Studies – Letter From the Editor
I find it both humorous and sad when people cite studies that allow them to justify their toxic lifestyles. Do you really need a study to tell you smoking is bad for you? Back in the 1950s and 1960s we did. It seems silly now that people didn’t realize inhaling smoke is unhealthy. Now we need studies to tell us whether or not an obscene number of vaccinations containing mercury, aluminum, antifreeze, and/or other toxins are dangerous. Apparently, many people need studies to prove eating organic is healthier. Where’s their common sense? Food laced with poison versus food without poison. Which is healthier?
People love to quote studies that claim coffee is a strong antioxidant so they can justify their coffee habits. If I developed cocaine that had vitamin D, zinc, and vitamin C, would you snort a few lines to combat the common cold? I have studies that will show you how important those three nutrients are for fighting a virus, so, what’s the problem?
We’re out of touch and not at all in tune with our bodies. Diseases that are said to be genetic are on the rise, spiraling out of control, increasing much more rapidly than population growth, and yet we need studies to tell us what we can and can’t do. But when we read about a study that tells us to stop doing whatever we consider convenient or normal, we’re quick to find flaws in it and we do everything we can to debunk it. Meanwhile some major corporation secretly funds a bogus study, gets all the peer reviews it wants, and we then use that study to show why we don’t need to change our habits.
The problem with studies is that they too often look for one correlation. It’s not solely vaccinations that are causing autism. It’s not only cell phones that are causing cancer. It’s not just high fructose corn syrup that’s causing diabetes. You can’t point a finger at any one thing. It’s the whole package, the blatant disregard for common sense in the name of profit and convenience.
If you accept the fact that our lifestyles are leading us down a road of poor health and medications, then the next step is to do something about it. This is where most people can get pretty overwhelmed.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: eat 80% fresh raw fruits and vegetables (more veggies than fruit). That’s step one. That’s your foundation. See how much better you feel. Keep learning. Keep an open mind. You decide what’s step two. You don’t need a study to tell you that this is a good move.
Michael Edwards
Editor in Chief
Clinical Trials and Scientific Studies
Clinical trials and scientific studies are held as the gold standard when it comes to health care, so how credible those trials and studies are ends up being a very important question. The truth, as it turns out, might surprise you.
The medical establishment likes to look at their studies as factual, evidence driven, and done with an impartial eye. But the truth is, the results of research studies can have multi-million or multi-billion dollar consequences for drug companies, so they can be about as biased as you can get.
It makes more sense when you understand that the drug companies with many millions or billions at stake are often funding the researchers or funding the universities for which the researchers work. And, of course, if the researchers’ studies produce the “right” results, they are more likely to continue to receive funding. Researchers who don’t get enough grant money from big pharmaceutical companies are likely to lose their university jobs. For some researchers, that can be reason enough to play along.
Playing along can mean a number of things. At its worst, playing along can result in complete fabrication or manipulation of the data and results.
It wasn’t long ago that Hwang Woo-Suk, South Korea’s once highly esteemed researcher, claimed a major breakthrough in stem cell research and his results were also published in a prestigious, peer-reviewed publication. It was later found that he fabricated the data, for which he publicly apologized. While his fraud made headlines around the world, the crime might not be as rare as you think.
In 2008, one in fifty scientists admitted they had fabricated, falsified or “doctored” a research study; that number is generally regarded as low since these researchers have an interest in keeping their frauds a secret. When these same scientists were asked if they knew a colleague who had fabricated the data or results, about one in seven said they knew someone who had done just that.
Questionable research practices fall below outright falsification of data and were found to be even more prevalent. When scientists were asked, about one in three admitting to having used questionable research practices; again, the number skyrocketed when asked if they knew a colleague who had. About seven out of every ten scientists said they knew a colleague who had used questionable research practices.
Questionable research includes practices like “changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressures from a funding source” or cherry-picking the results for publication. To the FDA, the latter is even acceptable.
In fact, by FDA rules, pharmaceutical companies can conduct as many clinical trials as they want, and send only the favorable results to the FDA for review. To help you read between the lines, this means drug companies can bury the negative results of clinical drug trials so that you and your doctor Clinical Trials never know about them.
Eli Lilly was accused of hiding the risk of suicide and suicidal tendencies with their drug Prozac, a drug now accepted to increase suicidal risk. A Harvard psychiatrist alleged that during the clinical trials those with suicidal tendencies were asked to leave the study, so their results were not counted. The Harvard psychiatrist was able to produce Eli Lilly internal documents to support the accusation.
