Aug 20, 2010

85% of Big Pharma's new drugs are "lemons" and pose health risks to users

NaturalNews  "The result is that drugs get approved without anyone being able to know how effective they really are or how much serious harm they will cause," he said. "The companies control the making of scientific knowledge and then control which findings will go to the FDA or be published."

Independent reviewers found that about 85 percent of new drugs offer few if any new benefits -- but they carry the risk of causing serious harm to users.

HTML clipboard"Risk Proliferation Syndrome", which refers to the way Big Pharma has grossly maximized the number of people exposed to new drugs with relatively low effectiveness but a heightened risk of adverse and often severe side effects. The pharmaceutical giants have accomplished this by failing to put each new medication on the market using a controlled, limited launch which would allow evidence to be gathered about the drug's effects, positive and negative. Instead, Big Pharma builds hugely hyped drug launches based on clinical trials  that were designed in the first place to minimize evidence of harm and are published in the medical literature to only emphasize a drug's advantages.

Pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars on massive campaigns to sell a new prescription med, recruiting leading doctors to use the drug for conditions other than those for which it is approved, Dr. Light revealed. By promoting such off-label or unapproved uses, Big Pharma goes after even more sales and physicians inadvertently become what Dr. Light calls "double agents" -- they work to push sales of the new drug while they are supposed to be stewards of their patients' well-being.

And what happens when patients complain that the drug is making them sicker and/or producing side effects? Studies show their doctors usually just discount or dismiss these complaints, Dr. Light said. See full at NaturalNews