預防勝於治療
傳播最新健康知識、記錄恢複健康消息、推薦及時健康產品
800,000 Deaths from Drugs:
By Dr. Mercola
Most people assume that scientific integrity is somehow assured; that there are safeguards along the way, preventing fraudulent research from harming patients.
Unfortunately, scientific misconduct has become a very serious and widespread problem that threatens the entire paradigm of science-based medicine—unless changes are made.
Again and again, papers assessing the prevalence of scientific fraud and/or the impact this is having shows that the situation is dire and getting worse. In short, we have lost scientific integrity, and without it, "science-based medicine" is just a term without substance.
Conflict of interest is another pervasive problem within the research field, and the featured article highlights a case that contains both.
Beta-blockers are drugs commonly used in the treatment of high blood pressure and congestive heart failure. They work primarily by blocking the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and epinephrine (adrenaline) from binding to beta receptors, thereby dilating blood vessels, which reduces your heart rate and blood pressure.
Until recently, the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) also recommended using beta-blockers in patients undergoing non-cardiac surgery.
A recent article in Forbes Magazine1 highlights how medical guidelines based on questionable science may have resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of patients in just a few years:
"Last summer, British researchers provoked concern when they published a paper raising the possibility that by following an established guideline UK doctors may have caused as many as 10,000 deaths each year,2" Larry Husten, editorial director of WebMD professional news, writes.
"Now, they have gone a step further and published an estimate that the same guideline may have led to the deaths of as many as 800,000 people in Europe over the last five years3...
The 800,000 deaths are comparable in size to the worst cases of genocide and mass murder in recent history."
Guideline Based on Discredited Research May Have Caused 800,000 Deaths
The paper, originally published in the online version of the European Heart Journal,4 is a testament to the dangers of modern medicine, and why scientific rigor needs to be reestablished as the norm. As I've discussed before, scientific misconduct by medical researchers affects real people, living real lives. It could affect you.
When flawed research is used as the basis for medical guidelines, people that shouldn't die do... All in the name of increasing profits to the drug company with reckless abandon and little to no concern for the casualties.
The issue goes back to research done by Don Poldermans,5 a cardiovascular researcher in the Netherlands, who was fired for scientific misconduct in 2011. Some of the strongest evidence for the European Society of Cardiology's (ESC) guidelines on beta-blocker use in patients undergoing non-cardiac surgery came from Poldermans' DECREASE trial.
It's well worth noting that Poldermans was also the chairman of the committee that drafted the guideline (he has since resigned from his position with the task force6). While his DECREASE trial has not as of yet been retracted, the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam stated7 he was fired because he was:
"…careless in collecting the data for his research. In one study, it was found that he used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and that two reports were submitted to conferences which included knowingly unreliable data."
You would think that once this was known, immediate action would result. However, it took two years before the ESC withdrew the beta-blocker recommendation once the Poldermans scandal had unraveled. This is absolutely scandalous as nearly a half of a million people died unnecessarily due to the delay.
In that two-year span, many European clinicians may have felt that their hands were tied, as failing to follow guidelines can lead to being penalized—even if the doctor knows the guidelines are likely to do more harm than good. As reported by Forbes:8
"They note that more than half of the lives lost—potentially more than 400,000—may 'have occurred after the research was discredited,' though some of the damage may have been mitigated if doctors changed their practice after reading about the controversy...
Cole and Francis argue that much needs to be changed in the application of medical research: 'The aviation profession has led the way in systems to prevent, recognize, study, and learn from professional failures. Clinical medicine is now following the same path. We must develop similar systems for research.'"
Understanding and Weighing the Potential Risks and Benefits...
While some studies show perioperative beta blockers save lives, the featured report found that they're killing people. So which is it? It turns out that both may be true--the BIG DIFFERENCE is that it all depends on whether you have a pre-existing, serious, life-threatening heart condition or not.
If you DO have a pre-existing, life-threatening condition, beta blockers appear to be helpful when you go into surgery. But if you DON'T, they appear to harm or even kill you. o, it’s important to realize that various studies address two very different scenarios:
- People already taking beta blockers for serious heart conditions
- People who are given beta blockers prior to surgery, even though their risk is negligible
One study9 opposing perioperative use of beta blockers showed that people who had the highest risk of dying from beta blockers were NOT the ones with the highest cardiac risk, meaning: Beta blockers may have helped those with the most serious conditions, while harming those with little or no prior heart risks.10
The first indication that beta blockers should not be routinely given prior to non-cardiac surgery due to the increased risk of death came out in 2008,11 but it appears that even though cardiology guidelines were eventually changed in both the UK and the US to reflect this concern, physicians continued to prescribe the perioperative use of beta blockers anyway.
