Dr Billy Health

America Speaks “The Food and Drug Administration Fails”.
Direct-to-consumer drug advertising, Dangerous prescription!

Americans are increasingly aware of the drug industry’s self-serving influence in governmental affairs and FDA corruption, according to a revealing Consumer Reports survey

The vast majority, (More than four out of five) Americans think drug companies have too much influence over the Food and Drug Administration, and 84 percent believe that advertisements for prescription drugs with safety concerns (Which of course are virtually all of them) “should be outlawed”. That’s what America said.

The survey results, are based on a telephone survey of 1,026 American adults conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center. They reveal the Food and Drug Administration is not working on behalf of, or in the best interest of the American people, to say the least.

Listed below are some concerns noted by the survey:

• 96 percent agreed the government should have the power to require warning labels on drugs with known safety problems. As Consumer Reports explains, “Right now, the Food and Drug Administration must negotiate safety warning labels with a drug maker.”

• 84 percent agree that drug companies have “too much influence over the government officials who regulate them.” More than two-thirds of those surveyed are concerned that drug companies actually pay the FDA to review and approve their drugs. It’s a situation that turns drug companies into the “customers” of the FDA.

• 92 percent agree that pharmaceutical companies should disclose the results of ALL clinical trials, not just the ones with positive results that they wish to publicize. (Currently, drug companies can bury negative drug trials, and the FDA has in fact been caught conspiring with drug companies to keep negative drug data secret from the public, and with manufacturers of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) to HIDE THE TRUTH.

• 93 percent think that the FDA should have the power to demand follow-up safety studies from drug companies. Currently, the FDA has no such authority for drugs after they are introduced to the market. This is a big problem, given that many problems with drugs only appear after widespread use. (Patients are widely used as guinea pigs in any new drug launch.)… There is actually a long history of government sanctioned guinea-pigging carried out on unsuspecting American citizens.

• 60 percent agreed that doctors and scientists with a financial conflict of interest should not be allowed to serve on FDA advisory boards (Daah, Maybe the other 40 percent didn’t understand the question). Currently, doctors who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in “consulting fees” from drug companies are not only allowed to vote on the recommendations for FDA approval of their drugs, there is not even any FDA requirement to disclose such conflicts of interest.

• 91 percent said they had seen a drug advertisement on television or in print. Marketing is everything, but to some shareholders the welfare of the public means very little. (The FDA legalizing such irresponsible ads in 1998)…And 26 percent said they asked their doctor for a brand-name medication after learning about it from an advertisement.

• 75 percent agreed that the allowing of drug advertising has resulted in the over-prescribing of pharmaceuticals. Fifty-nine percent said the government should restrict pharmaceutical advertising, and 26 percent said they “strongly agree” with such restrictions.

Direct-to-consumer advertising (Legal in only two developed countries in the world) equals big money for the drug pushers, and it is the primary reason the industry has exploded its revenues and influence since 1998. The invention and marketing of fictitious diseases via television advertising has proven instrumental to the drug industry’s successful pushing of medically unjustified drugs onto consumers.

• More than half of those surveyed said they are currently taking prescription drugs, indicating that more than half of American adults are now on drugs.

Forty percent said they have experienced a negative reaction (side effect) from taking prescription medications.

Most side effects go unreported, and there is currently no enforced legal requirement that doctors or drug companies report known side effects to the FDA. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association,

Prescription drugs currently kill approximately 100,000 Americans each year. None of those deaths are accurately recorded as “death by pharmaceuticals.

As mentioned earlier, 84 percent agree that advertisements should be outlawed for drugs with safety concerns. The United States and New Zealand are the only advanced nations in the world that allows drug companies to advertise directly to consumers.

It was legalized in 1998 by the FDA, following political pressure and influence from the drug companies who knew that being able to promote fictitious diseases and push brand-name drugs would result in windfall profits. (Some drugs are sold at markups as high as 300,000% over the cost of their ingredients.)

Two examples for which many people paid dearly…
The makers of Vioxx and Paxil had studies that indicated safety problems for years, but did not release those results to the public. - Consumer Reports

Reportedly, advertisement fueled pharmaceutical “Drug use / Drug abuse KILLS at least 100,000 American citizens. Many, maybe most such cases are not reported and filled as such, leading some analysts to place the number at GREATER THAN 200,000 U.S. CITIZENS DRUGGED TO DEATH EACH YEAR. And that accounts only for the relatively acute cases and offers no calculation of the 100s of thousands more who succumb to a more gradual poisoning from irresponsible and inappropriate long term drug use.

How is it that Americans have come to be bombarded with alluring, convincing, hypnotizing advertisements promoting that which is the 4th leading cause of death in America?

Pharmaceutical drugs are the 4th leading cause of death in America. And the very effective add campaigns are designed to create lifelong addicts of every single citizen, and in fact turn every one of us into users of a multiplicity of dangerous preparations used in even more dangerous combinations.

I am considering initiating a national boycott of the television networks and/or programs most heavily sponsored by the drug pushers and interested in your input.

Please join other concerned Americans in strongly communicating to all of your representatives in Washington that there will be NOT ONE MORE VOTE for drug pusher accomplices.

The FDA in large part has not been our friend.

Know and remember that the FDA has:

They have aggressively blacklisted, and in some case banned botanical products (Herbs with long histories of safe effective use) when they competed with drugs and “Drug Foods” EI: Stevia verses Cane Sugar. They actually ordered the destruction of recipe books promoting Stevia, (A valuable, benign healing herb and fantastic natural sweetener) because it threatens sales of white sugar and poisonous artificial sweeteners such as aspartame.

Helped keep useless end deadly drugs on the shelves as long as possible.

Suppressed information about the harm caused by dangerous drugs.

Many times went “way beyond the-call-of-duty to silence it’s own and outside scientists, to keep the truth and or safety concerns about drugs and GMOs from the people.

Promotes the manufacture marketing and consumption of junk-food while censoring and discouraging dissemination about the benefits of natural foods and nutritional supplements.

Many time have blacklisted valuable natural curative substances, treatments, and practitioners using them… Even raided and shut down facilities saving the lives of people given no hope by allopathic medicine.

We have the FDA to thank for the endless array of poisonous additives present in generous amounts in most of what people eat. Additives that make a lot of money for drug and chemical interests, but serve no defensible purpose and are neither a food or add to the nutritive value, and in fact in many cases are PROVEN KILLERS.

Bribes, pay-offs, collusion, fact hiding, truth suppressing, report spinning, intelligence insulting, corporation worshipping… Business-as-usual.

Really protecting our safety and health freedom rights… NOT SO MUCH.

~

The US (Since 1998) and New Zealand are the only industrialized countries that allow direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs, although New Zealand is planning a ban (As of late 2006). It was a shameful, civic-ly destructive move to allow DTCA in the first place, and clearly illustrates just whom Washington has been looking out for. That really can’t be defended. But that is history now, many people have suffered because of that illegitimate move, and by now it is way past time for the US to also ban the practice.

By the way, DTCA is limited to drugs that are profitable to advertise: mostly expensive, new drugs for long-term use for common indications. Such advertising promotes and increases premature distribution and overuse of new drugs before flaws, including safety problems, have been discovered and communicated to health professionals.”

The style of advertising used obviously aims to “persuade rather than to inform,” and studies of DTCA have found that the information is routinely flawed and incomplete.

Of course DTCA should be banned yesterday.

Anyone want to argue with that statement?

Thanks for thinking about it!

Billy

Filed under: Consider This, GMO on April 16th, 2007