Drugs Dethroned

Is Suppressing Symptoms with Synthetic Chemicals Losing its Lustre in Healthcare?

by Helke Ferrie

Street drugs kill about 20,000 people a year in North America, which is no surprise. But a much more shocking statistic is that prescription drugs kill about 700,000 people a year, making legal drugs the leading cause of death. As well, the side effects of legal drugs cause about 8.8 million hospitalizations annually, or 28% of all hospital admissions.

Prescription drugs and street drugs are both designed for symptom control. Prescription drug product monographs clearly state: “This drug does not cure.” In August 2004, the New Yorker ran a full-page ad by Novartis with a cartoon showing a castle wall at the bottom of which was a badly broken Humpty Dumpty. One of two courtiers kneeling beside him says: “We can’t put him back together again, but at least we can lower his blood pressure.”

Drug companies know that most drugs are toxic and so are now re-focusing on “biologicals” which contain natural peptides, helpful bacteria, biologically engineered drugs (most new cancer drugs), and even drugs that deliver minerals and vitamins. The more bio-identical a drug can be made, the less toxic it will be to the liver. Merck is hoping for big profits with its new cholesterol-lowering “drug” Cordaptive, whose active ingredient is Niacin (vitamin B3), long known to be nature’s cure for cardiovascular disease.

Drug companies have spent $76 billion since 2005 buying young biotech companies because old synthetic drug development, which earned them about $1 million per hour, is exhausted. Last December, Sidney Taurel, the chairman of Eli Lilly, said: “I think the industry is doomed if we don’t change.”

Pharmaceuticals, like street drugs, are  intended to get addicts and patients hooked; many drugs are addictive and some, like Ritalin, work through the same cellular receptor sites used by crack cocaine. At a marketing conference for the managers of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies in March 2004, one of the first overhead displays read: “As a Marketer: which is better for business? Steady continuous use of your drug, or occasional use of your drug?”.

There is one way in which street drugs differ from prescription drugs: drug pushers without a medical degree know exactly what their product does, while drug pushers with a medical degree don’t know they are drug pushers and are almost completely clueless about pharmacology. Last November, the Health Council of Canada published a report stating that “people are going out into practice without a comprehensive understanding either of how drugs work or how to use them rationally.”

Only four of Canada’s 17 medical schools require a course in clinical pharmacology. Yet, doctors have sole prescription power over some 20,000 pharmaceutical drugs, which generate 400 million prescriptions annually, costing our healthcare system $24 billion. Even if doctors do sometimes read the Health Canada warnings on a drug, they don’t seem to understand them. How else can one explain what Ontario’s Auditor General found in 2007 – that year over 18,000 alerts on known drug toxicity were provided by pharmacy computers for prescriptions issued for residents of 421 long-term care homes – yet the prescribing doctors ignored these warnings 91% of the time.

The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada was so shocked by these reports, they changed medical training requirements, starting this year. New students must study pharmacology for two years. This is undoubtedly very good news for Canadians because our doctors will learn what synthetic drugs really do – not just what a drug rep tells them over wine and roses. Even with this new breed of doctors soon appearing, you might want some help in understanding drugs.

A QUICK TOUR THROUGH THE MEDICINE CABINET
Every class of drugs currently used to treat the symptoms of cancer, diabetes, heart and autoimmune diseases, depression, psychiatric disorders, etc. is currently under regulatory investigation, the subject of class action lawsuits involving tens of thousands of people. These drugs continue to be sold with advisories required by the FDA and Health Canada stating, for example, that:
– antidepressants may increase the risk of suicide and that they do increase the risk of cancer, diabetes, and osteoporosis;
– non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, NSAIDs, and diabetes drugs like Avandia, increase the risk of heart attacks;
– all estrogenic drugs increase the risk of stroke due to the formation of blood clots;
– cholesterol-lowering drugs increase the risk of most of the above and interfere with sleep;
– certain cancer drugs can cause heart attacks and brain inflammation.
  