Now, the reason for the controversy is that Poldermans has been called out for corrupt research practices; thus, now researchers are speculating that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by the mass use of beta blockers before surgery.
However, as early as 2009 Poldermans claimed12 that the adverse events are caused by individual physicians using too high of a dosage of beta blockers, and not because of problems relating to his research.
The medical literature and media articles reflect ongoing concern and confusion about whether or not to give beta blockers with non-cardiac surgeries. What the media are missing is that the studies are talking about two different classes of patients.
It’s really all about weighing the risk/benefit ratio. In order to be of potential benefit, the risks associated with heart disease must outweigh the heavy risk and side effects of the drug itself, which is a very limited target population.
The moral of the story is that patients should push back to ensure the physician sees a definite need before prescribing this, or any other, drug. In this case, it appears that nearly a million Europeans with little or no need were given the drug as part of a routine guideline, and paid with their lives.
How Many Americans May have Been Harmed by Similar Guidelines?
If the claim that beta blockers may be killing some people—those who don’t already have serious risks for cardiac conditions, and who are not already on beta blockers –what is the potential number of deaths in the US?
Fortunately, according to a previous Forbes article13 published in July 2013, US guidelines are less aggressive in their support of perioperative beta blockers. Researchers say more than 30 million non-cardiac surgeries occur in the US each year,14 so if you divide 30 million by the 25 percent that European researchers claim may be harmed by this one-size-fits-all practice, you end up with a number of 7.5 million American surgery patients POTENTIALLY harmed by beta blockers each year. The numbers could be higher, or lower.
According to the CDC, the total number of surgical procedures performed in the US is 51.4 million, of which 4.7 million are cardiac-related. Using this statistic, the number of Americans potentially affected by dangerous beta blockers is 46.7 million, giving us a potential number of more than 11.6 million deaths each year. On the other hand, we don’t know how many already had a life-threatening heart condition prior to going in for non-cardiac surgery and might have benefited from the drug, opposed to patients whose risk of death is increased by the absence of prior heart disease...
Some validation for the concern that beta blockers is not a great idea for everyone may be found in an October 2013 study15 done in New York, which hasn’t been given much attention. It found that beta blocker use increased the odds of having an acute coronary event. In fact, researchers at SUNY were so concerned by what they found that they commented:
“The results from this study become especially important in view of the fact that beta-blockers are currently recommended by the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) 2011 guidelines regarding cardiac risk and management before, during and after surgery,"
Paper Removed for Peer Review
Interestingly, the paper that summarized the action taken to stop using the drug that was killing hundreds of thousands was quickly removed from the European Heart Journal's website, without explanation. Husten followed up with the journal, and was told that, due to an oversight, the paper had not been peer-reviewed prior to publication.
This is standard procedure for any article containing "scientific statements." The question is whether the paper actually contained statements in need of peer-review in the first place. Based on the reply from the paper's authors, this could be a matter of debate. Husten writes:
"The authors of the 'disappeared' article, Graham Cole and Darrel Francis, sent the following statement: 'Our article is a narrative of events with a timeline figure and a context figure. We had not considered it to contain scientific statements, but we admit that it does multiply together three published numbers...
The first of our two EHJ articles merely says that our community, which races to take credit when research-led therapy improves survival, must be equally attentive to the possibility of harm. The leverage of leadership means the magnitude of either may be far from trivial. Where our article relayed numbers, we made clear that alternative values were possible. The focus for readers was on how serious the consequences can be when clinical research goes wrong...
We admire Prof Lüscher's diligence in sending for peer review what we thought was merely multiplication. We await the review of the pair of articles. The first narrated one instance of a pervasive problem. The second suggests what each of us can do to reduce recurrences.'"
