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Quotes about Drug Safety from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"In the debate over prescription drug prices, drug safety, and oversight from the FDA, the assumption has been that everybody has access to the same data and that everybody, from drug safety officers to doctors to insurers, is equally capable of assessing the merits and dangers of a drug. That's not the case. In fact, maybe the real problem with prescription drugs, and indeed with medical technology in general, is not so much that they cost too much or that they're too dangerous or that they don't always work the way they're supposed to." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Staff at the FDA said they were "watching Accutane closely," but "they couldn't require the manufacturer to cooperate in trials of drug safety." One doctor at the NIH told me that the relationship between Accutane and depression "wasn't clinically relevant for dermatology." Based on my interactions with Roche, the manufacturer of Accutane, I did not get the feeling that it was encouraging doctors to research the Accutane and depression issue." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"The FDA and Mind Drugs During 2005 the FDA testified before Congress about the creation of a new and independent drug safety Oversight Board (DSOB) "to oversee the management of drug safety issues."54 The testimony stated that the new DSOB "will enhance the independence of internal deliberations and decisions regarding risk/benefit analyses and consumer safety." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"There is a dire need for an objective, scientific evaluation of drug safety. One of every five drugs introduced to the market between 1975 and 2000 was taken off the market, or had to have so-called black box warnings, because of safety concerns.44 ("Black box warnings," so called because the warning is printed inside a black frame on the package, indicate that the drug may have serious and even life-threatening effects. They are the most serious admonitions that the FDA places on the labels of prescription medications." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"Ross writes: A routine FDA inspection of the practices of the physician who enrolled the most patients—more than 400—[in the Ketek drug safety study] uncovered fraud, including complete fabrication of patient enrollment. The inspector notified FDA criminal investigators, and the physician is currently serving a 57-month sentence in federal prison for her actions. Inspections of nine other sites enrolling high numbers of patients revealed serious violations of trial conduct, raising substantial concerns about the overall integrity of the study." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"In February 2005, the FDA announced the formation of the drug safety Board, an independent entity to "oversee the management of drug safety issues and provide emerging information to health providers and patients about the risks and benefits of medicines."13 The truth is that even with these improved systems in place, we continue to hear horrific stories about previously approved drugs that have caused either life-threatening side effects or, in some cases, death." - Craig Pepin-Donat, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie (Get the book.)

"Food and Drug Administration, drug safety, and the business of drug (and food) marketing. Read them in the spirit of "information is power." Warning: Don't even dabble in these excellent books unless you're willing to have some cherished myths and beliefs about health and medicine challenged. The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney. Though this book focuses on the recent administration, don't let the title fool you. You'll find meticulously documented examples of how "independent" research can be molded to fit a political agenda, regardless of what that agenda happens to be." - Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S., The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth about What Treatments Work and Why (Get the book.)

"What is needed, the editors continued, is for Congress to establish an "independent drug safety board" to track the safety of drugs and medical devices after they are approved for use. Above all, "this agency must be completely independent of influence from the pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology firms, and medical device manufacturers."52 If the connections between the companies and their regulators are suspicious, so are the ties between the industry and physicians. The pharmaceutical industry employs about 88,000 sales representatives, which comes to about one for every five physicians." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"MPH, associate director of drug safety for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on November 18,2004, were part of congressional testimony concerning the dangers of the arthritis medication Vioxx, which had just been taken off the market because of evidence that it increased the risk of heart attack. Yet he could have been talking about the prescription-drug industry in general, especially since he mentioned that Vioxx was not the only medication that posed serious health threats. It was only the tip of the iceberg." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"In February 2005, the FDA announced the formation of the drug safety Board, an independent entity to "oversee the management of drug safety issues and provide emerging information to health providers and patients about the risks and benefits of medicines."13 The truth is that even with these improved systems in place, we continue to hear horrific stories about previously approved drugs that have caused either life-threatening side effects or, in some cases, death." - Craig Pepin-Donat, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie (Get the book.)

"The company's drug safety office was soon deluged with injury reports. On December 30, 1999, employees wrote that they had received sixty reports of patients hit by rhabdomyolysis in the United States in the last two months. "The steadily increasing numbers of spontaneous reports of rhabdomyolysis associated with Baycol, along with the additional telephone activity, has overwhelmed the available safety assurance resources," they wrote in an internal memo." - 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.) "The keystone of the current drug safety system is the prescriber," she explained, "and that learned intermediary is charged with determining for the individual patient whether the benefits outweigh the risks. "Now this system," she said, "has obviously broken down." This failure has created a crisis for all patients, whether they are rich or poor, young or old. Even Americans who don't take prescription drugs are suffering the consequences of the industry's ruthless promotional push. More Americans now abuse prescription drugs than they do cocaine." - 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.)

"KMM@dadlnet.dk. drug safety. 2004;27(12):831-40. It has been suggested that vaccination with the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism. The wide-scale use of the MMR vaccine has been reported to coincide with the apparent increase in the incidence of autism. Case reports have described children who developed signs of both developmental regression and gastrointestinal symptoms shortly after MMR vaccination.A review of the literature revealed no convincing scientific evidence to support a causal relationship between the use of MMR vaccines and autism." - Gary Null and Amy McDonald, The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing (Get the book.)