All of this information is freely available at your local drug store, in every doctor’s office, and online in the annually updated CPS, the
Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties.
Over the past decade, Big Pharma’s “science engine has stalled”, observed the Wall Street Journal on December 6, 2007.  Computer-assisted “rational drug design” can no longer find new applications to known cellular targets in humans, the main reason being the discoveries made through the Human Genome Project. It was formerly believed that about 10,000 useful targets would be available on human cells for drugs to act upon; in fact it is now known that there are at most 1,000.

Furthermore, almost all blockbuster drugs are under increasingly successful legal attack for deaths and injury. Merck paid more than $4 billion (about one year’s earnings) for the human disaster it created with the NSAID known as Vioxx, which killed about 150,000 since coming to market. And the French government has charged GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur with “manslaughter” for the deaths caused by the Hepatitis B vaccine. As well, Eli Lilly paid $1 billion in legal settlements to thousands of patients injured or killed by the antidepressant Zyprexa, and now faces angry shareholders who are suing them for “recklessly disregarding risks” and “illegal marketing tactics”.

According to Dr. Michelle Brill-Edwards, formerly Health Canada’s top drug regulator,  “Patients are merely road-kill on the highway to profit”. Shareholder wrath is more like the highway itself disintegrating; investors are demanding to know why they are losing money. Wall Street evaluations are grim. Moody’s has assessed pharmaceutical stocks as “negative”, i.e. don’t invest. The FTSE Global Pharmaceutical Index fell by 19%, even though the price of drugs rose by 63% since 2002.
 
HOW DRUGS WORK
A current pharmacology textbook states that “the symptoms of a disease arise from a deficiency or excess of a specific metabolite in the body, from an infestation by a foreign organism, or from an aberrant cell growth.” The “metabolite” might be the result of inflammation such as in arthritis, the “infestation” could be a bacterium, and “aberrant cell growth” would be cancer. “These problems can be addressed through enzyme inhibition,” the textbook asserts, so these symptoms are simply stopped in their tracks.

Almost all drugs are inherently toxic either by causing a universal allergic response, such as ACE inhibitors, aspirin and antibiotics, or by depleting essential nutrients if they are enzyme inhibitors – which includes most of them. Drugs poison essential chemical pathways when they are “inhibitors” or “blockers”. Enzymes are proteins that cause all the chemical reactions that keep us alive. Enzymes depend on essential minerals. Drugs are never as specific as their designers intended, so they go after the intended and many unintended targets.

At first, symptom relief may occur, but then new symptoms start – the infamous side-effects. More drugs are needed to cut off the enzymatic action of the new troublemakers, and the battlefield becomes larger and larger as greater numbers of enzyme populations are attacked, until finally even the drugs themselves fall victim to “friendly fire”, and we have a war going on within all bodily systems. This is why synthetic drugs are Killer No. 1.

When a drug is beneficial, it performs through successful, specific “search and destroy” missions. Antibiotics, medications used in acute heart failure, and some anticonvulsants are examples. (Note, none are blockbuster drugs under patent protection.) These drugs can act fast, accurately, and don’t mess up the surrounding areas much, if at all, if they are used short-term.

On the other hand, according to the current edition of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, the drugs that are causing 90% of the death and destruction in patients today include: all the NSAIDs, digoxin, anticoagulants, diuretics, new-generation antibiotics (like Cipro), all cancer drugs, and hypoglycemics (for diabetes). Among the pain killers, acetaminophen (Tylenol) is the most dangerous; in fact most liver transplants are due to its long-term use.

The liver detoxifies natural and synthetic toxins. It does this through many enzymes which are divided into various families, all of which arise out of one super-family called Cytochrome P450. If a drug arouses this super-family, the liver will quite literally fight to the death to protect you.

Various racial groups have over time evolved differences in CytochromeP450. People of African and Afro-American origin react differently to many drugs than whites and Hispanics do: some people are “extensive metabolizers”, and others are “slow metabolizers”. Some people lack specific cell receptors for which a drug was originally designed: the cancer drug Herceptin, for example, becomes acutely toxic if the patient lacks those receptors. The new science of “genotyping” tries to map this.