Research Claims an Apple a Day Is Comparable to Daily Statin Use
In related news, a recent study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ)16 found that simply eating an apple a day might help prevent cardiovascular-related deaths in those over 50 to a similar degree as using a daily statin. This reminds me of the recent analysis17 that found exercise is just as potent as medications for pre-diabetes and heart disease. In fact, the evidence was so strong, the researchers suggested that drug companies ought to be required to include exercise for comparison when conducting clinical trials for new drugs. Perhaps diet ought to be a standard comparator as well?
As reported by Medical News Today,18 there's plenty of research suggesting that statins will reduce your risk of a vascular event like heart attack and stroke, even if you don't have an underlying risk of cardiovascular problems. Such questionable research is being used to push for more widespread use of the drugs. But just how valuable is such research, once you compare it to something as simple as adding an apple to your diet?
"...[T]he investigators decided to see how widespread use of statins would impact the rate of vascular mortality in the over-50 UK population, and they compared this with the effects of apple consumption... From their calculations, they found that if 17.6 million people in the UK took a statin a day, this would reduce the number of vascular deaths by 9,400. If the whole over-50 UK population (22 million) ate an apple a day, this could reduce the annual number of vascular deaths by 8,500.
But the researchers took into account the side effects of statin use, stating that prescribing a statin to everyone over the age of 50 could lead to over 1,000 extra cases of muscle disease (myopathy) and more than 10,000 additional cases of diabetes..."
Beware of New Cholesterol Guidelines
One in four Americans over the age of 45 currently take a statin drug, despite the fact that there are over 900 studies proving their adverse effects, and recently updated treatment guidelines for high cholesterol will likely DOUBLE the number of Americans being prescribed these dangerous drugs.
While they're trying to sell these new cholesterol guidelines as being focused on prevention through lifestyle modifications along with statin therapy, this is a gross misapplication of the word "prevention," as these drugs cannot possibly address the underlying conditions of heart or cardiovascular disease. (Even more egregious, it completely ignores recent research showing that statins can effectively nullify the benefits of exercise, which is one of the primary heart disease prevention strategies.)
It's also important to know that the cardiovascular risk calculator used to determine whether you are a candidate for statin drug treatment under these new guidelines (which ignores your cholesterol level), is seriously flawed. Until or unless the calculator is revised, it may overestimate your cardiovascular health risk by anywhere from 75 to 150 percent! Basically, it is currently calibrated in such a way that virtually everyone will qualify for statin treatment, no matter how healthy you are.
How to Get Solid Information in an Era of Confusion and Corruption
Ultimately, the take-home message here is that even if a drug or treatment is "backed by science," this in absolutely no way guarantees it is safe or effective. Likewise, if an alternative treatment has not been published in a medical journal, it does not mean it is unsafe or ineffective. Exercising and eating more fresh fruits and vegetables may be just as effective as a drug treatment, as some studies have shown. That is why it is so crucial to have a philosophical framework to assist you in evaluating all these studies that can fire off your alarm signals if it violates those guidelines.
You've got to use all the resources available to you, including your own common sense and reason, true experts' advice, and other's experiences, to determine what medical treatment or advice will be best for you in any given situation. I advise you to remain skeptical but open -- even if it is something I'm saying, you need to realize that YOU are responsible for your and your family's health, not me, and certainly not drug companies trying to sell their wares and convince you to take dangerous "symptom-cover-ups" disguised as science-based solutions.
Since it is very well established that most prescribed drugs do absolutely nothing to treat the cause of disease, it would be prudent to exercise the precautionary principle when evaluating ANY new drug claim, as it will more than likely be seriously flawed, biased, or worse.
If you're facing a health challenge, it is best to identify a qualified natural health consultant—someone who really understands health at a foundational level and has had extensive experience in helping others resolve their health care challenges. Just make sure to see a competent regular physician to make certain serious disorders like cancer are ruled out as well.
Basic Tenets of Optimal Health
I have provided some general conclusions I have reached after seeing 25,000 patients and actively seeking to achieve a high level of wellness myself. Hopefully, you can use these as a starting point to develop your own personalized philosophical framework that can help you sort through any existing or new health recommendations as an additional filter, to help you determine if they are valid or not. We clearly want to learn from others' mistakes. No need to blindly follow medical advice that has killed hundreds of thousands.
