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Only one in ten medical treatments are backed by high-quality evidence

The conversation September 2, 2020

When you visit your doctor, you might assume that the treatment they prescribe has solid evidence to back it up. But you'd be wrong. Only one in ten medical treatments are supported by high-quality evidence, our latest research shows.

The analysis, which is published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, included 154 Cochrane systematic reviews published between 2015 and 2019. Only 15 (9.9%) had high-quality evidence according to the gold-standard method for determining whether they provide high or low-quality evidence, called GRADE (grading of recommendations, assessment, development and evaluation). Among these, only two had statistically significant results - meaning that the results were unlikely to have arisen due to random error - and were believed by the review authors to be useful in clinical practice. Using the same system, 37% had moderate, 31% had low, and 22% had very low-quality evidence.

The GRADE system looks at things like risk of bias. For example, studies that are "blinded" - in which patients don't know whether they are getting the actual treatment or a placebo - offer higher-quality evidence than "unblinded" studies. Blinding is important because people who know what treatment they are getting can experience greater placebo effects than those who do not know what treatment they are getting.

Here’s why I don’t trust any rushed shots

RT 21 Jul, 2020

Developing any type of vaccine requires meticulous, methodical research, and the willingness to scrap ideas that don’t pan out and start over again from scratch. I don’t see that happening, with the pressure to produce a vaccine amid a pandemic as devastating to all aspects of life as this one. And with several companies and groups trying to be the first to get a vaccine to market, I’m afraid the company that receives the approval may be the one with the best political connections, not the best and safest vaccine. Considering the number of post-market drug recalls and withdrawals in the past few years, the US’ Food and Drug Administration doesn’t have the best track record on vetting the research.

I ask once again: how can the public trust a drug that’s made in haste while the scientific community is still learning the remaining health problems the virus has created in people who’ve contracted it and lived? The government is not instilling any confidence that whatever is produced will be in our best interest.

How can you not be seriously skeptical of any vaccine produced in the current climate of hate, fear, and political pressure? You should be. Right now, I would feel about as safe trying a Covid-19 vaccine as I would trying one of the potion recipes in the Harry Potter books.

Big Pharma firms will NOT be held accountable for side effects of Covid vaccine

RT31 Jul, 2020

A senior executive for pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has confirmed that his company cannot face legal action for any potential side effects caused by its Covid vaccine. Those affected will have no legal recourse.

AstraZeneca is one of 25 pharmaceutical companies worldwide already testing their Covid vaccines on humans, in preparation for injecting hundreds of millions of people. These are flush times for Britain’s largest pharmaceutical company, worth something in the order of £70 million. They have just reported bumper profits of $12.6 billion in the last six months alone.

But despite its healthy balance sheet, AstraZeneca is unwilling to be held responsible for any potential side effects of its ‘hopeful’ vaccine candidate. In other words, the company is completely protected, or indemnified, against lawsuits from people who are injected with their vaccine and experience negative effects, regardless of how severe or long-lasting they are.

The firm’s lawyers have demanded that clauses to that effect be put in their contracts with the countries AstraZeneca has agreed to supply with its Covid vaccine. The company says that, without such guarantees of indemnity, they would not be incentivised to produce the drug. And it seems most of the countries have ceded to this demand.

The Pushing for Coronavirus Vaccines

Neo 18.05.2020

The US White House has appointed a coronavirus “Vaccine Czar” from Big Pharma to oversee something dubbed Operation Warp Speed. The goal is to create and produce 300 million doses of a new vaccine to supposedly immunize the entire US population by year-end against COVID-19. To be sure that Big Pharma companies give their all to the medical Manhattan Project, they have been fully indemnified by the US government against liabilities should vaccine recipients die or develop serious disease as a result of the rushed vaccine. The FDA and NIH have waived standard pre-testing on animals in the situation. The US military, according to recent remarks by the US President, is being trained to administer the yet-to-be unveiled vaccine in record time. Surely nothing could go wrong here?

