Anti-Vitamin studies
Nutritional medicine
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, October 20, 2011
How to Make People Believe Any
Anti-Vitamin Scare
It Just Takes Lots of Pharmaceutical
Industry Cash
by Andrew W. Saul
Editor, Orthomolecular Medicine News Service
(OMNS, Oct 20, 2011) Recent much
trumpeted anti-vitamin news is the product of pharmaceutical company
payouts. No, this is not one of "those" conspiracy theories. Here's
how it's done:
1) Cash to study authors.
Many of the authors of a recent negative vitamin E paper (1) have
received substantial income from the pharmaceutical industry. The
names are available in the last page of the paper (1556) in the
"Conflict of Interest" section. You will not see them in the brief
summary at the JAMA website. A number of the study authors have
received money from pharmaceutical companies, including Merck,
Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis, AstraZeneca, Abbott, GlaxoSmithKline,
Janssen, Amgen, Firmagon, and Novartis.
2) Advertising revenue.
Many popular magazines and almost all major medical journals receive
income from the pharmaceutical industry. The only question is, how
much? Pick up a copy of the publication and count the pharmaceutical
ads. The more space sold, the more revenue for the publication. If
you try to find their advertisement revenue, you'll see that they
don't disclose it. So, just count the Pharma ads. Look in them all:
Readers Digest
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n11.shtml , JAMA,
Newsweek, Time, AARP Today, NEJM, Archives of Pediatrics. Even
Prevention magazine. Practically any major periodical.
3) Rigged trials.
Yes, it is true and yes it is provable. In a recent editorial, we
explained how trials of new drugs are often rigged at
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v04n20.shtml . Studies
of the health benefits of vitamins and essential nutrients also
appear to be rigged. This can be easily done by using low doses to
guarantee a negative result, and by biasing the interpretation to
show a statistical increase in risk.
4) Bias in what is
published, or rejected for publication. The largest and
most popular medical journals receive very large income from
pharmaceutical advertising. Peer-reviewed research indicates that
this influences what they print, and even what study authors
conclude from their data.
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n02.shtml .
5) Censorship of what is
indexed and available to doctors and the public. Public tax
money pays for censorship in the largest public medical library on
the planet: the US National Library of Medicine (MEDLINE/PubMed).
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n03.shtml. See also:
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n05.shtml.
Don't Believe It?
How well were these pro-vitamin,
anti-drug studies covered in the mass media?
- A Harvard study showed a 27%
reduction in AIDS deaths among patients given vitamin
supplements. (2)
- There have been no deaths from
vitamins in 27 years.
http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v07n05.shtml
- Antibiotics cause 700,000
emergency room visits per year, just in the US. (3)
- Modern drug-and-cut medicine is
at least the third leading cause of death in the USA. Some
estimates place medicine as the number one cause of death. (4)
- Over 1.5 million Americans are
injured every year by drug errors in hospitals, doctors'
offices, and nursing homes. If in a hospital, a patient can
expect at least one medication error every single day. (5)
- More than 100,000 patients die
every year, just in the US, from drugs properly prescribed and
taken as directed. (6)
Double Standard
Countless comedians have made fun of
the incompetent physician who, when called late at night during a
life- threatening disease crisis, says, "take two aspirin and call
me in the morning." It's no longer funny. One of the largest
pharmaceutical conglomerates in the world ran prime- time national
television commercials that declared: "Bayer aspirin may actually
help stop you from dying if you take it during a heart attack." The
company also promotes such use of its product on the Internet.
http://www.wonderdrug.com/ , formerly
http://www.bayeraspirin.com/news/heart_attack.htm
Daily Aspirin Use Linked With Pancreatic Cancer
Here's something you may have not
seen. Research has shown that women who take just one aspirin a day,
"which millions do to prevent heart attack and stroke as well as to
treat headaches - may raise their risk of getting deadly pancreatic
cancer. . . . Pancreatic cancer affects only 31,000 Americans a
year, but it kills virtually all its victims within three years. The
study of 88,000 nurses found that those who took two or more
aspirins a week for 20 years or more had a 58 percent higher risk of
pancreatic cancer." (7) Women who took two or more aspirin
tablets per day had an alarming 86 percent greater risk of
pancreatic cancer.
Study author Dr. Eva Schernhammer of
Harvard Medical School was quoted as saying: "Apart from smoking,
this is one of the few risk factors that have been identified for
pancreatic cancer. Initially we expected that aspirin would protect
against pancreatic cancer."
How about that.
Say: What if there was one, just
one case of pancreatic cancer caused by a vitamin?
What do you think the press would have said about that?
The fact is, vitamins are known to
be effective and safe. They are essential nutrients, and when taken
at the proper doses over a lifetime, are capable of preventing a
wide variety of diseases. Because drug companies can't make big
profits developing essential nutrients, they have a vested interest
in agitating for the use of drugs and disparaging the use of
nutritional supplements.
(Orthomolecular Medicine News
Service editor Andrew W. Saul taught nutrition, health science and
cell biology at the college level, and has published over 100
reviews and editorials in peer-reviewed publications. He is author
or coauthor of tent books and is featured in the documentary film
Food Matters. His website is
http://www.doctoryourself.com .)
References:
1. Klein EA, Thompson Jr, IM, Tangen
CM et al. JAMA. 2011;306(14):1549-1556.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/306/14/1549
2. Fawzi WW, Msamanga GI, Spiegelman
D, Wei R, Kapiga S, Villamor E, Mwakagile D, Mugusi F, Hertzmark E,
Essex M, Hunter DJ. A randomized trial of multivitamin supplements
and HIV disease progression and mortality. N Engl J Med. 2004 Jul
1;351(1):23-32.
3. Associated Press, Oct 17, 2006.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15305033/
4. Null G, Dean C, Feldman M, Rasio
D. Death by medicine. J Orthomolecular Med, 2005. 20: 1, 21-34.
http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/2005/pdf/2005-v20n01-p021.pdf
5. The Associated Press. Drug errors
injure more than 1.5 million a year. July 20, 2006.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13954142
6. Leape LL. Institute of Medicine
medical error figures are not exaggerated. JAMA, 2000. Jul
5;284(1):95-7; Leape LL. Error in medicine. JAMA, 1994. Dec
21;272(23):1851-7; Lazarou J, Pomeranz BH, Corey PN. Incidence of
adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of
prospective studies. JAMA, 1998. Apr 15;279(15):1200-5.
7. Fox M. Daily aspirin use linked
with pancreatic cancer. Reuters, Oct 27, 2003.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/10/27/cancer.aspirin.reut/index.html
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Ian Brighthope, M.D. (Australia)
Ralph K. Campbell, M.D. (USA)
Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D. (Canada)
Damien Downing, M.D. (United Kingdom)
Michael Ellis, M.D. (Australia)
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Michael Janson, M.D. (USA)
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W. Todd Penberthy, Ph.D. (USA)
Gert E. Shuitemaker, Ph.D. (Netherlands)
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Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D. (USA),
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