predicted to strengthen; in 1997 drug companies spent about $1 billion on direct-to-consumer ads, but by 2004 that number had increased to more than $4 billion. drug companies rely so much on profit generated from drugs, especially new ones attached to active patents, that they've begun persuasive marketing campaigns targeting consumers direcuy."- Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith, The Detox Strategy: Vibrant Health in 5 Easy Steps (Get the book.) |
 "One reason is because these drugs are intended for children, and children represent a market category that has historically been of marginal interest to drug companies. drug companies are generally reluctant to invest in medications for kids, because there are so many difficult legal issues involved with administering drugs to children. Also, even though autism is now more common than ever before, it is still a small market segment when compared to the markets that exist for conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, and depression."- Kenneth Bock, Healing the New Childhood Epidemics: Autism, ADHD, Asthma, and Allergies: The Groundbreaking Program for the 4-A Disorders (Get the book.) |
| "Direct-to-consumer ads is a new trend and one that is predicted to strengthen; in 1997 drug companies spent about $1 billion on direct-to-consumer ads, but by 2004 that number had increased to more than $4 billion. drug companies rely so much on profit generated from drugs, especially new ones attached to active patents, that they've begun persuasive marketing campaigns targeting consumers direcuy. In doing so, many times they will angle an ad to make you think you need this pill or that potion to live a healthier, longer life (as in "Ask your doctor if X is right for you."" - Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith, The Detox Strategy: Vibrant Health in 5 Easy Steps (Get the book.) |
 "Surely this is further evidence of the lack of innovation in the big drug companies.
There is a related problem. The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the scientific process that supposedly underlies their existence. And we, the people, or at least our government, have let them do it! The very clinical trials which are crucial in establishing a new drug's efficacy are designed, carried out, and interpreted not by independent investigators, but by the very drug companies that have an enormous vested interest in the outcomes."- Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.) |
 "By default, that would force drug companies to put more of their efforts into developing truly innovative drugs. To start with, U.S. patent law should be enforced in its original form. Courts have progressively weakened the requirement that new discoveries or inventions be useful, novel, and non-obvious. There is no possible justification, for instance, for a new patent on Prozac to treat premenstrual tension. Examiners in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office should not receive bonuses based on how many patent applications they handle."- Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.) "But "education" comes out of the drug companies' marketing budgets. That should tell you what is really going on. As in all other businesses, there is an inherent conflict of interest between selling products and assessing them. Pfizer, for instance, is hardly likely to provide impartial information about how its Zoloft compares with GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil to treat depression, or indeed, about whether either one of them is any good. Nor can it be relied on to teach us about depression itself." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.) "In 2001, the ten American drug companies in the Fortune 500 list (not quite the same as the top ten worldwide, but their profit margins are much the same) ranked far above all other American industries in average net return, whether as a percentage of sales (18.5 percent), of assets (16.3 percent), or of shareholders' equity (33.2 percent). These are astonishing margins. For comparison, the median net return for all other industries in the Fortune 500 was only 3.3 percent of sales." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.) "Even in this small collection, only seven came from the top ten U.S. drug companies. There were one each from Pharmacia, Merck, and Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2000; one from Merck in 2001; none in 2002; and one each from Pharmacia, Wyeth, and Abbott in 2003. Where was Pfizer? Lilly? Schering-Plough? That paltry output nowhere near justifies all the rhetoric about how innovative the American pharmaceutical industry is, or all the warnings that if we dare regulate prices, we will jeopardize the prodigious flow of lifesaving medicines." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.) |
 "Unfortunately, it took the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) until 2005 to require drug companies to add black box warnings to antidepressant labels about the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children and adolescents, and until 2007 to extend that warning to young adults aged eighteen to twenty-four.
The Promise of Orthomolecular Psychiatry and Psychoimmunology
¦¦?
Despite the forces defending the medical status quo, change is happening. There are some physicians—albeit a relative handful out of the 700,000 in the US—who are using the therapies referred to in this book."- Gary Null and Amy McDonald, The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing (Get the book.) "The big drug companies, with all their money, pay hundreds of millions to show the efficacy of the drugs they make their profits from. Because of their self-interest and the resulting biases, the fairness and accuracy of these studies are increasingly doubtful. But where are the efficacy studies, the scientific studies, for nutritional approaches to illness? Where are the studies of nonproprietary vitamin supplements? They don't exist, because these are already in the public domain. They are inexpensive. So the pharmaceutical companies don't want us to know about them." - Gary Null and Amy McDonald, The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing (Get the book.) "It was never really popular because you can't patent a plant and so drug companies can't make millions of dollars on it. Kava has been for the past several years very popular in Europe and is finally hitting the US." As Kilham explains it, the Polynesians and the Melanesians pound the root and make a beverage out of it, which they drink on an almost daily basis as a relaxing beverage. For medicinal purposes, use extracts of the root. The root contains a group of naturally occurring compounds known as the kava lactones. They are skeletal muscle relaxants." - Gary Null and Amy McDonald, The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing (Get the book.) |
 "As of Spring 2007,1 have carried out my last consulting obligations and will accept no more consulting money directly from drug companies.
