Pharmaceutical Fraud

It's no secret that I am as big a skeptic when it comes to pharmaceutical solutions to many health care conditions as many people are when they regard alternative health care. Lest anyone misunderstand me, I am not saying there is not a place for allopathic medicine. If you need your appendix out or have suffered trauma, then get thee to a hospital to get it dealt with, not your local herbalist.

Glaxo-Smith Kline, one of the multi-national pharmaceutical companies, recently admitted that most drugs only work in about 30-50% of the people they are administered to. Part of the reason for this is because most drugs are only tested on men. This leaves out 50% of the human race when you do this. What they find when they do test some of these drugs on women is that the potency of the drug and its effects may change depending on where a woman is at in her menstrual cycle. What could be an effective dose at one part of the cycle may be far too much or too little in another part of the cycle. And then there are all the side effects they cause because drugs exist, not to treat the root cause of disease (which is not caused by a drug deficency -- you don't get cancer because your mom failed to sprinkle chemotherapy drugs on your Cornflakes when you were a child) but to suppress symptoms of disease.

Let's look at the typical way that people with type II diabetes are treated in the medical establishment. People who develop adult-onset diabetes are what is known as insulin resistant. This means they have more than adequate levels of insulin in their systems. In fact, they have too much, so the body, in order to protect itself from all the insulin, starts to shut off the receptors on the cells so that the cells won't be flooded with too much insulin and blood sugar. One of the first areas protected this way is the brain. Now the brain's main fuel is glucose, and if the brain becomes insulin resistant, then the glucose has a harder time making it into the brain to feed it, which helps to explain the brain fog many of these people suffer from.

Now if glucose metabolism is impaired, and the reason it is impaired is because there is too much insulin being produced, then common sense should tell us that we should find ways of reducing the amount of insulin made and restoring insulin sensitivity to the body. This can be done through restricting the things that cause blood sugar, and therefore insulin levels to rise in the body: namely high glycemic carbohydrates. But what does allopathic medicine do? They give you a drug like Glyburide or Metformin.

Glyburide and Metformin work by making your pancreas squeeze out more insulin. Now remember, type II diabetes is caused by too much insulin in the first place. So their solution is to make more insulin. This causes the blood sugar levels to drop because in effect you are taking a battering ram to the cells in the form of even more insulin and forcing the insulin and blood sugar into cells that were already stuffed full of them. Over time this process forces the body's cells to become even less sensitive to insulin and it exhausts the pancreas' ability to make the amounts of insulin required to move blood sugar out of the blood stream and into the cells.

When the diabetic reaches this stage, he is now ready for the next size of battering ram: injected insulin. By this point, not only are his cells stuffed full of sugar and resistant to insulin, now he is coping with rising triglyceride and bad cholesterol levels. The reason for this is because when the blood sugar gets trapped in the blood stream, the body must find a way to dispose of it. It's answer is to take all this excess sugar to the liver and convert it to blood fat. Now, you not only have a stressed pancreas, your liver is working double time too and you have all the conditions in place for giving yourself heart disease.

Doctors look at the blood sugar index on a person who is injecting insulin and is happy because the blood sugar under control, but in reality he is shooting at the wrong target and worsening the health of the person who follows his advice. (Just ask me how I know! -- Someone very close to me is doing this-- with the typical outcome.)

To deal properly with this condition, our goal should be to lower the output of insulin and restore the body's sensitivity to the insulin it naturally makes. The key to this is to change the diet by cutting out anything with sugar or anything the body converts easily to sugar, control the weight, and EXERCISE REGULARLY. This will lead to the elimination, rather than the escalation of drugs. But most people find it easier to just punch a needle in their leg than to actually exercise. [sigh]

But I digress.

The real point of this soap box diatribe was sparked by a recent article in The Province newspaper.

Pharmaceutical companies are deceiving patients and doctors by keeping negative results from drug trials "locked in the filing cabinet," Canada's leading medical journal warns.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal says Health Canada is complicit in this "file-drawer phenomenon" by too often keeping quiet about evidence that questions drug safety and effectiveness....

"...It takes $1 billion on average to bring a new drug to market, a huge investment that "puts pressure on companies to suppress results that might slow or extinguish sales," the CMAJ says. But by burying data, drug companies "deceive physicians, their patients and, perhaps, shareholders."


So next time you are faced with the decision to take a drug or find an alternative, maybe it would be a good idea to consult a health "nut" about safer and more effective alterntatives.