Finally, age and sex are important. Men metabolize drugs differently than women. Antidepressants are less toxic (at first) in men, but tend to have side effects faster in women because their livers are in bodies with more female sex hormones. And as we age, we are less able to metabolize drugs, hence side effects (especially when more than one drug is involved) are more severe.
Harrison’s advises that old people should always be given minimum doses, and the use of more than one drug should be avoided. (Given the current norm of polypharmacy, especially in old age homes, one must wonder if doctors even read Harrison’s, their standard textbook.) When 5 drugs are given, a 5% chance exists of adverse events. However, drug action is “nonlinear”, i.e. more than one target is hit and unpredictable interactions will occur. So, if 15 drugs are given simultaneously, the chance of serious adverse events is not just three times as much, i.e. 15%, but rather 40% – and so begins that war referred to previously which is ultimately due to depletion of essential nutrients, especially minerals.

A quick survey of the drugs responsible for 90% of adverse events and deaths, as listed in Harrison’s, showed that they deplete the following:
– potassium (responsible for cell-to-cell communication),
– calcium (bones, central nervous system),
– all the B vitamins (all bodily systems require these, the liver stores them all),
– iron (oxygen transport in blood),
– vitamin D (DNA repair, cancer prevention),
– zinc and selenium (immune system),
– Co Q10 (heart function),
– magnesium (essential to everything, being Queen of minerals).
Some drugs also inhibit melatonin, such as most statins and antidepressants (the immune system does most of its work while you sleep). Antidepressants often wipe out the sex drive; reduced sex hormones adversely affect memory and learning.

LEARNING TO PROTECT YOURSELF
Symptoms are the urgent demand our bodies make on us for intelligent dialogue. The vast majority of synthetic drugs are designed to prevent such a dialogue. Intelligent dialogue may, at times, leave symptom control as the only viable option, as in the case of surgical or chronic pain. However, current drug-dependent medical practice prevents homeostasis (a cure) because the focus is on symptom control.

So, always ask: Does this drug cure, or does it make me into a customer indefinitely? And: What is my body likely to do if I take this drug? It is naïve in the extreme to take any drug on trust and not check it out in the CPS at the very least. Big Pharma does not deserve any trust; its products are the leading cause of death. Since those deaths were initiated by prescriptions from well-meaning but pharmacologically ignorant doctors, it is a health hazard to assume “the doctor knows best.” Doctors need to be treated with polite doubt – like politicians. Their assertions must be verified carefully, mainly because they themselves have usually been duped.
The following guidelines may prove helpful, as I have found from personal experience:

1. If media reports tell of a drug’s withdrawal from the marketplace, or serious side effects, that entire class of drugs should be considered as bad news. For example, all SSRI antidepressants were designed to act on the same targets. And if one NSAID, like Vioxx, killed a lot of people, all the others in that family are dangerous. 

2. If the CPS informs you that this drug is metabolized by Cytochrome P450, you know it is liver-toxic. In situations when such a drug cannot be avoided (e.g. certain antibiotics for Lyme Disease, systemic infections from nano-bacteria or fungi, pain control, etc) we may rely on guidance again from Harrison’s, which suggests taking glutathione supplements, or Alpha Lipoic Acid, or N’Acetyl L-Cysteine to avoid the drug’s known toxicity.

3. If you develop side effects, or if the drug doesn’t work, do not increase the dose or add another drug to “boost” the first one. Rapid side effects suggest you are a slow metabolizer and must stop the drug, probably immediately; and no effect suggest you may be a fast metabolizer and will get serious side effects if you increase the dose.

4. If you are currently on drugs, check Dr. Hyla Cass’ and Pelton and LaValle’s books to see what essential nutrients your drug depletes and take those, as recommended in each case, for as long as it takes to either wean yourself off, substitute safer drugs and recover from side effects, or as a safety supplement while you need it.

5. To find reliable information on drugs, consult Best Pills Worst Pills and especially the World Health Organization’s Essential Drugs List (online).

6. Drug-drug interactions as well as interactions between synthetic drugs and many foods must be assumed; known interactions are listed in the blue pages of the annually updated CPS.

During a lecture at the University of Toronto on November 21, 2007, Dr. Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, said: “Doctors and patients are in this bogus contract. The patient believes the doctor can fix my problem. That is a very powerful fantasy! Patients need to invest time and energy in researching their condition and be smarter than their doctors. That is quite possible these days.”

Amen.
 
Sources & Resources:
 
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Most truthful journal: PloS Medicine, free on internet