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Monday, December 20, 2010

Warning: Herbal Flu Remedy Fraudulently Marketed

(Natural News) In an independent review published in a peer-reviewed medical journal (see below), a popular herbal immune supplement called "ImmunoFlu Remedy" was found to fraudulently marketed as a "flu prevention supplement."

Its makers claim that if you take the supplement, you won't get the flu and won't miss a day of work during the flu season (a silly claim, eh?).

But clinical testing recently revealed that ImmunoFlu Remedy only works to reduce flu symptoms on 1 out of every 100 people who take the supplement, meaning it is 99 percent ineffective.

“Obviously Fraudulent”

An FTC spokesperson, commenting on the study results, characterized the marketing of ImmunoFlu Remedy as "obviously fraudulent" –

-- and a top FDA official has publicly promised to launch a criminal investigation into the makers of ImmunoFlu Remedy in order to "protect the public from misleading health claims."

Evidence has also surfaced that ImmunoFlu Remedy may contain trace levels of heavy metals linked to neurological disorders. Over a dozen children admitted to emergency rooms at hospitals across the country have been identified as consumers of ImmunoFlu Remedy, and two of those children died.

The makers of ImmunoFlu Remedy are being ordered to remove the product from their website and recall the product from distributors and retailers.

As shocking as all this sounds, there's something you need to know as you continue reading this story here on NaturalNews. There is no such thing as ImmunoFlu Remedy. This story is actually about seasonal flu vaccines.

Most of the details mentioned above, you see, are actually the true story about seasonal flu vaccines.

Flu vaccines don't work on 99 out of 100 people

Seasonal flu vaccines have been scientifically shown to reduce flu symptoms in only 1 out of every 100 people (they are ineffective on 99% of those receiving the shots).

Flu vaccines also contain chemical ingredients linked to neurological disorders, which is why so many children in Australia and around the world have been admitted to hospital emergency rooms suffering from seizures and convulsions following flu shot injections.

Seasonal flu vaccines are also fraudulently marketed with blatantly false claims that they prevent the flu in everyone who receives a shot. "Get the shot and you won't miss work" is one of the common claims made in flu shot promotions.

Or, as Walgreens implies, "Get the shot and you won't infect your family members." That claim is blatantly misleading and scientifically false.

And yet, despite this fraudulent marketing of a product that doesn't work on 99% of those who take it, neither the FTC nor the FDA has taken any action against it.

Marketers of flu vaccines, it turns out, can make any claims they wish, even if such claims are laughable in the face of scientific scrutiny.

Forget the science... we've got vaccines to sell!

Flu vaccines, you see, are immune from any real scientific scrutiny -- even by the scientific community.

The mythology of season flu vaccines has been so pervasive and so widely described as "scientific" that the truth of whether it's really scientific no longer matters.

Flu vaccines are simply assumed to work even without testing; without scientific evidence and without any legitimate application of skeptical thinking.

There's a word for that, of course. It's the word used to describe a system of belief that requires no evidence –

-- a system in which truths are materialized out of lies through the mere act of enough authoritative people uttering falsehoods until they all begin to believe each other.

That word, of course, is a four-letter word: Cult.

A cult need not answer to statistical scrutiny.

It need not subject its own internal beliefs to outside review because everyone inside the cult already agrees on the answer -- and why ask questions when we already know the truth, right?

Such is the nature of the cult of flu vaccines. It's a large cult, of course, but the sheer size of the cult in no way detracts from the fact that it is a cult nonetheless.

In other words, just because millions of doctors believe the propaganda of a cult does not make it any less of a cult.

Even if all the doctors, pharmacists and drug pushers in the world fall for a fictitious belief and put their faith and professional reputations on the line in order to back that belief, it's still fiction.

And it's still a cult.

The real quackery of vaccines

The evil genius in all this is that people have been tricked into believing in vaccines whether they work or not.

When someone receives a vaccine shot, they consider themselves "protected" from the flu.

So what happens if they get the flu anyway? They simply reason in their own heads that if they hadn't been vaccinated, they might have experienced far worse flu symptoms.

And if they don't get the flu at all? Then they reason that the vaccine prevented the flu!

Thus, with the right programming, flu vaccines can be thought of as useful and effective regardless of the actual health outcome.

This is a classic red flag for a system of quackery. It's one of the most common complaints leveled against energy medicine by conventional scientists, in fact. They rightly point out that determining whether energy medicine really works for you is a guessing game:

If you still get sick, you might think the energy medicine worked a little bit but not enough. If you don't get sick, then you might think the energy medicine worked like a miracle.

Such a logic matrix is prone to misinterpretation by patients and doctors alike. In both cases -- energy medicine as well as flu vaccines -- patients are likely to convince themselves that it's working, even if there is no real evidence that their belief is accurate.