"Crawford asked if I would come to the Commissioner's Office to oversee the revamping of drug safety at FDA. I explained that I was a scientist, not a manager or a bureaucrat, and I could think of 10 or 12 people outside of FDA who would be perfect for this job, especially if at the end of it, this person was told they could be the director of a new Center for Product Safety."114 Dr." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.) "The FDA Commissioner often relies on advisory panels consisting of scientists he or she selects to evaluate drug safety issues. The choice of whom to place on the panel oftentimes affects the outcome. That is particularly true when those with known conflicts of interest, with economic ties to the very company whose drug is being evaluated, are selected and the conflicts routinely waived. In 2006, the National Research Center for Women & Families evaluated FDA advisory committee meetings from January 1998 through December 2005." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"In the debate over prescription drug prices, drug safety, and oversight from the FDA, the assumption has been that everybody has access to the same data and that everybody, from drug safety officers to doctors to insurers, is equally capable of assessing the merits and dangers of a drug. That's not the case. In fact, maybe the real problem with prescription drugs, and indeed with medical technology in general, is not so much that they cost too much or that they're too dangerous or that they don't always work the way they're supposed to." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Legislation needs to be introduced removing from FDA the power to determine drug safety and efficacy. FDA's legacy of censorship of science, duplicity, and approval of unsafe drugs has proven the agency, regardless of who Congress has chosen to run it, entirely incapable of reliably protecting the public from unsafe drugs. FDA suffers from a pervasive corruption in which the instruments of governance are under the control of its principal regulatees." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"The Fresno Bee (February 11, 2005) reported: "Officials at the Food and Drug Administration asked Canadian regulators to refrain from suspending the use of the hyperactivity drug Adder-all XR, because the FDA could not handle another 'drug safety crisis.'" Meanwhile, the FDA is allowing the drug's sales to continue in the United States. A million children in the US are taking one form or the other of Adderall, almost always for ADHD." - Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey, The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes "Patients" of Normal Children (Get the book.)

"Rigged its drug safety review panels with decision makers who have substantial financial ties to drug companies, even while refusing to disclose such blatant conflicts of interest. Planned, organized, and took part in armed "SWAT-style" raids on vitamin shops, pet food stores, and even a church. Knowingly approved harmful food additives for widespread use in the food supply (such as aspartame, which has a rather dubious history and has been proven toxic in several studies), even when its own safety experts recommended denying approval." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.)

"Unfortunately, doctors may not be able to provide their patients with all the details on side effects. They aren't hiding anything; they just can't keep up with new information. There are more than five thousand medical journals, each of which publishes twenty articles a month, meaning that there are more than 1 million articles published each year. It's impossible for anyone to read all of this, let alone a busy general practitioner or internist, or even a specialist, all of whom are often buried by insurance forms and HMO paperwork." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety. were not followed in nearly half (49.6%) of the prescriptions. The most common omission was the recommendation for a pregnancy test when a woman was given a new prescription. In addition, almost 13% of the patients who were taking drugs that required them to be monitored by ongoing lab tests did not receive such monitoring, according to the study. We need to think about communicating the risks of drugs more effectively." - Bottom Line Health, Bottom Line's Health Breakthroughs 2007 (Get the book.)

"It's called off-label drug use, and it's a common practice that promotes the sale of prescription drugs and circumvents the so-called "gold standard" drug safety procedures the FDA claims to enforce. Here's how it works: once a drug gets approved for any condition, whether it's a skin disorder, a mental disorder, or a cardiovascular problem, it can then be legally prescribed by doctors for everything. In other words, a drug approved for heart disease can be prescribed for diabetes, even though there's absolutely no testing done whatsoever with the drug on diabetes patients." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.)

"Using the search engine will yield very specific information — for instance, the transcript of an advisory committee meeting about the safety of Paxil — and very general information about drug safety issues, some of which is worth reading. But a better site for detailed scholarly research about specific drugs is the Pub Med section of the National Library of Medicine (www.nlm .nih.gov); the search feature will give you abstracts and links to journals, where you can access (sometimes for free, often for a fee) the original full text." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

"Congressional Report Assails FDA on drug safety Wall Street Journal. 4/24/2006; Page A3 Chapter 6 1. The best book reviewing the rise of IG Farben and the business connections of the Rockefellers with Bayer and Hitler is The Crime And Punishment of I.G. Farben by Joseph Borkin. The book is out of print, it can be read in full at: http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/PHARMACEUTICAL_BUSINESS/history_of_the_pharma-ceutical_industry.htm This link is also the best overall reference for those interested in the Nazi/Codex vitamin regulation efforts. 2." - Byron J. Richards, Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America (Get the book.)

"The wall begins to crumble But the real earthquake to hit the world of medicines regulation came in the summer of 2004, when first Professor Eric Topol, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, Ohio, spoke to the New York Times, and then, Dr David Graham, an FDA official, supported him by telling a US Senate hearing in October 2004 that his agency's approval of Vioxx had led to the 'single greatest drug safety catastrophe in the history of this country or the history of the world'." - Jacky Law, Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda (Get the book.)

"You'll see how the FDA goes along with this, even to the point of censoring negative drug safety results it doesn't want to see. The FDA is simultaneously engaged in absolutely outrageous acts, like refusing to ban drugs that have been proven deadly to the American public in order to protect the profits of drug companies, and allowing those drugs to stay on the market as long as possible. We saw this with a diabetes drug called Rezulin. This is just one example of many where the FDA has put industry profits ahead of public safety. Today, we live in the Dark Ages of medicine." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.)

"Even worse, he had dared to call for the creation of an independent drug safety board, a reasonable enough notion to most human beings but one that sounded like "I eat Satan flakes for breakfast" to Holmer's CEOs. And Wood had spoken publicly about another heresy: perhaps, he said, it would be a good idea to wait for a while before doing DTC on new drugs. That did it for him. As Spilker recalls, "When I got the list back from circulation among the members, there were exactly two names circled for elimination." One was Dr." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

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