Warp speed is a term out of the sci-fi Star Trek media, defined as a speed faster than the speed of light. In recent weeks billions of dollars have been pledged from governments, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others to fast-track a vaccine as well as test medical treatments to combat the VODIV19 illness said to originate from a novel coronavirus first discovered late 2019 in Wuhan China. This rush to create a “miracle” vaccine is ominous and suggests some hidden agenda.

SIDS Listed as a Side Effect on a DTaP Vaccine Insert

RNK

SIDS is the term given to all of the babies who die of an unexplainable death before they turn one year old.

SIDS and the DTaP Vaccine

“70% of children who have died of SIDS received the pertussis vaccine within 3 weeks before death.”  Within this 3 week time period after receiving the vaccine, children’s breathing patterns became stress-induced, wreaking havoc on their respiratory systems (Pages 120 and 121 of Vaccine Safety Manual For Concerned Families and Health Practitioners). This stressed induced breathing, combined with a baby sleeping face down would seem to make it even more troublesome for him/her to breathe freely. This is the very same vaccine that lists SIDS as a possible side effect. Something to think about (at the very least).

Please note, the CDC is changing their inserts over the last year, leaving out important side effects even though they are very much still side effects.

Any infant death that is ‘unexplainable’ gets lumped into the term SIDS. I believe much of it has to do with a toxic overload. Here’s some more information on that: Protecting Your Baby From SIDS

Statement from the World Health Organization on Vaccines

Just Two Days Ago (January 18, 2020), after meeting to discuss vaccines at the Global Vaccine Safety Summit, the World Health Organization came out with a statement acknowledging that they are questioning the safety of vaccines. The live feed is pretty eye-opening.

The Childhood Vaccination Program

As far as the childhood vaccination program, Robert F. Kennedy has been studying the ingredients and the program itself, for years. “These guys at the CDC originally were telling me ‘well, there’s a good mercury and a bad mercury,’” Kennedy said. “I knew at that point, their argument was not with me, it was with the periodic table, because there’s no way that could happen.”

Kennedy said according to well-known vaccine proponent and rotavirus vaccine developer Paul Offit, who he spoke with by phone, ethyl mercury leaves the body so fast that it doesn’t have time to do damage. However, Kennedy said that he had read Thomas Burbacher’s monkey studies which confirmed that although ethyl mercury does clear the blood quickly, it goes directly into the brain, where it rapidly metabolizes into highly toxic inorganic mercury, and then lodges there, creating inflammation and brain damage.

Top medical journal takes on big pharma

SMH. December 4, 2019
A leading medical journal is launching a global campaign to separate medicine from big pharma, linking industry influence to the pelvic mesh scandal that injured hundreds of women.
The BMJ says doctors are being unduly influenced by industry-sponsored education events and industry-funded trials for major drugs.

Those trials cannot be trusted, the journal's editor and a team of global healthcare leaders write in a scathing editorial published on Wednesday.

The "endemic financial entanglement with industry is distorting the production and use of healthcare evidence, causing harm to individuals and waste for health systems", they write.

They are calling for governments to start funding independent trials of new drugs and medical devices, rather than relying on industry-funded studies. Sponsored research is more likely to find a favourable result compared to independent research, studies show.

Vaccine Skepticism In Australia Now Punishable By 10 Years In Jail

Explain Life  January 4, 2019

Australian nurses and midwives who dare to speak out against the dangers of vaccinations on social media or in person will be prosecuted, the Australian government has warned, urging members of the public to report vaccine skeptics to the authorities.

Medical professional face a jail sentence of 10 years for expressing doubt about the effectiveness of vaccinations or urging further studies into vaccine safety. Opponents of the new law claim free speech and scientific integrity is under attack in Australia by a government that has been bought and paid for by Big Pharma.