Belief itself, of course, is perhaps the best medicine of all, and it is a distinct possibility that the small number of patients who seem to be helped by flu vaccines (one percent) may be experiencing the benefit of the placebo effect.

Nevertheless, the way out of this puzzle is to subject flu vaccines (or energy medicine, similarly) to rigorous clinical trials in which a serious attempt is made to tease out some statistically significant answers such as "what percentage of people are actually helped by this treatment?"

What's really amazing about all this is that such clinical trials have already been done on flu vaccines, and the results are in:

Seasonal flu vaccines prevent flu symptoms in about one percent of the people who receive vaccine jabs. And that's if you believe the more optimistic conclusions of the vaccine manufacturers themselves, by the way.

How would this quackery be viewed

if it were an herbal remedy?

From a scientific perspective, then, seasonal flu vaccines have roughly a one percent effectiveness rate, which means they have no apparent effect on 99 out of 100 people.

What's interesting about this is that if homeopathy, or energy medicine, or an herbal formula produced such poor results, it would be widely ridiculed as a quack remedy promoted via fraudulent marketing.

A one percent effectiveness rate proves any "natural" remedy to be quackery, you see, and yet the same one percent effectiveness rate is more than sufficient to support the mythology of vaccines to those who believe the vaccine cult.

What it all comes down to is really this:

Seasonal flu vaccines are really 1% science and 99% wishful thinking.

And yet, apparently, that's more than enough reason for virtually the entire medical and scientific establishments to back seasonal flu vaccines as if they were scientifically proven while touting highly exaggerated marketing claims that imply one hundred percent effectiveness.

In any other industry, marketing a product that didn't work 99 percent of the time would be considered fraud. But in the vaccine industry? It's just business as usual.

How to make money selling a product

that almost never works as advertised…

The seasonal flu vaccine is a great money-making con, too. Imagine how much money you could make if you could convince hundreds of millions of people to buy a product that didn't work on 99 percent of your customers, and yet 100 percent of them were convinced that they were receiving benefits from it!

It's a pretty clever con, and it all depends on promoting the mythology -- or "catapulting the propaganda" as President George Bush famously said -- in order to make sure that 99 percent of the wishful thinking that powers the flu vaccine industry remains in place.

Because, let's face it:

If flu vaccines actually worked, the industry really wouldn't need to advertise them so heavily, would they?

If these vaccines really stopped flu infections with 100 percent effectiveness, word of mouth about flu vaccines would spread even faster than the flu itself, and virtually everyone would line up to get their "flu protection" shots out of sheer necessity.

The only reason the industry needs to engage in such aggressive flu vaccine promotion is because flu vaccines are only based on 1% science, and the other 99% of the marketing formula depends on keeping people brainwashed into believing the false mythology of flu vaccines.

Flu shots as placebo

Flu vaccines, in effect, are largely just placebo shots. If you think they're going to work for you, then you'll remain convinced of that regardless of whether you get sick or not.

There wouldn't really be any harm in that except for the inconvenient fact that vaccine shots contain harmful chemical ingredients that pose a health risk to those who take them.

Thus, even while a flu vaccine may be providing as much as a 1% protection against the flu, it may simultaneously subject a person to a significantly smaller risk of a far more serious detrimental outcome:

Neurological damage, convulsions, learning disabilities or even the accelerated development of Alzheimer's disease.

Are these risks really worth a 1-in-100 chance of preventing the flu?

A rational answer seems to be no, they aren't. Especially when the available evidence says that vitamin D supplements work far better at preventing flu infections. And vitamin D can be taken with virtually no health risks whatsoever.

Even better, vitamin D supplements are not formulated with mercury preservatives, chemical adjuvants or other questionable chemicals that are typically added to vaccines.

But don't expect this sort of rational, clear-thinking discussion of flu vaccines and vitamin D to be undertaken by your physician. Doctors have already drank the flu vaccine Kool-Aid, and as a result the science no longer matters to them.

Even if Wikileaks released definitive documents showing the entire flu vaccine industry to be a complete scam based on fraudulent science, most doctors would no doubt continue to push flu vaccines anyway because that's what they've always done.

Doctors don't change course very often... especially not if they've participated as active members of the vaccine cult for several years (or decades).

The likelihood of a doctor actually changing his mind on this issue of flu vaccines is even less than the likelihood of a flu vaccine preventing you from getting the flu this winter. And that likelihood is ridiculously low to begin with. So don't hold your breath.

And don't hold out any faith for the idea that doctors will suddenly embrace scientific thinking, either. Because there's no room for truly scientific thought in the membership ranks of the vaccine cult.

From our good friends at NaturalNews.Com

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Friday, December 17, 2010

London-Based Researchers Say Antidepressant Drugs Raise the Risk of Fatal Heart Attacks

Grim news for the 12 million Britons taking happy pills. London-based researchers have just announced that antidepressants raise the risk of fatal heart attacks.

