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"Meanwhile, the Food and Dmg Adminisfration cites examples in which premature permission to use newly discovered therapies ended in disaster--like the thalidomide situation. However, lets compare the risk to benefit ratio of thalidomide and altemative cancer freatment: -Thalidomide. >Benefits: an entirely elective dmg used to relieve the mild symptoms of nausea. >Risks: taken during an extremely vulnerable phase of life, pregnancy." - Patrick Quillin, Beating Cancer with Nutrition (Get the book.)

"DES, Premarin, thalidomide, and Vioxx, to name a few, were all FDA-approved but are now known to be associated with increased risks of cancer, blood clots, birth defects, and heart disease. FDA approval does not mean that no possible harm can come to you from using a medication. ?There are no studies supporting the safety or efficacy of bioidentical hormones. This is not true. Bioidentical hormones have been used by physicians in this country and worldwide for over twenty years." - Phuli Cohan, The Natural Hormone Makeover: 10 Steps to Rejuvenate Your Health and Rediscover Your Inner Glow (Get the book.)

"And then there were the failures of biomedicine, rendered more visible by its many successes: iatrogenic disease, nosocomial infection, antibiotic resistance, thalidomide. Western consumers were disenchanted by science, and living in societies rapidly transforming around political movements—including feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, and multiculturalism?dedicated to redressing social imbalances which had often been reinforced by the science of earlier eras." - Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine?: A History (Get the book.)

"In promotional materials, Griinenthal said that thalidomide was "completely safe." With these promises, millions of people outside America had begun taking the drug to help them sleep. Foreign doctors were also giving the medicine to pregnant women to alleviate the nausea and vomiting of morning sickness. The German company proclaimed in its advertisements that the drug was "especially well-suited for calming down anxious, nervous and restless children . . . Excellent for babies." - 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.) "Merrell had explained that the doctors would be part of "a trial" of thalidomide. Actually, the "trial" was later revealed to be more about promoting the sleeping pill than about gathering scientific information. For one thing, the company's marketing department was in charge of it. And according to internal documents later obtained by The Sunday Times of London, Merrell told its sales reps that the "objective" of signing up doctors to participate in the trial was "for the purpose of selling them on Kevadon," the company's brand name for the drug." - 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.) "Public outrage about the thalidomide tragedy stirred Congress to reconsider Senator Kefauver's proposal. On October 10, 1962, members of both the House and the Senate unanimously passed the Kefauver-Harris amendments. None of Kefauver's proposals aimed at reducing drug prices was left in the bill, but the new law greatly strengthened the FDA's control over the marketing and promotion of prescription drugs. It also required the companies once again to focus on good science." - 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.)

"A mandate for efficacy awaited another disaster, the thalidomide tragedy, following which the Kefauver-Harris Amendments were passed in 1962 demanding "substantial evidence" of benefit as well as safety and purity before any new drug could be licensed for sale in the United States. And so the modern fda came into being, charged with designing and revising the process by which this mandate can be served. That was a watershed for consumer safety. It also marks the modern age of biostatistics and epidemiology: methodologies had to be devised to serve this mandate and revised repeatedly." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"However, lets compare the risk to benefit ratio of thalidomide and altemative cancer freatment: -Thalidomide. >Benefits: an entirely elective dmg used to relieve the mild symptoms of nausea. >Risks: taken during an extremely vulnerable phase of life, pregnancy. We know, for instance, that small amounts of alcohol will not harm most healthy adults, but the same amount of alcohol could create permanent birth defects when consumed by pregnant women. The results of thalidomide use were catastrophic, with thousands of newborn infants suffering irremedial birth defects." - Patrick Quillin, Beating Cancer with Nutrition (Get the book.)

"Reviewing the world's literature on thalidomide, Dr. Frances Kelsey of the FDA found reason for alarm and lead the FDA refusal to license thalidomide for marketing in the US. But we saw occasional cases in the US, largely in the offspring of Armed Forces families stationed abroad; and there were cases aplenty in Canada, many of which were seen in amputee clinics in the states. That was the late fifties and early sixties. The FDA no doubt protected the public good. The drug companies urging FDA approval and marketing did not win out. What about today?" - Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey, The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes "Patients" of Normal Children (Get the book.) "I doubt the FDA would have banned thalidomide. Just as they do today with addictive, dangerous, and deadly, but non-essential, drugs (sleeping pills, pain pills, psychiatric pills), they would have found a way to champion the marketplace cause of thalidomide. In the mid-nineties they resisted calls to ban the pediatric use of tricyclic antidepressants despite reports of sudden deaths, such as in the cases of Shaina Dunkle and Cameron Pettus. In 1998, the FDA was forced to remove three drugs from the market because of safety problems, more than in any similar period in its history." - Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey, The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes "Patients" of Normal Children (Get the book.)

