News

Fiction Masquerades as Science


[Picture]      Officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration calmly rubber-stamp pharmaceutical manufacturers’ misstatements and distortions, such as those at left below, either oblivious to or disinterested in the harm they unleash on the public they are mandated to safeguard.

     A full compendium of such statements would fill an entire magazine; this sampler gives a view of what is happening on the subverted watchdog’s turf.

FDA-Approved
Falsehood

[line] The Truth

  • “The most common side effects of Prozac are mild and they usually go away within the first few weeks of treatment.”

  • Nearly 40,000 adverse reactions to Prozac have been reported to the FDA, the highest number of adverse reactions by far in the history of the agency’s adverse reaction reporting system – including mutilations, mass murders, suicides and more than 2,300 deaths. Joseph Wesbecker, armed with an AK-47 and other weapons, had a “therapeutic” level of Prozac in his blood when he shot 20 people and then killed himself.

  • “An antidepressant is thought to work by restoring the chemical imbalance in the brain.”

  • “There is no scientific evidence supporting the chemical imbalance theory.” — Dr. John Sommers-Flanagan, University of Montana

  • Psychiatric drugs are “safe” and “effective.”

  • A medical study published in 1996 in the American Journal of Psychiatry by Drs. Uriel Halbreich, Jianhua Shen and Victor Panaro concluded that the higher incidence of cancer among psychiatric patients was due to their use of two major classes of psychiatric drugs, antidepressants and neuroleptics.

          A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1994 found that pregnant women who take Prozac in their first trimester were twice as likely to have miscarriages.

          Countless other studies have shown psychiatric drugs, individually and collectively, are neither safe nor effective.

  • “Xanax provides relief of anxiety in depressed patients.”

  • According to the Physicians Desk Reference (PDR), the recognized authority for medical doctors, Xanax creates both depression and anxiety.

          The PDR states: “In a study of 641 patients treated with Xanax, Xanax created anxiety in 19.2 percent [or 123] of these patients. And in 5.1 percent [or 32] patients it actually created depression.”

          Other adverse effects of Xanax cited in the PDR include seizures, hallucinations, depersonalization, memory impairment, anorexia and jaundice.

  • “Depakote ... proven effective in a 21-day double-blind, multi-center, placebo controlled, randomized clinical trial.”

  • “At present, no one actually knows how effective antidepressants are. Confident declarations about their potency go well beyond the existing evidence. ... Surprisingly, even the most positive reviews indicate that 30 to 40 percent of studies show no significant difference in response to drug versus placebo. ... Actually, most of the studies showed no difference in the percentage of patients significantly improved by the drugs.” — Dr. Roger Greenberg, State University of New York’s Upstate Medical Center

          The PDR notes that Depakote creates depression, psychosis, aggression and behavioral deterioration. Among other things, the PDR warns that it can cause liver dysfunction and failure, and that it produces teratogenic effects (malformations) in offspring.



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