“With no exceptions we expect all registered nurses, enrolled nurses and midwives to use the best available evidence in making practice decisions. This includes providing information to the public about public health issues,” Chair of the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) Dr. Lynette Cusack said in a statement.

America’s Health Care System Has Become One Of The World’s Largest Money Making Scams

 

The Economic Collapse

If the U.S. health care system was a country, it would have the fifth largest GDP on the entire planet.  At this point only the United States, China, Japan and Germany have a GDP that is larger than the 3.5 trillion dollar U.S. health care market.  If that sounds obscene to you, that is because it is obscene.  We should want people to be attracted to the health care industry because they truly want to help people that are suffering, but instead the primary reason why people are drawn to the health care industry these days is because of the giant mountains of money that are being made.  Like so many other things in our society, the health care industry is all about the pursuit of the almighty dollar, and that is just wrong.

In order to keep this giant money machine rolling, the health care industry has to do an enormous amount of marketing.  If you can believe it, a study that was just published found that at least 30 billion dollars a year is spent on such marketing.

Hoping to earn its share of the $3.5 trillion health care market, the medical industry is pouring more money than ever into advertising its products — from high-priced prescriptions to do-it-yourself genetic tests and unapproved stem cell treatments.
Spending on health care marketing nearly doubled from 1997 to 2016, soaring to at least $30 billion a year, according to a study published Tuesday in JAMA.

This marketing takes many different forms, but perhaps the most obnoxious are the television ads that are endlessly hawking various pharmaceutical drugs.  If you watch much television, you certainly can’t miss them.  They always show vibrant, smiling, healthy people participating in various outdoor activities on bright, sunny days, and the inference is that if you want to be like those people you should take their drugs.  And the phrase “ask your doctor” is usually near the end of every ad…

As a result of all those ads, millions of Americans rush out to their doctors to ask about drugs that they do not need for diseases that they do not have.

And on January 1st, dozens of pharmaceutical manufacturers hit Americans with another annual round of massive price increases.

But everyone will just keep taking those drugs, because that is what the doctors are telling them to do.  But what most people never find out is that the pharmaceutical industry goes to great lengths to get those doctors to do what they want.  According to NBC News, the big drug companies are constantly “showering them with free food, drinks and speaking fees, as well as paying for them to travel to conferences”.

It is a legal form of bribery, and it works.

When you go to most doctors, they will only have two solutions to whatever problem you have – drugs or surgery.

And since nobody really likes to get cut open, and since drugs are usually the far less expensive choice, they are usually the preferred option.
Of course if doctors get off the path and start trying to get cute by proposing alternative solutions, they can get in big trouble really fast…

How drug companies sell treatments by inventing diseases

Yahoo June 8, 2018

The pharmaceutical industry’s image has been significantly damaged in recent years as the public discovered the role its aggressive marketing played in fueling the opioid epidemic. But the American people are still largely in the dark about what may be pharma’s most effective tactic for pushing drugs — marketing diseases.

There’s a substantial body of medical literature dating back to the early ’90s about the practice known as “disease mongering.” Pharmaceutical companies regularly pathologize everyday experiences, convince doctors that they are serious problems, tell a hypochondriacal public it needs help and offers the cure: a new drug. Against the onslaught of billions of dollars in marketing campaigns each year, however, researchers’ warnings about these tactics have gone largely unheeded.

To be clear: Pharmacology has helped countless people recover from illness or lead more productive lives. But the number of patients receiving any given drug is often greater than those who would benefit from it, and often includes people it could harm.

The United States was still the largest single pharmaceutical market in 2017, generating more than $450 billion of revenue. In contrast, all of Europe accounted for roughly $214 billion. U.S. pharmaceutical spending alone is double the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average. According to the Mayo Clinic, nearly 70 percent of Americans take at least one prescription drug.

Drug Companies Sell Us Remedies for Problems Caused by Their Own Products

Alternet  January 30, 2018

Like most folks, you dutifully rub shampoo into your hair daily or a few times each week. After it strips out your hair’s natural moisture and liveliness, you apply a conditioner to get that moisture and liveliness back.

