Source: Natural News

(NaturalNews) You know all those thousands of clinical trials conducted over the last few decades comparing pharmaceuticals to placebo pills? Well, it turns out all those studies must now be completely thrown out as utterly non-scientific. And why? Because the placebos used in the studies weren’t really placebos at all, rendering the studies scientifically invalid.

This is the conclusion from researchers at the University of California who published their findings in the October issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. They reviewed 167 placebo-controlled trials published in peer-reviewed medical journals in 2008 and 2009 and found that 92 percent of those trials never even described the ingredients of their placebo pills.

Why is this important? Because placebo pills are supposed to be inert. But nothing is inert, it turns out. Even so-called “sugar pills” contain sugar, obviously. And sugar isn’t inert. If you’re running a clinical trial on diabetics, testing the effectiveness of a diabetes drug versus a placebo then obviously your clinical trial is going to make the diabetes drug look better than placebo if you use sugar pills as your placebo.

Some placebo pills use olive oil which may actually improve heart health. Other placebo pills use partially-hydrogenated oils which harm heart health. Yet only 8 percent of clinical trials bothered to list the placebo ingredients at all!

Stay with me on this placebo issue… because it gets even more bizarre…

There are no FDA rules regarding placebos in clinical trials

It turns out there are absolutely no FDA rules regarding the choice or composition of placebos used in clinical trials. Technically, a clinical trial director could use eye of newt or lizard’s legs as placebo and would not even be required to mention such nefarious details in the trial results. That would cause trouble, trouble, boil and bubble! (Shakespeare reference for all you literary fans…)

We already know that clinical trials are rife with fraud. Most of the clinical trials used by pharmaceutical companies to win FDA approval of their drugs, for example, are funded by pharmaceutical companies. And it is a verifiable fact that most clinical trials tend to find results that favor the financial interests of whatever organization paid for them. So what’s to stop Big Pharma from scheming up the perfect placebo that would harm patients just enough to make their own drugs look good by comparison?

Fact: Placebos are usually provided by the very same company funding the clinical trial! Do you detect any room for fraud in this equation?

How drug companies can fake clinical trials with selected placebo pills

Placebo performance strongly influences whether drugs are approved by the FDA, by the way. As the key piece of information on its regulatory approval decisions, the FDA wants to know whether a drug works better than placebo. That’s the primary requirement! If they work even 5% better than placebo, they are said to be “efficacious” (meaning they “work”). This is true even if the placebo was selected and used specifically to make the drug look good by comparison.

You see, if there are no regulations or rules regarding placebo, then none of the placebo-controlled clinical trials are scientifically valid.

It’s amazing how medical scientists will get rough and tough when attacking homeopathy, touting how their own medicine is “based on the gold standard of scientific evidence!” and yet when it really comes down to it, their scientific evidence is just a jug of quackery mixed with a pinch of wishful thinking and a wisp of pseudoscientific gobbledygook, all framed in the language of scientism by members of the FDA who wouldn’t recognize real science if they tripped and fell into a vat full of it.

Big Pharma and the FDA have based their entire system of scientific evidence on a placebo fraud! And if the placebo isn’t a placebo, then the scientific evidence isn’t scientific.

Oh, but wait. They’ll call it science because they wish the placebo to be a placebo. Yep — the clinical researchers are now psychics, mediums and fortune tellers who simply decree that little pill of olive oil to “be a placebo!” while waving their hands over it in a gesture borrowed from David Copperfield.

James Randi may have never seen a psychic transmute lead into gold, but he’s no doubt seen doctors transmute biochemically active substances into totally inert materials merely by wishing them so! It’s so amazing!

And this brings me to the really interesting “how-to” part of this article…

How to make your own placebo just like clinical researchers do

Are you wondering how to make your own FDA-approved, scientifically validated placebo? It’s easier than you think.

Step 1 – Find something shaped like a pill. It could be a pill full of olive oil, white sugar, palm oil, fluoridated water, chalk dust, synthetic chemicals or just about anything you can imagine.

Step 2 – Close your eyes and get ready to concentrate.

Step 3 – This is the important part – Repeat out loud five times while turning counter-clockwise, “I am a scientific researcher practicing evidence-based medicine!” You must say this until you really, truly believe it. If you don’t believe it strongly enough, the placebo effect will be ruined.

