News

Mainstream Drugs are Neither Safe nor Effective, Part III

By: Tony Isaacs

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 1:07:59 CST

Over 95% of the 24,000 plus FDA approved medicines have side effects. In many instance those side effects lead to further conditions requiring still more drugs with more side effects in a never ending cycle. Millions of serious adverse reactions are reported each year and over 140,000 deaths in hospitals and homes happen each year even when the drugs have been properly prescribed and administered.

We are told that there is always risk versus reward to be considered. But it appears that often a great deal of the "reward" is drug company profits regardless of risks. Such was the case when the makers of Vioxx (Merck) reaped billions of dollars of profit while the body count piled up even higher than all the lives we lost in the Vietnam War. The same thing appears to be happening now with Paxil:

http://www.naturalnews.com/027962_Paxil_antidepressants.html

Meanwhile, major side effects caused by natural herbs are rare and deaths almost non-existent.

Often we see the supporters of mainstream medicine refer to natural healing as "woo" and sometimes they liken belief in natural herbs as more akin to some kind of religion instead of "real science". Yet, true science is based on observation and mankind has observed nature to work and has used nature for healing for thousands of years. Most of the people around the world continue to rely on such observation and history of us to make herbal and natural healing their top choices for addressing health issues. Among those countries are several countries ranked above the U.S. (the world`s most medicated country) in health rankings, including two of the top three ranked countries. Our life expectancy ranks below 40 plus other countries and is closer to that of Mexico than it is the top 10 countries.

To claim that nature, from whence life itself came, is "woo" is patently absurd. Of course most of us would like to see scientific proof that anything we take is safe and effective, but when medical science has been sold off to the highest bidder far too often, choosing what others have observed to work time and again through the ages often appears to be a safer bet than taking the word of what medical science tells us will work and is safe.

History has taught us over and over that the science of today has but a fraction of the answers and is often overturned tomorrow. When you combine the record of safety and effectiveness of approved drugs with the lessons of history, one might well conclude that blind belief in mainstream medicine is much more of a religion than belief in nature.

Granted, just because something is natural does not mean that it will work or even that it is safe, but the fact that something has been approved by medical science provides no assurances either. According to Doctor Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline and academic geneticist from Duke University, "The vast majority of drugs - more than 90 per cent - only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people."

Despite the conflicting and incomplete studies on herbs, natural remedies, vitamins and minerals, studies largely agree on one thing: a great many of our health problems can be traced to vitamin and mineral deficiencies. On the other hand, no one ever became ill due to a deficiency in pharmaceuticals.