Much about modern life seems to follow this general pattern.

Mounting evidence suggests multinational companies negligently sell products to the public that are leading drivers of public health issues, while at the same time another division presents the “remedy” for that same harm. A panacea for their own poison, as it were. In this way, they profit twice: once when they supply the cause of our ailments, and again when we come to them for the cure.

It is clear that all is not well in Big Pharma these days. Americans have yet to coalesce around a plan to impose transparency and integrity on health care and pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile, mounting evidence suggests the industry persists in the peddling hundreds of products each year with dubious claims and even more dubious real-world effects — all while maintaining stupefyingly high profit margins.

Sick and Getting Sicker

The real topics today are corporate consolidation and corruption. There may be no better example of this problem than Johnson & Johnson, a corporation made up of more than 250 subsidiaries. You may recall that the pharma giant’s talc-based baby powder is now inextricably linked to incidences of ovarian cancer. Websites that concern themselves with preventing this type of cancer specifically recommend omitting talcum powders from your daily constitutionals.

Fortunately for Johnson & Johnson’s bottom line, at least one company from its panoply of subsidiaries — Janssen Pharmaceuticals — charitably offers chemotherapy drugs for ovarian cancer patients for a mere $2,758 per dose. You can recognize it by the marketing-friendly name “Doxil.”

Flu Vaccine Fails 99% in New Cochrane Review

Dr Brownstein  Feb 04, 2018
For over 20 years, I have been writing and lecturing about how the flu vaccine fails nearly all who get it. I have written about the failure of the flu vaccine in past blog posts and in my newsletter, Dr. Brownstein’s Natural Way to Health.

Cochrane is a global independent network of researchers in more than 130 countries who strive to produce credible, accessible health information that is free from commercial sponsorship and other conflicts of illness. They do not take Big Pharma money.  Therefore, their studies deserve attention when they are released.

On February 1, 2018, the Cochrane group released its latest findings on the flu vaccine. (1) The scientists studied randomized, controlled trials comparing the flu vaccine with placebo or no intervention. They included 52 clinical trials of over 80,000 people assessing the safety and effectiveness of flu vaccines in healthy adults. The studies were conducted between 1969 and 2009.

The authors found that flu vaccines probably reduced influenzas in healthy adults from 2.3% without vaccination to 0.9% with.

That means that the difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated is 1.4% or 0.014. Therefore, 71 people would need to be treated with the flu vaccine to prevent one case (1/1.4%). In other words, the flu vaccine did nothing for 70 out of 71 who received it. That means this study found the flu vaccine failed 99% (71/72).

There was more bad news for the flu vaccine in this study. The flu vaccine is touted as decreasing the risk of hospitalizations from the flu. I’m not sure how that happens since the vaccine has never been shown to be very effective against preventing the flu. In this study they found the risk of hospitalization in those that received the flu vaccine declined from 14.7% to 14.1%. That is a 0.6% decline. That means the flu vaccine fails over 99% (165/166) in preventing hospitalizations. Furthermore, the independent researchers found the flu vaccine “…may lead to little or no small reduction in days off work.” To make matter worse, the flu vaccine was shown to cause an increase in fever from 1.5% to 2.3%. Oy vey.

Why would anyone get a flu vaccine when it fails 99% who receive it?

Why would any physician prescribe a therapy, which is associated with serious adverse effects, that fails 99% who receive it?

Why are health care workers forced to receive a flu vaccine when it is consistently shown to fail nearly 99% who get them? And, there is not a single well-done study showing that vaccinating health care workers with the flu vaccine protects against the spread of flu.

Folks, the flu vaccine is a disaster. I can understand why President Trump does not get the flu shot. I cannot understand why anyone would allow themselves to be injected with a failed flu vaccine.
(1) Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2018. Feb. 1,2:CD001269