Step 4 – Thrust your palm in the direction of the placebo pills and shout, at the top of your voice, “You are now placebo!” You may feel a shiver of energy coursing through your body. That’s the power of placebo reaching out to the pills.

The process is now complete. You may now use these placebo pills in any clinical trial and expect full approval of such use by your colleagues, famous medical journals and FDA regulators. (This is not a joke. This is the state of the art today in conventional medicine.)

Hope also has a huge role to place in all this. The more you hope your placebos are really placebos, the better results you’ll get. In fact, in reporting on this whole fiasco, the lead researcher of the study uncovering all this, Dr Beatric Golomb, said, “We can only hope that this hasn’t seriously systematically affected medical treatment.”

But of course it has. (And by the way, no disrespect toward Dr Golomb. She deserves kudos for being willing to tackle this subject which will no doubt make her very unpopular among the cult of Scientism as practiced by conventional medical researchers today.)

How to improve your clinical trial results

For improved results, try to use the most harmful placebo substances you can. For example, in real clinical trials involving AIDS patients — who tend to be lactose intolerant — researchers have used pills made of, guess what? Lactose!

That’s sort of like running a clinical trial on a cure for heroin addiction and using heroin as the placebo, isn’t it? Gee, somehow our drug worked “better than placebo.” Funny how that works, isn’t it?

And if you still don’t get the results you want, just start inventing your own data like other clinical trial researchers do. Remember Dr Scott Reuben? This highly-respected clinical trial researcher faked at least twenty-one clinical trials for Big Pharma (http://www.naturalnews.com/028194_S…). His fraudulent clinical trials are still being cited to sell prescription medications!

Heck, who needs placebo when you can just invent the data?

Come to think of it, who needs science when you can just use anything you want and call it placebo in the first place?

Conventional medicine operates clinical trials in the same way that banks and securities firms handle mortgage documents. They all just sort of make things up as they go along, committing felony crimes on a daily basis while hoping nobody notices. On that note, check out this amazing story by Greg Hunter called The Perfect No-Prosecution Crime (http://usawatchdog.com/the-perfect-…).

Where on the skeptics when it comes to Big Pharma science fraud?

Seriously, you just gotta love the state of medical science today. I’ve never watched a more hilarious group of nincompoops reassure each other that they’re all so scientific while practicing the most quack-ridden chicanery imaginable. The stuff being pulled off today in the name of Big Pharma’s clinical trials makes psychic detectives and tarot card readers look downright scientifically gifted by comparison.

It really makes you wonder about so-called “skeptics,” doesn’t it? If they’re skeptical of homeopathy, tarot cards, psychic mediums and people who claim they can levitate, I can at least understand the urge to ask tough questions about all these things. I ask tough questions, too, especially when people tell me they’ve seen ghosts or spirits coming back from the dead or other unexplained phenomena. (And I’ve already publicly denounced so-called “psychic surgery” which it quite obviously little more than sleight-of-hand trickery combined with animal blood.)

But most conventional skeptics never step out of bounds of their “safety zone” of popular topics for which skepticism may be safely expressed. They won’t dare ask skeptical questions about the quack science backing the pharmaceutical industry, for example. Nor will they ask tough questions about vaccines, or mammography, or chemotherapy. And you’d be hard pressed to find anything more steeped in outright fraudulent quackery than the pharmaceutical industry as operated today (and the cancer branch of it in particular).

That’s why I’m skeptical about the skeptics. If a skeptic doesn’t question the loosey goosey pseudoscience practiced by Big Pharma, then they really have no credibility as a skeptic. You can’t be selectively skeptical about some things but then a fall-for-anything fool on other scams just because they’re backed by drug companies.

But getting back to this study in particular…

Abstract of the study

Here’s some of the text from the abstract of this study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (http://www.annals.org/content/153/8…)

What’s in Placebos: Who Knows? Analysis of Randomized, Controlled Trials

1. Beatrice A. Golomb, MD, PhD;
2. Laura C. Erickson, BS;
3. Sabrina Koperski, BS;
4. Deanna Sack, BS;
5. Murray Enkin, MD; and
6. Jeremy Howick, PhD

Background: No regulations govern placebo composition. The composition of placebos can influence trial outcomes and merits reporting.

Purpose: To assess how often investigators specify the composition of placebos in randomized, placebo-controlled trials.