Internal documents also surfaced to support the accusation that Eli Lilly knowingly hid the risks of their drug Zyprexa. A former FDA official even testified in court that the drug giant hid the risks for the purpose of insuring profits.
Questionable research practices can also include tweaking the results to make them seem more definite than they originally were, ignoring conclusions that don’t meet the study’s needs, and concealing conflicts of interest.
Depending on whose numbers you trust, incidences of scientific fraud in the U.S., as counted by government confirmed cases, occur with one out of ten scientists at the high end, or at the low end, with one out of every hundred scientists. Either way, they’re high numbers, especially when you consider that millions of people trust this information then put unnatural chemicals inside their bodies.
Properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs have been found to kill 100,000 Americans and “seriously injure” another 2.1 million each year, and one has to wonder how much pharmaceutical and scientific manipulation and outright fraud is responsible.
To add to the dog pile, drug companies have been found to stoop to all sorts of tricks.
Merck was caught disguising in-house authors as independent researchers. To accomplish this, Merck wrote a key study used to popularize the now infamous Vioxx then paid a researcher to put his/her name on it.
In relation to Vioxx, the Wall Street Journal reported that “a prominent Massachusetts anesthesiologist allegedly fabricated 21 medical studies that claimed to show benefits from painkillers like Vioxx and Celebrex.” The studies were published in anesthesiology journals between 1996 and 2008.
Another tactic of the drug companies is to intimidate the scientists. Drug companies have been known to pressure researchers, even scientists at the federal agency that is supposed to regulate them.
Drug Overdose Pressure at the FDA to bow to the interests of their financiers, the drug companies, has gotten so out of hand that scientists at the agency recently wrote Congress and then president-elect Obama about the problems. They talked about being forced to “change their opinions and conclusions,” which is a pretty weighty accusation.
The medical world’s insistence that their drugs are both effective and safe, based on their “unbiased, evident-based” research and clinical trials, no longer sounds so reassuring, does it? Profit-driven would be a more accurate description.
Sources:
- http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090824/ap_on_re_as/as_skorea_disgraced_scientist – Page no Longer Available
- http://healthinmotion.wordpress.com/category/drugs-medical/
- http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7076/full/439520a.html
- http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=19478950
- http://www.naturalnews.com/001810_antidepressant_drugs_the_FDA_antidepressants.html
- http://www.petitiononline.com/lilpro/
- http://www.naturalnews.com/003201_Prozac_Eli_Lilly_suicide.html
- http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/01417/zyprexa-attempt-suicide.html
- http://www.naturalnews.com/024089_Eli_Lilly_Zyprexa_diabetes.html
- http://www.naturalnews.com/021352_Zyprexa_Eli_Lilly_diabetes.html
- http://www.pathlights.com/nr_encyclopedia/hn041598.htm
- http://www.naturalnews.com/023052_Merck_scientific_fraud_America.html
- http://www.naturalnews.com/023074_the_FDA_drug_trials_drugs.html
- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123672510903888207.html
- http://www.naturalnews.com/019717_the_FDA_America_censorship.html
- http://absolutelysafe.blogspot.com/2009/06/fd.html
This Just In – Study Proves that 9 out of 10 Studies Mean Nothing!
In case you haven’t noticed, or this is the first OLM article you’ve read this month, this issue is primarily about studies. Many people rely on studies to tell them what they should and shouldn’t eat, drink, smoke, and purchase. People aren’t in tune with their bodies. People aren’t listening. They seem to have lost their common sense.
Do you need a study to tell you that it’s not good for you to drink a whole bottle of wine? Hopefully not. What about one glass? If you truly listen to your body, you’ll know if and how much that glass affected you. The signs are usually subtle, but they are there. We’ve spent so long ignoring our bodies that we are dependent on “experts” to tell us what we should already know—just by paying attention.
The following pages take a look at the studies involving milk, chocolate, red wine, and coffee, four foods the media now tells us are health foods. We, at OLM, do not consider them to be healthy, though our editor-in-chief admits he’s a “chocoholic,” and he also enjoys a glass of red wine every now and then.
The proceeding articles were not written to “convince” you to give up chocolate, milk, alcohol, or coffee. That’s up to you. We’re just looking at the so-called “expert studies” in a discerning manner and stating our opinions. Your opinion is your own, but we hope you will see the fallacy in relying on “experts” and their studies to tell you how to live.