"An FDA advisory panel has approved thalidomide to treat leprosy. thalidomide is an extremely potent antiangiogenesis drug that could slow or possibly stop the progression of wet macular degeneration (Kaven et al 2001). It is legal for doctors to prescribe thalidomide to treat wet macular degeneration even though it will only be officially approved to treat leprosy. IbSJSUSSjh thalidomide causes severe birth defects and must not be used by pregnant women or women who may become pregnant." - The Life Extension Editorial Staff, Disease Prevention and Treatment (Get the book.)

"Amendments strengthening the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act were passed in 1962 in the wake of thalidomide, the drug that caused devastating birth defects when it was given to pregnant women. A series of midair collisions prompted the passage of the Federal Aviation Act twenty years later. Today, heart-wrenching stories like that of Deamonte Driver are helping focus the nation's attention once again on the plight of the uninsured. One state, Massachusetts, has already passed legislation aimed at insuring all residents. Others are considering similar proposals." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"There are more than fifty years of medical and scientific progress between thalidomide and Vioxx. Well, this is cynical, but what has really changed? "Nevertheless, the pharmaceutical industry still has the nimbus of scientific nature and of progress, and those researching pharmaceutical companies justify their high prices with their high costs for research and development before these new medicinal products can finally be marketed to become a blockbuster. I don't need to comment on this any further, do I?" "What about all those alternative companies? " - Kenneth W Thomas, Ron Gilbert, Gerd Schaller, Side Effects: The Hidden Agenda of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel (Get the book.)

"An FDA advisory panel has approved thalidomide to treat leprosy. thalidomide is an extremely potent antiangiogenesis drug that could slow or possibly stop the progression of wet macular degeneration (Kaven et al 2001). It is legal for doctors to prescribe thalidomide to treat wet macular degeneration even though it will only be officially approved to treat leprosy. IbSJSUSSjh thalidomide causes severe birth defects and must not be used by pregnant women or women who may become pregnant." - The Life Extension Editorial Staff, Disease Prevention and Treatment (Get the book.)

"She had been reviewing the application that Merrell submitted to gain approval to sell thalidomide in the United States. Dr. Kelsey had become concerned, however, about the poor quality of the company's scientific data. She had also found a report in the British Medical Journal in December 1960 that said the sedative appeared to damage the nerves of some patients. Merrell executives had become furious with Dr. Kelsey for delaying the sale of their product as she asked them for more data to prove it was safe." - 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.)

"It was one single independent woman, a maverick, who prevented thalidomide from entering the United States. If Frances Kelsey had not stood up to her superiors, if the FDA had done business as usual, then thalidomide would have been marketed in the United States, with the consequences being thousands of monstrously deformed infants. And I submit to you that the thalidomide scandal was utterly trivial — it didn't amount to a hill of beans — compared to the AZT scandal that is happening now. I know some of these people on AZT. You know, it's not real to think of 125,000 people." - John Lauritsen, The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex (Get the book.)

"The patients developed symptoms similar to the ones caused by the drug thalidomide (which recently has been reintroduced for specific disorders). Mothers who had taken large amounts of B6 during their pregnancy also reported deformities in their children's bodies. It took a long time before the nerve damage was linked to vitamin poisoning. As it turned out, many patients, who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, were poisoned by vitamin B6. There are many unsuspecting people taking vitamin B6 today without the faintest idea that they are slowly injuring their bodies from the inside out." - Andreas Moritz, Timeless Secrets of Health & Rejuvenation: Unleash The Natural Healing Power That Lies Dormant Within You (Get the book.)

"THAL-uh-muhs) The part of the brain that coordinates nerve impulses relating to the senses of sight, hearing, touch, and taste. thalidomide (thuh-LID-uh-meyed) A sedative drug that was developed and used in Europe in the 1960s. thalidomide was taken off the market when it became evident that it caused severe birth defects in babies born to women who had used the drug during pregnancy. fa References to thalidomide are often made when illustrating the dangers of using drugs whose side effects are not well known." - E. D. Hirsch, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Get the book.)