This research is only the latest wake-up call for a nation hooked on happy pills. Might we finally heed the warnings and shake ourselves out of our pharmaceutical stupor?

It is high time we did: a small mountain of studies shows that antidepressant drugs are largely ineffective. But more than that, they can ruin lives by creating chronic dependency and a grinding hopelessness that sometimes leads to self-neglect and death.

The drugs don't work: Too many people are needlessly tucking into antidepressants

The latest study, by Dr Mark Hamer, a public health researcher at University College London, shows that people on the older drugs — tricyclic antidepressants — are at far higher risk of cardiovascular disease than those taking the newer class of pills, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

But if I were taking SSRIs, I would not be cheered by the findings. Tricyclics were discovered in the Forties and it is only now we have identified these dangerous effects.

Moreover, some SSRI drugs are known to cause serious problems such as stomach bleeding. In addition, the withdrawal symptoms can be so severe that patients may become dependent on them.

Dr Hamer says his findings do not only affect people with depression, because antidepressants are also prescribed to people with back pain, headache, anxiety and sleeping problems.

Last year, according to Dr Hamer’s figures, about 33 million antidepressant prescriptions were dispensed in England.

At some point, surely, there will be no one left to prescribe for. In my view, it’s fast becoming one of the greatest medical scandals of our age.

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Drug Company Executive: Our Drugs Do Not Work On Most People

A senior executive with Britain's biggest drugs company has admitted that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them.

Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.

It is an open secret within the drugs industry that most of its products are ineffective in most patients but this is the first time that such a senior drugs boss has gone public.

Dr Roses, an academic geneticist from Duke University in North Carolina, spoke at a recent scientific meeting in London where he cited figures on how well different classes of drugs work in real patients.

Drugs for Alzheimer's disease work in fewer than one in three patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about half the patients, Dr Roses said.

Most drugs work in fewer than one in two patients mainly because the recipients carry genes that interfere in some way with the medicine, he said.

"The vast majority of drugs - more than 90 per cent - only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people," Dr Roses said.

"I wouldn't say that most drugs don't work. I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 per cent of people. Drugs out there on the market work, but they don't work in everybody."

Some industry analysts said Dr Roses's comments were reminiscent of the 1991 gaffe by Gerald Ratner, the jewelry boss, who famously said that his high street shops are successful because they sold "total crap".

But others believe Dr Roses deserves credit for being honest about a little-publicized fact known to the drugs industry for many years.

"Roses is a smart guy and what he is saying will surprise the public but not his colleagues," said one industry scientist.

Therapeutic area: drug efficacy rate in per cent:

Alzheimer's: 30
Analgesics (Cox-2): 80
Asthma: 60
Cardiac Arrhythmias: 60
Depression (SSRI): 62
Diabetes: 57
Hepatitis C (HCV): 47
Incontinence: 40
Migraine (acute): 52
Migraine (prophylaxis)50
Oncology: 25
Rheumatoid arthritis: 50
Schizophrenia: 60

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Big Pharma Moves Clinical Trials Overseas In Order to Get Potentially Dangerous Drugs Approved Easier

One big factor in the shift of clinical trials to foreign countries is a loophole in F.D.A. regulations: if studies in the United States suggest that a drug has no benefit, trials from abroad can often be used in their stead to secure F.D.A. approval. There’s even a term for countries that have shown themselves to be especially amenable when drug companies need positive data fast: they’re called “rescue countries.”

Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year.

Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves?

The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Government’s failure to rein in a lethal profit machine.

More and more clinical trials for new drugs are being outsourced overseas and conducted by companies for hire. Is oversight even possible?

You wouldn’t think the cities had much in common. Iaşi, with a population of 320,000, lies in the Moldavian region of Romania. Mégrine is a town of 24,000 in northern Tunisia, on the Mediterranean Sea. Tartu, Estonia, with a population of 100,000, is the oldest city in the Baltic States; it is sometimes called “the Athens on the Emajõgi.” Shenyang, in northeastern China, is a major industrial center and transportation hub with a population of 7.2 million.

These places are not on anyone’s Top 10 list of travel destinations. But the advance scouts of the pharmaceutical industry have visited all of them, and scores of similar cities and towns, large and small, in far-flung corners of the planet.

They have gone there to find people willing to undergo clinical trials for new drugs, and thereby help persuade the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to declare the drugs safe and effective for Americans. It’s the next big step in globalization, and there’s good reason to wish that it weren’t.

Once upon a time, the drugs Americans took to treat chronic diseases, clear up infections, improve their state of mind, and enhance their sexual vitality were tested primarily either in the United States (the vast majority of cases) or in Europe.