- Eat a healthy diet focused on fresh, whole foods (ideally organic and/or locally grown). Try to eat a large portion of your food raw. You want to pay careful attention to keeping your insulin levels down, which means avoiding sugars and grains of all kinds, and replacing the lost carbs with healthful fats. Also, be mindful of your protein sources, making sure they're of high quality (ideally organically-raised and pasture-fed). A high-fat, moderate-protein, low-carb diet is likely to improve the health of most people. My optimized Nutritional Plan can guide you, whether you're at a beginner or advanced level.
- Consume healthy fat. The science is loud and clear on this point: omega-3 fats are essential for optimal health. Unfortunately, most fish commercially available today are polluted with mercury, PCBs, and other toxic substances, which is why I recommend you take a supplement like krill oil instead of getting it from your food. Other healthy fats include coconut oil, avocados, olives, olive oil, butter and macadamia nuts. All these fats are low in protein and carbs and will not impair insulin, leptin or mTOR.
- Make clean, pure water your primary beverage, and steer clear of all sweetened and/or flavored beverages, including those that contain artificial sweeteners
- Manage your stress. There are many effective stress-relieving tools out there, but I have found energy psychology approaches like the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) to be very helpful.
- Exercise regularly. Ideally, you want a comprehensive fitness regimen that includes stretching, high intensity interval training, core strengthening exercises, and strength training
- Get plenty of appropriate sun exposure to optimize your vitamin D levels naturally. UV exposure also has additional health benefits beyond vitamin D production. A robust and growing body of research clearly shows that vitamin D is absolutely critical for your health. The D*Action project has been initiated by GrassrootsHealth along with 42 leading vitamin D researchers to demonstrate how health can be achieved right now with what's known about vitamin D with a combination of vitamin D measurement and health outcome tracking. To learn more, please see this recent article.
- Limit your exposure to toxins of all kinds. The number of toxic chemicals and their sources is so large, addressing them all could easily require an entire library, but I believe you can help you keep your toxic load as low as possible by becoming an informed and vigilant consumer. This includes tossing out your toxic household cleaners, soaps, personal hygiene products, air fresheners, bug sprays, lawn pesticides, and insecticides, just to name a few, and replacing them with non-toxic alternatives
- Get plenty of quality sleep. Scientists have discovered that your circadian rhythms regulate the energy levels in your cells. In addition, the proteins involved with your circadian rhythm and metabolism are intrinsically linked and dependent upon each other. Therefore, when your circadian rhythm is disrupted, it can have a profound influence on your physical health. For example, research has also linked disrupted sleep cycles to serious health problems like depression, coronary heart diseases, and even cancer. If you have any kind of sleep problem, whether you're having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, my article "33 Secrets to a Good Night's Sleep" is packed with great tips to help you finally get some good rest.
A Special Interview with Dr. Andrew Saul
By Dr. Joseph Mercola
DM: Dr. Joseph Mercola
AS: Dr. Andrew Saul
DM: How is it possible that a misinformation could kill nearly a million people from inappropriately prescribed drugs? This is Dr. Mercola, helping you take control of your health. I’m joined today by Dr. Andrew Saul, who is going to help us delve into the answer to this question. Welcome and thank you for joining us today.
AS: I’m glad to be here.
DM: It is just extraordinary. I just nearly fell out of my chair when I read this study that in brief summary, the… This is in Europe, which has a much larger population than the US collectively. They’re about 740 million. The results of the study are just restricted to Europe, but clearly the implications are appropriate also for the US. The numbers aren’t just as big, but they appear to have killed 800,000 people by inappropriately prescribing beta blockers for patients in non-cardiac surgery. I mean, it’s just almost unimaginable that they can get away with it. But then, of course, they tried to cover it up. We’ll get into the details. I’m wondering what your take is on this study.
AS: Well, Dr. Abram Hoffer said for years and years that, "Drugs make a well person sick. Why would they make a sick person well?" since he was advocating the use of niacin to help with heart disease problems. This was picked up by William Parsons at the Mayo Clinic years later. There has always been an alternative. The best alternative is not really the alternative at all – it’s the common-sense way to deal with these heart problems. That is to recognize that you need to exercise. You need to eat whole foods. You need to get rid of sugar. You need to start juicing. You need to take supplements. None of this is being presented to the public as a solution.
In fact, you know all too well, as does your readership, that for the last year or two there’s been a really intense effort to try to suggest that vitamins are hurting people. Now, they’ve gone out of their way to try to find evidence that vitamins might possibly be causing deaths. The most recent report by the American Association of Poison Control Centers shows there are no deaths once again from vitamins. One was alleged to some B vitamin, but they couldn’t even specify it. Obviously, they didn’t have anything on it. At the same time, we’re having tens, even hundreds, of thousands of people dying from drugs that most doctors would consider to be garden-variety therapy.