As I mentioned, the mass media also plays a fundamental role in disseminating the war metaphors. By quoting experts who offer words of encouragement using complex (and often bellicose) medical terminology, and by enthusiastically publicizing new neuroimaging devices and pharmaceuticals, the mass media legitimizes, informs, and helps shape the myth of
Alzheimer's disease that we have all come to know."- Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.) "The effect sizes are often small and exaggerated by the authors, especially in studies supported by the drug companies. In many cases, placebos cause improvements, and sometimes perform better than biologically active treatments. Furthermore, side effects are often underreported and studies are often not of long enough duration to establish long-term safety. Moreover, people who participate in RCTs are often carefully selected to be healthier or to have more clear-cut diagnostic categories." - Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.) "Primary-care doctors tend not to be impressed by the therapeutic effects of the currently available antidementia drugs, a feeling I share. drug companies expend enormous amounts of effort and cash to get opinion leaders like myself to convince doctors in the trenches to use their medications. At stake is the credibility of specialists, who must stand up for their patients and not answer to the powerful empire of the drug industry. Why do drugs cost four dollars a day for the individual consumer?" - Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.) "Nor would drug companies find the path to profits so clearly marked if cognitive dysfunction were considered a natural outgrowth of the aging process rather than a pathological condition called Alzheimer's disease or Mild Cognitive Impairment that could be treated with pills. In 2004 a conference organized by the International Psychogeriatrics Association was held in Washington to gather consensus on the clinical usage of MCI. During the conference, Henry Brodaty, a friend and colleague of mine, and I tried to point out the social and cultural difficulties with the use of the label." - Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.) |
 "This is called detailing a pharmaceutical because it involves educating the practitioner about all the various "details" of the drug, from how it works and interacts with other medications, to dosing and possible side effects. drug companies obviously spend a lot of money on this one-to-one approach in order to bring this level of education to each individual healthcare practitioner, but it does let them get more comfortable with drugs new to the market.
Not so with nutraceuticals."- Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D., The Sinatra Solution Metabolic Cardiology (Get the book.) "It is fundamental to health and people need to hear about it, but the drug companies are not going to carry the message. Someone has to get the word out, and that's why Dr. Sinatra and I are such advocates. Our agenda is to improve the nation's cardiac health—why should our patients be the only ones to get better? That's why we spend so much of our time away from home educating doctors and patients about the fundamental relationship between nutrition and health and wellness. So why don't classically trained cardiologists recognize this? Why don't they flock to this message?" - Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D., The Sinatra Solution Metabolic Cardiology (Get the book.) "Nutritional therapies do not move the revenue needle for hospitals, doctors, research institutions, or the drug companies. And, because traditionally doctors have not been well trained in biochemistry, there is a lot of misunderstanding about the fundamental physiological relationships between basic cellular bioenergetics and cardiac function. Because of this lack of understanding, doctors don't want to be known as "vitamin doctors." They don't want their local peers to see them as kooks, and don't want referrals from family doctors to dry up." - Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D., The Sinatra Solution Metabolic Cardiology (Get the book.) |
 "Pharmacia's marketers had created the disease and a new medicine market, and now they were expanding it, making it even more lucrative. And drug companies of all sizes began funneling more of their research dollars into developing medicines aimed at keeping busy Americans away from the toilet. In 2003 the Swiss drugmaker Novartis, flush with cash from selling the antifungal drug Lamisil and other medicines to Americans, plunked down $225 million for an experimental bladder pill that was being considered for approval by the FDA."- Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.) |
 "If your risk is low, say 2 chances out of 100 that you will sustain a CVD event, and statin therapy reduces your risk to 1 chance out of 100 (the 50 percent risk reduction rate the drug companies talk about), should you spend $1,200 per year for the rest of your life to take a drug that will not prolong your life? Vitamin C delays the rate at which arteries clog, decreases cardiovascular event rate, and lowers overall mortality. Vitamin
C costs pennies a day. Antioxidants and essential fatty acids do the same for $250 a year.
The big fallout from statin abuse is coming."- Stephen Sinatra, M.D. and James C., M.D. Roberts, Reverse Heart Disease Now: Stop Deadly Cardiovascular Plaque Before It's Too Late (Get the book.) |
 "The last "miracle pill" released on the market, Phen-Phen, ended up killing people, but the drug companies haven't given up, because the American public would much rather take pills that kill hunger than address the emotional source of the compulsion to overeat.