No longer. As recently as 1990, according to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, a mere 271 trials were being conducted in foreign countries of drugs intended for American use. By 2008, the number had risen to 6,485—an increase of more than 2,000 percent.

A database being compiled by the National Institutes of Health has identified 58,788 such trials in 173 countries outside the United States since 2000. In 2008 alone, according to the inspector general’s report, 80 percent of the applications submitted to the F.D.A. for new drugs contained data from foreign clinical trials. Increasingly, companies are doing 100 percent of their testing offshore.

The inspector general found that the 20 largest U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies now conducted “one-third of their clinical trials exclusively at foreign sites.” All of this is taking place when more drugs than ever—some 2,900 different drugs for some 4,600 different conditions—are undergoing clinical testing and vying to come to market.

Some medical researchers question whether the results of clinical trials conducted in certain other countries are relevant to Americans in the first place. They point out that people in impoverished parts of the world, for a variety of reasons, may metabolize drugs differently from the way Americans do. They note that the prevailing diseases in other countries, such as malaria and tuberculosis, can skew the outcome of clinical trials.

But from the point of view of the drug companies, it’s easy to see why moving clinical trials overseas is so appealing. For one thing, it’s cheaper to run trials in places where the local population survives on only a few dollars a day. It’s also easier to recruit patients, who often believe they are being treated for a disease rather than, as may be the case, just getting a placebo as part of an experiment.

And it’s easier to find what the industry calls “drug-naïve” patients: people who are not being treated for any disease and are not currently taking any drugs, and indeed may never have taken any—the sort of people who will almost certainly yield better test results. (For some subjects overseas, participation in a clinical trial may be their first significant exposure to a doctor.)

Regulations in many foreign countries are also less stringent, if there are any regulations at all. The risk of litigation is negligible, in some places nonexistent. Ethical concerns are a figure of speech. Finally—a significant plus for the drug companies—the F.D.A. does so little monitoring that the companies can pretty much do and say what they want.

Consent by Thumbprint

Many of today’s trials still take place in developed countries, such as Britain, Italy, and Japan. But thousands are taking place in countries with large concentrations of poor, often illiterate people, who in some cases sign consent forms with a thumbprint, or scratch an “X.”

Bangladesh has been home to 76 clinical trials. There have been clinical trials in Malawi (61), the Russian Federation (1,513), Romania (876), Thailand (786), Ukraine (589), Kazakhstan (15), Peru (494), Iran (292), Turkey (716), and Uganda (132). Throw a dart at a world map and you are unlikely to hit a spot that has escaped the attention of those who scout out locations for the pharmaceutical industry.

The two destinations that one day will eclipse all the others, including Europe and the United States, are China (with 1,861 trials) and India (with 1,457). A few years ago, India was home to more American drug trials than China was, thanks in part to its large English-speaking population. But that has changed. English is now mandatory in China’s elementary schools, and, owing to its population edge, China now has more people who speak English than India does.

While Americans may be unfamiliar with the names of foreign cities where clinical trials have been conducted, many of the drugs being tested are staples of their medicine cabinets. One example is Celebrex, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that has been aggressively promoted in television commercials for a decade. Its manufacturer, Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, has spent more than a billion dollars promoting its use as a pain remedy for arthritis and other conditions, including menstrual cramps.

The National Institutes of Health maintains a record of most—but by no means all—drug trials inside and outside the United States. The database counts 290 studies involving Celebrex. Companies are not required to report—and do not report—all studies conducted overseas. According to the database, of the 290 trials for Celebrex, 183 took place in the United States, meaning, one would assume, that 107 took place in other countries.

But an informal, country-by-country accounting by VANITY FAIR turned up no fewer than 207 Celebrex trials in at least 36 other countries. They ranged from 1 each in Estonia, Croatia, and Lithuania to 6 each in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Russia, to 8 in Mexico, 9 in China, and 10 in Brazil. But even these numbers understate the extent of the foreign trials. For example, the database lists five Celebrex trials in Ukraine, but just “one” of those trials involved studies in 11 different Ukrainian cities.

The Celebrex story does not have a happy ending. First, it was disclosed that patients taking the drug were more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes than those who took older and cheaper painkillers. Then it was alleged that Pfizer had suppressed a study calling attention to these very problems. (The company denied that the study was undisclosed and insisted that it “acted responsibly in sharing this information in a timely manner with the F.D.A.”)

Soon afterward the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine reported an array of additional negative findings. Meanwhile, Pfizer was promoting Celebrex for use with Alzheimer’s patients, holding out the possibility that the drug would slow the progression of dementia. It didn’t. Sales of Celebrex reached $3.3 billion in 2004, and then began to quickly drop.

“Rescue Countries”

There’s even a term for countries that have shown themselves to be especially amenable when drug companies need positive data fast: they’re called “rescue countries.”

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