Data Sources: 4 English-language general and internal medicine journals with high impact factors.

Study Selection: 3 reviewers screened titles and abstracts of the journals to identify randomized, placebo-controlled trials published from January 2008 to December 2009.

Data Extraction: Reviewers independently abstracted data from the introduction and methods sections of identified articles, recording treatment type (pill, injection, or other) and whether placebo composition was stated. Discrepancies were resolved by consensus.

Data Synthesis: Most studies did not disclose the composition of the study placebo. Disclosure was less common for pills than for injections and other treatments (8.2% vs. 26.7%; P = 0.002).

Limitation: Journals with high impact factors may not be representative.

Conclusion: Placebos were seldom described in randomized, controlled trials of pills or capsules. Because the nature of the placebo can influence trial outcomes, placebo formulation should be disclosed in reports of placebo-controlled trials.

Primary Funding Source: University of California Foundation Fund 3929 — Medical Reasoning.

Source: NaturalNews

The breaking news is that Fosamax, the popular drug for supposed bone strength, may cause “spontaneous fractures.” That means you could end up like Sandy Potter, 59, of Queens, New York on ABC News who claims she was in excruciating pain when she broke her femur due to jumping rope. Who knew?

Well, the signs were there: hidden in plain sight. “Fractures” are listed right on the package insert as a side effect, or in Merck’s words, “Low energy femoral shaft and subtrochanteric fractures.” Yeah, we all know what that means.

“We are seeing people just walking, walking down the steps, patients who are doing low-energy exercise,” said Dr. Kenneth Egol, professor of orthopedic surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center. “Very unusual, the femur is one of the strongest bones in the body.”

Egol adds that some of his patient’s X-rays from a minimal fall look more like they came from a car accident and he’s seeing this more frequently.

In my book, Nature’s Secret Messages: Hidden in Plain Sight, I write about “prescriptions for trouble.” Here are facts that require careful consideration before or when taking medications.

1. As Fosamax shows, we don’t know the long-term effects of drugs.
It took 30 to 40 years before we could see the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Doctors used to endorse cigarettes, along with some “miracle” drugs that were later discovered to be dangerous and even deadly.

2. Side effects could be confused as a symptom.
An article published in April 2009 in USA Today called “Drugs Cause Confusion in Elderly” stated that medications, both prescribed and over the counter, could impair the elderly. A patient could actually be given a wrong diagnosis because doctors don’t always recognize the symptoms as a side effect of a drug.

3. Combining meds may lead to a combination of problems.
Researchers have done very little testing on the effects of combining a variety of drugs and the serious complications — even death — that may follow. You can probably name several celebrities who died as a result of combining painkillers, antidepressants, and sleeping pills. But how often do you hear about celebrities overdosing on herbs?

4. Studies can be unreliable.
The New York Timess published a lengthy feature article in 2007 about the many ways in which clinical studies can be seriously flawed. In the words of Karl Menninger, M.D.: “One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.”

5. What about the side effects to the planet?
The more drugs we take, the more drugs our bodies excrete in waste, and the more they make their way into sewers and eventually into the environment. Research2 suggests that some of these drugs (as well as toxic substances in cleaning materials, shampoos, cosmetics and other personal-care products) can harm fish and other animals living in our waterways, which in turn can affect us.

Too often, our default is to pop a pill instead of trying a natural remedy first — even though certain foods and herbs are quite often just as effective as drugs (if not more so) and may not have the nasty side effects.

A 50 year-old colleague took a bone scan for the last four years and her doctor was shocked to see that her bones were becoming stronger each year while she was growing older. Her secret? Was she on medications? No. Was she eating a lot of milk and cheese? No. She actually went off of all dairy products. She went on an internal cleanse, eliminated junk foods, and started eating nature’s foods. Make bones about it — when the body is nourished, active, and working well, it can have more energy to repair and rebuild itself.

I offer a bone growth supplement system on my web site because the company, Garden of Life, gives a “grow bone challenge” for stronger, healthier bones or they’ll give double your money back if you qualify! They make you this amazing offer because they’re so confident in the Grow Bone System’s ability to build bone density by using natural whole food minerals to create bone growth.3

Also consider using acupuncture, which originated in ancient China, and is now widely used in the West as well as chiropractic, massage, Qigong, Healing Touch and yoga. These all have side effects that activate the natural healing processes of the body and restore physical and emotional well-being.