There’s a better answer. There always has been a better answer. Really, drugs are kind of the alternative. They’re the Johnny-come-lately. What on Earth did we do until we came up with these drugs in the last 20, 30, or 40 years? How did civilization ever make it? How do animals manage without beta blockers? How do they manage without statins? How do they manage without all the interventions that pharmaceutical medicine makes so much money off of? The answer is that the natural solution has always been the best. It’s always been in front of us. But now the point is being driven home.
If we’re seeing the deaths of 800,000 people in Europe, this is a huge, huge issue. You are absolutely right to flag the public’s attention to this. There’s a lot of good advice on your website to help people really get control with their health and to get off this drug-death, drug-side effect, drug-death, drug-side effect spiral.
DM:
It’s just so extraordinary. I mean, it’s not tens of thousands; it’s more than hundreds of thousands, because this was for one group of drugs, beta blockers, in Europe alone. If you extrapolate those numbers to the US, you’re looking at probably about half of those deaths. That’s another 400,000, well over a million. And that’s only over a five-year period.
But one of the points that I found most extraordinary is that the majority of those deaths in Europe actually occurred after they found this out. It took them years to change the recommendation. I mean, let’s just talk about turning the Titanic. Turning the Titanic or a large ship is a challenge. But here we’ve got tens, hundreds, of thousands of people dying for their inability to act quickly. It’s just almost reprehensible negligence on their part. They can get away with this.
I thank you for bringing up the point that there are obviously solutions and that there’s been this massive effort from certain legislators and physicians to derail supplements. You are the leader in showing us that they’re essentially harmless – no deaths at all. Here we have one group of drugs in Europe alone causing 800,000 deaths over five years.
AS: Right.
DM: It’s just incredible.
AS:
To put that in perspective, that is considerably more than all of the dead in the United States Civil War (Union and Confederate), including deaths by disease as well as battle. Eight hundred thousand people dead is approaching a number that the health nuts have been talking about for a while.
There was an article and a book called
Death by Modern Medicine that came out around 10 years ago. Everybody thought, "Ho, ho, ho, this is a wild exaggeration." They’re claiming that at least 300,000 or possibly as many as 800,000 people a year die of medical interventions, including the ones that are done according to the book, the ones that are properly prescribed and taken as directed.
Now, there was a huge outcry saying that these authors were exaggerating. There is no way that modern medicine was killing that many. Well, it is. Now we can say with a fair amount of certainty that in the United States, modern medicine techniques are killing so many people that it’s in the top 10 causes of death. By some estimates, it’s in the top five, and by some limited estimates, it’s actually the number one killer of Americans every year.
Here we are, we’re killing off our own countrymen in America, and we’re killing off our friends in Europe as well. It’s getting to the point where the public, I think, is going to just pull back. They’re not even going to believe that number because it’s so large. But this is a global issue, and there is a global solution. There is no monotherapy for heart disease. It is a lifestyle change. That lifestyle change is individual. It’s doable, it’s old-fashioned, and it works. Get rid of sugar, exercise, eat whole, unprocessed foods, drink vegetable juices, take your vitamins, and you’re going to live longer.
There have been lots of studies that show that people who take supplements have less cardiovascular disease. What have you been told for the last year or two? In the last 39 years that I’ve been doing this, the public has been told, "We need more study on those vitamins. We’ve got to have tighter research controls." Well, look at the research controls they had on their beta blockers. This is outright fraud. This is fraud and murder. People went to the gallows in Nuremberg for doing what the drug industry is doing in Europe.
DM:
Yes. This should clearly be on the front page of most every major periodical – magazines and newspapers – but it was buried. We found this report buried in the back pages of Forbes magazine. Fortunately, there is an editor or a writer at Forbes who’s been following this case very closely, which is why he picked up on it. But interestingly, when the details came out in the European Heart Journal and they were published, they withdrew the paper supposedly because of the implications of the assertions. Normally, this type of article is not peer-reviewed, but they said, "Oh, we got to pull it [out] and get it peer-reviewed." Who knows if they’ll ever put it back in the journal?