Phen-Phen wasn't the first weight-loss medication to endanger health. Dexedrine, an amphetamine, was commonly used for weight loss but has largely been discredited. Many people who started taking Dexedrine to lose weight ended up addicted, less hungry and less dependent on food, but more dependent on the drug."- Roger Gould, Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever (Get the book.) |
 "In the United States, bioidentical hormones are now available from drug companies, with hundreds of studies showing their efficacy in reducing heart disease risk factors, protecting women's uterine linings, and preventing waning bone densities. Studies using transdermal estrogen have not shown increases in blood clotting, as occurs with oral estrogen preparations (also discussed in chapter 9).
In Europe, women are commonly treated with transdermal estradiol gels and natural progesterone, and there are many well-conducted studies proving their efficacy and safety."- Phuli Cohan, The Natural Hormone Makeover: 10 Steps to Rejuvenate Your Health and Rediscover Your Inner Glow (Get the book.) "We did that, not the drug companies, and we can take women's health to the next level. The Future of Hormones The future of hormones is now. With a simple blood test, we can look at your DNA and determine if you are at risk for breast cancer, stroke, heart disease, dementia, or osteoporosis. Your daughter can take this same test to see if she is at risk of a stroke if she uses birth control pills. You now have the tools to learn which enzymes in your body, coded by your DNA, are sluggish, and what foods and supplements you need to move them along." - Phuli Cohan, The Natural Hormone Makeover: 10 Steps to Rejuvenate Your Health and Rediscover Your Inner Glow (Get the book.) "Fortunately, more and more drug companies are marketing natural versions of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. But not all doctors are trained in using natural hormones. If you don't know whom to contact, try asking a compounding pharmacy what doctors are using natural hormones. Compounding pharmacies can be found in every state. By going online at IACP (International Academy of Compounding Pharmacies) you can readily find a compounding pharmacist near you. (Recommended pharmacies are listed at the end of chapter 7." - Phuli Cohan, The Natural Hormone Makeover: 10 Steps to Rejuvenate Your Health and Rediscover Your Inner Glow (Get the book.) |
 "Those parts of the study where the drug has had no or only an insignificant advantage over the placebo effect are simply omitted from the study's final report.
The drug companies reporting their findings to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only need to prove that the tested drug have shown some benefit in some people. If the researchers manage to recruit enough candidates with a positive disposition that are likely to produce a good placebo response to the drug treatment, they may hit the jackpot and produce a "convincing" study, and a marketable drug."- Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not A Disease - It's A Survival Mechanism (Get the book.) "The result is a permanent and ever-increasing source of income for drug companies, shareholders, medical institutions and medical practitioners. If universal health care becomes a reality in the U.S., we will also experience a massive escalation of diseases and disease-related fatalities. Many people who currently cannot afford costly medical expenses or medical insurance tend to seek more natural, inexpensive ways of dealing with illness; or else they don't seek any treatment at all." - Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not A Disease - It's A Survival Mechanism (Get the book.) "One of America's billion-dollar drug companies attempted to produce an anti-cancer drug from Graviola after it discovered that this compound was 10,000 times more toxic to colon cancer cells than a common chemo drug. It found Graviola to be lethal to 12 different kinds of malignant cells, especially those that cause lung, prostate, and breast cancers, and to be safe enough to protect healthy cells instead of killing them. With Graviola, the patient experiences no nausea or hair loss, major weight loss, or weakness. Rather than compromising the immune system, Graviola actually strengthens it." - Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not A Disease - It's A Survival Mechanism (Get the book.) |
 "By far, the key contributor to this dangerous misperception of what health care means is the pharmaceutical industry. The drug companies thrive in a state where people remain sick and more are getting sick, as that means both repeat customers and a growing base for their overpriced treatments." He went on to say through his report that drug companies generate hundreds of billions of dollars in profit annually. This enormous amount of capital has created the largest legislative lobbying influence in Congress. If you would like to read this whole report, go to: www. mercola. com/forms/myvision."- Gregory, A. Gore, Defeat Cancer (Get the book.) |
page 1 of 15 | Next ->
FAIR USE NOTICE: The research quoted here is provided under the protection of Fair Use provisions and published by the 501(c)3 non-profit Consumer Wellness Center for the purposes of public comment and education. Authors / publishers may submit books for consideration of inclusion here.
TERMS OF USE: Read full terms of use. Citations of text from NaturalPedia must include: 1) Full credit to the original author and book title. 2) Secondary credit to the Natural News Naturalpedia as a research resource and a link to www.NaturalPedia.com
This unique compilation of research is copyright (c) 2008, 2009 by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center.
ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of NaturalPedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.
| Email announcements powered by Campaign Enterprise from ArialSoftware.com |