"Anything that interferes with new blood vessel formation, as does the drug thalidomide, results in birth defects. The cancer-resistant rodents in the Sloan Kettering trial had their "id" genes disabled during adulthood, when they were largely inactive. [Nature 401:670-7, 1999] In another genetic experiment, researchers used telomerase, an enzyme that repairs the ends of genes, called telomeres, to produce cells that are immortal, or perpetually young. The idea was to see if youthful cells would resist cancer." - Bill Sardi, You Don't Have to be Afraid of Cancer Anymore (Get the book.)

"The part of the brain that coordinates nerve impulses relating to the senses of sight, hearing, touch, and taste. thalidomide (thuh-LiD-uh-meyed) A sedative drug that was developed and used in Europe in the 1960s. thalidomide was taken off the market when it became evident that it caused severe birth defects in babies born to women who had used the drug during pregnancy. fa References to thalidomide are often made when illustrating the dangers of using drugs whose side effects are not well known." - James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, and E. D. Hirsch, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Get the book.)

"Would this result in a new wave of drug tragedies, another crop of thalidomide babies? Of course not. Let us suppose that the FDA had only the power to require the label and literature of 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1945), p. 291. thalidomide to state that "this drug is dangerous for use by women during periods of potential pregnancy and may result in deformed infants." thalidomide is available only through the prescription of a licensed physician." - G. Edward Griffin, World Without Cancer (Get the book.)

"McBride, wrote a letter to the editor of the Lancet stating, "In recent months I have observed that the incidence of multiple severe abnormalities in babies delivered of women who were given the drug thalidomide ... to be almost 20%."" He then asked, "Have any of your readers seen similar abnormalities in babies delivered of women who have taken this drug during pregnancy?"12 In Germany Dr. Widukind Lenz, a pediatrician and professor at Hamburg University, also became aware of the surprising number of babies being born with missing fingers or short arms or with feet attached to the hips." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.) "Even among those who have heard about thalidomide, many are not aware that, though it was prescribed in countries all around the world, it was never approved for use in the United States.18 The FDA's approval process, though inadequate by today's standards, was more stringent than that found in most countries. Those more demanding standards saved countless babies from the terrible physical effects continuing to plague thousands of adults in countries all across the world." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"Does the word thalidomide ring a bell? It was a prescription drug given to pregnant mothers with morning sickness in the early 1960s that produced offspring with flippers instead of arms and legs. Before thalidomide, medical experts believed that the placenta acted as a complete protection for the developing baby from harmful outside influences. The thalidomide tragedy shattered that theory." - D. Lindsey Berkson, Hormone Deception (Get the book.)

"In some ways the United States has been lucky when it comes to prescription drugs and birth defects, escaping the thalidomide disaster of the late 1950s, which was almost entirely confined to Europe. But that was when Europe was faster than we were in approving new drugs. Yet today, even despite faster approvals, the United States has remained relatively fortunate. Chemical assaying and animal testing keep most major teratogens out of the drug supply." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

"It appeared to be the timing of thalidomide ingestion rather than the dose that influenced the babies' deformities. While some of the mothers with limbless children had taken only two or three thalidomide pills during their entire pregnancy, ingestion occurred between the fifth and eighth weeks when the babies' arms and legs were developing. An interesting note is that eleven out of 380 children born to thalidomide victims in the United Kingdom have limb defects, a figure which is five times higher than the usual rate for the general population." - D. Lindsey Berkson, Hormone Deception (Get the book.)

"In the case of thalidomide, the special circumstance was pregnancy.) More than half of those beginning an antidepressant (whether an older tricyclic antidepressant or a newer SSRI antidepressant) have one of the more common side effects.17 Examining the most popular antidepressant ever sold (Prozac) and what is currently the most popular antidepressant (Zoloft), we can get some idea about how often these mind drugs affect both the mind and the body." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration cites examples in which premature permission to use newly discovered therapies ended in disaster--like the thalidomide situation. However, lets compare the risk to benefit ratio of thalidomide and alternative cancer treatment: -Thalidomide. >Benefits: an entirely elective drug used to relieve the mild symptoms of nausea. >Risks: taken during an extremely vulnerable phase of life, pregnancy." - Patrick Quillin, PhD,RD,CNS, Beating Cancer with Nutrition (Get the book.)

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