AS:
An interesting thing about that: the study authors commented. They basically said we didn’t really draw wild conclusions; all we did was multiply three numbers. And you know, peer review is funny.
We’re back to Abram Hoffer again, my mentor for years. Dr. Abram Hoffer was very much opposed to peer review. He said, "That’s a really good way to stamp out innovation and maintain the status quo." Linus Pauling also had a rather dim view of peer review. There are quite a few scientists who have come out and said, "Look, why don’t we do what works? Why don’t we take a look at what doctors do when they get results? Let’s all do it." This is exactly what Dr. Hoffer said. "Where are the good ol’ days of medicine," he said, "when honest physicians reported what they saw, and other doctors followed their example?"
[----- 10:00 -----]
DM:
I couldn’t agree more. That clearly seems to be the way that you should pattern your treatments: based on successful interventions. That’s what they seek to do. But unfortunately, the entire system has been perverted. It’s probably the best description. It’s twisted and manipulated by the industries that fund most of these studies and [by] the government. The government is lobbied by the drug companies. They’re able to get these studies published and make these types of recommendations and interventions that kill people. I mean, millions of people.
To me, one of the most extraordinary components of this is if it challenges the whole basis of scientific medicine. I mean, how can you trust it when just one of these studies kills a million people?
AS: Right.
DM:
It just challenges the whole basic foundation of what they’re doing.
AS:
It does. It gets even more disturbing when we take a look at the regulators who are supposed to be running interference on this on behalf of the public. The fox definitely is in charge of the hen house. The FDA is a perfect example. The FDA has all kinds of people with drug industry ties either before or after they’re there and very possible while they’re there. The FDA basically says to the drug companies, "Now, you do the research and you submit the study showing that it’s safe." Oh, now, there’s a good idea. Gee.
DM:
Yeah, and the total implication that they don’t state directly, the indirect implication, is, "If you happen to do a study that doesn’t support your claims, we’ll just throw that away. Don’t show it to us. We don’t need to see that."
AS:
Right. In case people think that Saul and Mercola are going off on this again, it’s very important that we point out that Dr. Angell, who was editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote a book called The Truth About the Drug Companies. She absolutely ripped into them. This is the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. [It’s] difficult to dismiss her. And quite frankly, she’s not particularly keen on alternative or natural healing. For her to rip into the drug companies was particularly powerful.
She went out of her way to point out how these studies are rigged. They are fraudulent. They are driven by money. The drug industry controls medical education, medical research, medical practice, and medical laws. We’ve been saying this for years and it has to be said again: the emperor has no clothes. To the public: there’s a way out. Question authority (that was my favorite button during the hippie ‘60s). Question authority. Always question authority. Linus Pauling said that. He said, "If there will be some scientists who won a prize and who has gray hair, telling you what to do, and he said say, "no," listen politely, consider what he says, look into it, and decide for yourself.
This is what we have to do more than ever. As we move toward national healthcare of some sort in the United States, it’s really important that we don’t let the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry dictate to our representatives and senators what’s going to be done. I think that is what is happening right now unless we stand up and walk. It’s time to do it.
DM:
I always like to end on a positive note and reframe things positively. To me, the most powerful lesson from this serious tragedy… I mean, we’re talking 800,000 people dying unnecessarily and prematurely. Obviously, we’re all going to die. But they die prematurely without any reason other than this flawed study. That’s just one. We could spend hours going through all the rest of them, and read Dr. Angell’s book that go into more philosophical components.
But the message here is that you can’t trust this system. This is a powerful example of that. You’ve got to develop your own philosophy, your own ability to make this discernment, because this is not going to be the first. Probably this, but when you hear of that… This week, there are going to be more announcements of these medical studies, these new breakthroughs. If it violates what you know to be true in your own heart, in your own common-sense wisdom, which is obviously not very common, you have to question it, not only you but those that you love – your friends and your family.
If they start hearing it from a number of people, we could start to make a difference. As we said, this material is not going to be announced on your news channel. It’s just not. It’s suppressed. Even though it’s true and it’s real, they’re not going to let you know about it. You have to find additional resources to form your basis and opinion, and to let all the people know. If we get a critical mass, we can change the system.
I’m not too hopeful about changing it through the legislative process because it’s so manipulated. It’s so twisted. It’s so lobbied. The system is so fatally broken that I don’t know if it’s ever possible to fix without a complete reset.