Nature’s food and natural remedies can be powerful drugs — hidden in plain sight. You and your health care practitioner may want to consider nature’s four billion years of wisdom to help you in all areas of your life, and then decide if medication is truly needed.

Sources:
1. Taubes, G., “Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?” The New York Times, September 16, 2007.
2. Critser, G., Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
3. http://www.ElaineWilkes.com

About the author:
Elaine Wilkes, Ph.D., N.C., M.A., LEED, a self-proclaimed “learning addict” who discovered that the answers to life’s questions are found in nature’s magic. You’ll ask yourself, What would Nature Do? after you read Nature’s Secret Messages: Hidden in Plain Sight. Order Elaine’s Hay House book that was awarded a rare star recommendation from Publisher’s Weekly. Now available on Amazon at: http://tiny.cc/cHzqu. Discover the finest health products available at: www.ElaineWilkes.com

In a study published in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers came to a surprising conclusion: hospitalizations for poisoning by prescription medication has increased by 65 percent from 1999 to 2006.

The rates of unintentional poisoning– from prescription opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers in the U.S. has surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of unintentional injury death.

Simply put, this means that poisoning from prescription drugs is now the second leading cause of unintentional injury death in the U.S.

“Deaths and hospitalizations associated with prescription drug misuse have reached epidemic proportions,” said the study’s lead author, Jeffrey H. Coben, MD, of the West Virginia University School of Medicine. “It is essential that health care providers, pharmacists, insurance providers, state and federal agencies, and the general public all work together to address this crisis.

Prescription medications are just as powerful and dangerous as other notorious street drugs, and we need to ensure people are aware of these dangers and that treatment services are available for those with substance abuse problems.”

Read the rest of the story on Care2.com

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Many scientific “breakthroughs” widely reported in the popular press are actually false, warn researchers Marcus Munafo of the University of Bristol and Jonathan Flint of Oxford University, writing in The Guardian.

“The social environment in which research occurs places scientists under pressure to perform, measured by the amount and quality of publications, and success in attracting research funding from government and charitable agencies,” the scientists write.

This pressure encourages researchers to find some exciting conclusion to report, the authors write, even if that conclusion is probably false.

All scientific studies — such as those claiming to find a “gene for” depression, schizophrenia, obesity, or any other condition — contain a probability that their findings occurred simply by chance. Normally, this probability is less than 5 percent — making the findings “statistically significant.” Munafo and Flint note, however, that it is actually fairly easy to produce statistical significance.

“With enough data, and by running enough statistical tests, it is easy enough to find a significant effect,” they write. “And with enough people trying, this effect might even be found more than once, giving the appearance of replication. The problem is that the results almost certainly won’t be true.”

This is why further studies, particularly meta-analyses combining the results of multiple studies, consistently disprove many headline-topping “breakthroughs.” Yet these later studies rarely receive the same degree of media coverage as the originals. The authors note that although they conducted a meta-analysis finding no evidence for a connection between a certain gene variant and depression, screening for this “depression gene” is still available via the Internet.

More research being done does not necessarily mean more reliable findings, either.

“The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true,” said genetic epidemiologist, John Ioannidis. “The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.”

Source:  Natural News

A MUST WATCH 24 minute video expose of how we make and consume STUFF, creating a global mess that will be very hard to undo.

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

www.StoryOf Stuff.com :: StoryOfStuff.org

YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/storyofstuffproject#p/u

U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water — contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation.

Hundreds of active pharmaceutical ingredients are used in a variety of manufacturing, including drugmaking: For example, lithium is used to make ceramics and treat bipolar disorder; nitroglycerin is a heart drug and also used in explosives; copper shows up in everything from pipes to contraceptives.

Federal and industry officials say they don’t know the extent to which pharmaceuticals are released by U.S. manufacturers because no one tracks them — as drugs. But a close analysis of 20 years of federal records found that, in fact, the government unintentionally keeps data on a few, allowing a glimpse of the pharmaceuticals coming from factories.

As part of its ongoing PharmaWater investigation about trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals in drinking water, AP identified 22 compounds that show up on two lists: the EPA monitors them as industrial chemicals that are released into rivers, lakes and other bodies of water under federal pollution laws, while the Food and Drug Administration classifies them as active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Read More: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517131,00.html