Excerpt from Chapter One:
Big Drug companies have a product to sell. If you get right down to it they only have one product to sell: drugs. If they do not sell drugs then they go out of business. Their main responsibility is to stay in business, and to make money for their stockholders, their employees, and themselves. Their purpose is NOT to make people healthier, or cure disease. Well, drug companies are among the most profitable businesses on earth, each making many billions and even trillions of dollars each and every year! All by just selling their one product, drugs. Please follow this reasoning very carefully: Do drug companies sell most of their drugs to healthy people or to sick people? The obvious answer is that almost all drugs are sold to “sick” people, or at least to people who think they are “sick.” Why would the drug companies want to cure any disease? Well, they don’t. And they won’t. No matter what they tell you, drug companies are only in the business of selling drugs, and most all of the drugs are for symptoms that people have who believe they are sick. Period! The marketing of all drugs from all drug companies is centered on keeping you sick or making you think you are sick. This will never change, unless the drug company decides to give up making drugs and develop a new and different product to sell. Sometimes you can’t fight City Hall. This is especially true when City Hall is owned by the drug companies.
I promise that I will not spend the rest of this book bashing drug companies, but you should know a few undeniable facts that I have uncovered in my years of study. I will give you the facts to support my statements, and then leave it at that. This book is mainly about how to live a longer, happier, healthier life (and a little about me and my life story), neither of which has anything to do with drugs or drug companies. Before we begin, here are a few undeniable facts about drug companies:
The leading drug companies can gross TRILLIONS of dollars in sales each year. That’s right. More than millions, more than billions, and they spend more than 15% of their income on marketing and advertising, which came to roughly 23 billion dollars in 2004 for some of the successful drug companies. It gets higher every year. They spend less than this, in fact less than 9%, in research and development, and even less on after market safety programs and follow-up. With regard to safety, remember that the FDA is supposed to “approve” of a drug before it goes to market. But guess who owns the FDA? Even though this is supposed to be a government administration that is in place to protect the public, nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the top officials on the FDA are former drug company executives. Once they have finished their stint serving on the FDA, they go back and work for the drug companies. This is not even that big of a secret. You can go look it up as a matter of public record. What do you think the FDA does when a drug comes up for approval? Lots of scientific research, right? Well in fact, they usually do no research at all. They review the research the drug company gives them that the drug company did on their own drug! And so common sense would tell you what these former/future drug company executives are going to say about the safety of the new drug right?
This is the reason for Vioxx. This is the reason for Fen-fen. This is the reason why almost 80% of drugs on the market today will eventually be pulled off the market and deemed unsafe or ineffective. They almost always are. I could write an entire book on this very scary but very true problem in our society, and maybe I will, but why beat a dead horse as they say. There are literally dozens of great books that have already been written on this subject. So I will refer you to those books for now, some of them are listed at the end of this book.
One final note to sum up the drug topic for now; EVERY drug has an LD-50 listed in the PDR (Physicians Desk Reference). Even over the counter drugs. An LD-50 means “Lethal-dose-50%,” which means that every drug, even aspirin and Tylenol, has a specific dose, or amount, that when given to a population of people will kill 50% of that population. Why is it expressed this way? Because if a drug has an LD-50, then automatically the drug also has an LD-100! That means that Lipator, Nexxium, and EVERY drug, even aspirin and Tylenol, have a specific amount or dose, that when given to a population of people, will kill ALL the population of those people. More simply put, any drug can be taken in such an amount that it will kill you, every time! It’s the same thing, but they would not tell it to you in those terms. See, EVERY drug is a deadly toxic chemical by definition. They are just prescribed in sub-lethal doses so you don’t die right away. You just stay sick so you can continue to purchase more drugs.