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Originally Posted by jp4m2  I couldn't agree more on this. Whenever I hear the FDA approved of a medical product, it means nothing to me. The ties between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry runs very deep, and the corruption is real and scary between the two. All anyone has to do is a search to see just how bad this has become. The Food and Drug Administration receives more than half of its funding from the drug companies, whose very products it is assessing and approving, this makes for a huge conflict of interest. The FDA also hires former drug company employees and vice versa, this is another conflict of interest when these people have a stock options in the very company they are supposed to police.
We have a false sense of security that drugs go under rigorous testing and are scrutinized for safety before being approved but this couldn't be farther from the truth. Just take a look and some of the drugs removed from the market in the past 10-15 years, were they not tested and approved? The deaths and injuries connected to dangerous drugs that never should have been approved typically go unreported so the public never really knows the frequency this is happening.
This is a quote from a person who worked in the industry.....
According to Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM): 3 “Any reputable journal is at the mercy of what is submitted to it and must choose from whatever comes over the transom. Many studies never see the light of day because their findings are negative. There is a heavy bias toward positive studies, and this negative bias is a real problem. A company may conduct 1,000 trials; if two are positive, they get FDA approval and are published. The other 998 never see the light of day. In fact, half of all study data is never published.”
When our own medical system is listed in the top three causes of deaths in the US there is a huge problem. Recently, there was a study done evaluating the health care system in eleven countries, including the US. The US health care system scored at the bottom in some of the categories. We don't have the best medical system in the world, ours is broken and we are at it's mercy.
There's also the issue of deaths caused by properly prescribed and properly administered drugs, which accounts for 106,000 every year. Personally, I believe this number is actually higher than this because not every death is recorded as such. If this number of deaths were attached to supplements there would be such outrage and a call for tougher regulations, but since it's pharmaceuticals it's chalked up the risk vs benefit equation, even though these deaths weren't supposed to happen.
Many aren't even aware that the pharmaceutical companies have gotten so greedy they are now outsourcing the manufacturing of the drugs we are consuming. Over 80% of them are now being made in China and India. The FDA is not able to inspect these factories, they just don't have the funding to send inspectors out of the country to oversee the quality control standards in these factories, so we are all at risk when consuming these drugs. Some people won't buy a household product made in China or buy a jerky treat for our pets, but we will trust the drugs without question. Some of the questions I'm concerned with are are they putting in the active ingredient? Are they putting in the correct dosage of the active ingredient? Are they putting is toxic fillers?..... Who knows since no one is watching or checking. |
I do agree with some of what you have said but I think it is very dangerous to dismiss all drugs on the basis of bias etc. Alzheimer's drugs, MS drugs and even influenza, measles, mumps, rubella and POLO have all benefitted from reduced symptomology, delay in progression or eradicated altogether.
Lots of people claim drugs are responsible for a lot of things negative and dismiss all of the positive which is why some of these diseases, like measles etc. have resurfaced amongst children. A lot of people forget that measles can and DOES kill and inoculations are the reason so many kids have been saved from death.
I think bias is something to be aware of but it isn't the be all and end all in terms of medicinal efficacy for humans or non-human animals.