AS:
Abraham Lincoln was right, and still is: "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time." There are more of us than there are of them.
DM: Yes.
AS:
There are more people taking vitamins now than that don’t. Seventy-five percent of physicians take vitamins every day. We’re winning. We’re winning. The center has shifted. The drug industry has more money but we have more votes. If we are to move ahead on this, we’re going to have to claim our power. Voting with your dollars is one of the great ways to do it. Just say "no" to drugs. Say, "No, I’m not going to take the beta blocker. No, I’m not going to take the statin. No, I’m not going to take the antibiotic that you’re giving me to prevent an infection. I’m not dumb."
I know I’m not going to do it. I raised my kids all the way into college. They never had a single antibiotic – not one dose, not ever. That’s because we used other methods – natural diet, mostly a plant-based diet, vegetable juices, and lots of vitamin C. We did all the things that natural health physicians taught us over the decades. You know something? It works!
DM:
Yes. The benefit is that you don’t get these side effects. You don’t get these chronic degenerative diseases. You don’t die prematurely.
AS:
Let’s just stay there for a minute. You don’t die prematurely. That’s big. This is important. This is not little trivial stuff; this is life and death for your uncle, your aunt, your grandmother, your children, your brother, and your sister. This is something we have to do right now. Say "no" to drugs. This is good advice. This is within our power. If everybody says "no" to the drug, things are going to shift.
DM:
Yeah. That recommendation is not set in stone. It’s not an absolute. Obviously, there are certain conditions where it may be appropriate. But those are clearly the exception. My guess is far under five percent. Thank God they’re available. Certain pain killers for one, if used appropriately….
AS: Yes.
DM:
For acute traumas make a big difference. If you have a life-threatening infection as a result of a trauma, clearly go on antibiotics. But that’s the exception. That is far less than five percent. Otherwise, your recommendation is clearly the best strategy to not die prematurely, especially in conjunction when it’s applied to these lifestyle changes.
AS:
Oddly enough, the fewer drugs you use, the better the drugs will work if you need them.
DM: Yeah.
AS:
If you really need an antibiotic, you’re the best patient if you haven’t had one in 10 or 15 years. If you really needed some kind of antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug, it would be better if you hadn’t been taking it, if you just needed it temporarily. The people, who are on long-term medications, say, for heart disease, it’s never one medication; it’s several medications. If there were a drug cure for heart disease, the heart disease deaths would be going down rather noticeably. They’re kind of not. If there was a cure for cancer, we would have heard about it. [What] all of this side effect-rich, profit-rich business is doing is perpetuating itself. It’s not healthcare; it’s disease care or it’s bank account care.
We can actually improve our health. You can – by changing your lifestyle and your diet – greatly reduce, tremendously reduce, your problems of heart disease. As an example, when my blood pressure went up and I had to take my own advice (which is a bummer, of course), I realized, "I’m not going to take this medication. Woho! What? My pressure’s gone up." I’ve gone on to juices, fasting, supplements, and whole foods diet more thoroughly than I had. The result was the diastolic went down to 18 points. There are not a whole lot of drugs that will do that.
DM:
No. It makes a huge difference. Just to clear up a point, too. We’re probably preaching to the choir for most of the people listening to this. But the average person, the average adult, in the US is taking not one, not two, not three, not five, not six drugs a day, but 11 drugs a day unless they’re over 65. And then the number goes up to 31.
AS: Right.
DM:
It’s insane. I mean, this is just unbelievable insanity that they’ve allowed this to perpetuate. It’s very clever and sophisticated marketing to convince such a large portion of the population to engage in this behavior. But they have. You don’t have to fall into this trap. You can take responsibility of your own health. You can take control of your health and make the choice to avoid drugs in almost every case.
AS:
You really can. "Almost every case" is a very fair statement, as you pointed out earlier. If you need the medical care, that’s wonderful. But literally, as you correctly said, 95 percent of the time, you can do a better job yourself. You really can.
DM:
Yeah. All right. Well, I think that wraps it up for us in really sort of highlighting the importance of this study and how it can hopefully motivate and inspire you and your family and your friends to engage in an even more aggressive commitment to change your lifestyle, so that you don’t have to die prematurely from these drugs. All right. Thank you for joining us.
AS:
I’m glad to do it.
