Free-Reprint Article Written by: Mark Hyman, M.D. See Terms of Reprint Below.
***************************************************************** * * This email is being delivered directly to members of the group: * * [email protected] * ***************************************************************** We have moved our TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article. Be certain to read our TERMS OF REPRINT and honor our TERMS OF REPRINT when you use this article. Thank you. This article has been distributed by: http://Article-Distribution.com Helpful Link: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Overview http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Article Title: ============== Does the FDA Hide Negative Drug Study? Article Description: ==================== Think the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is here to protect you? It isn't. Think your doctor makes decisions about your health based on medical science? Not so fast. Truth is, half of medical evidence is hidden from your doctors. And the half that's hidden is the half that shows drugs don't work. Additional Article Information: =============================== 911 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line Distribution Date and Time: 2008-03-11 11:12:00 Written By: Mark Hyman, M.D. Copyright: 2008 Contact Email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Mark Hyman, M.D.'s Picture URL: http://www.ultrametabolism.com/files/images/drhymanbio.jpg For more free-reprint articles by Mark Hyman, M.D., please visit: http://www.thePhantomWriters.com/recent/author/mark-hyman,-m_d_.html ============================================= Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters: ============================================= If you use this article on your website or in your ezine, We Want To Know About It. Use the following URL to let us know where you have used this article, and we will include a link to your website on thePhantomWriters.com: http://thephantomwriters.com/notify.php?id=5785&p=load HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of Article Are Available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/h/negative-drug-study.shtml#get_code --------------------------------------------------------------------- Does the FDA Hide Negative Drug Study? Copyright (c) 2008 Mark Hyman, M.D. UltraWellness http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog/ Think the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is here to protect you? It isn't. Think your doctor makes decisions about your health based on medical science? Not so fast. Truth is, half of medical evidence is hidden from your doctors. And the half that's hidden is the half that shows drugs don't work. Today I'd like to tell you about some recent news that highlights why we need more accurate, more accessible databases for drug information and why our government just can't be trusted to make objective decisions about your medications. First, let me explain how our FDA works. When a drug company designs and performs a study, it has to submit all of its results to the FDA. But this often doesn't happen. Instead, the pharmaceutical companies submit only the data they want to get published to medical journals positive data, of course. They hide negative studies from the scientific community and from you. The FDA didn't release this information until 2004, when all the major scientific journals refused to publish any data from any drug study that did not list the results of all trials, positive or negative, in a central database. The problem? This database is hard to find and search. Your doctor probably doesn't have time to read medical journals, never mind search a database. So he or she relies on the bits of information delivered by drug reps not the best way to get an objective opinion! A Bitter Pill to Swallow These problems were made even more apparent by the recent news about Zetia. Zetia is a new drug that lowers cholesterol by a different mechanism than statin drugs like Lipitor and Zocor. Most doctors wrongly believe that cholesterol causes heart attacks even though half of all people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol. Cholesterol-lowering statins lower cholesterol, and appear to reduce heart attacks. But I believe and a study published in the January 6, 2005, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine supports this that they reduce heart attacks by reducing inflammation, not cholesterol. Nevertheless, the FDA approved Zetia without any proof that it lowered heart attacks or reduced the progression of heart disease. The drug was approved only because it lowered cholesterol. And once Zetia was approved, its makers had no incentive to prove that it actually did what it was thought to do lower heart attacks. And why should they? The drug was making them $14 million a day in profits. But the FDA had the negative data on Zetia and it didn't speak up. The data that was withheld proved that Zetia lowered cholesterol but led to MORE heart disease! That suggests that high cholesterol may not be a disease and may or may not be related to heart attacks. Another new cholesterol drug, torcetrapib, was pulled from the pipeline in December 2006 because it caused more heart attacks and strokes. A Voice for Change This recent information shows us that our research and approval system is flawed in several ways. First, drug companies fund most of the research in the world. That means that other therapies that may work better including diet and lifestyle or nutritional therapies often don't get enough funding. Second, the FDA helps drug companies by suppressing and hiding negative studies on drugs. Finally, doctors, patients, and the media believe they have the whole truth but we don't. Often, we don't know the truth until it is too late like with Zetia, Premarin, and Vioxx. This makes it very difficult for consumers to get the best treatments for their health and the whole truth about drugs. But together, we can work to change things for the better. Here's how. 1. Follow the money. Be suspicious of studies funded by drug companies. 2. Contact your congressperson or senator and demand better legislation. We should have an easy-to-navigate database of all drug trials, with consumer-friendly summaries of both published AND unpublished data submitted to the FDA so you can look up the drug you are prescribed and have a balanced opinion. 3. Don't assume that drugs are the answer to your health problems. Heart disease is NOT a Lipitor deficiency but the result of your lifestyle interacting with your genes. 4. Learn to ask the question "why?" and search for the answers. Dealing with lifestyle and environmental factors (the basis of UltraWellness) almost always works better for chronic illnesses. Drugs are there as a backup only if needed. So take a closer look at the information you've been given about drugs. You might be surprised by what you find. REFERENCES: Laine C, Horton R, DeAngelis CD, Drazen JM, Frizelle FA, Godlee F, Haug C, Hébert PC, Kotzin S, Marusic A, Sahni P, Schroeder TV, Sox HC, Van der Weyden MB, Verheugt FW.Clinical trial registration: looking back and moving ahead. JAMA. 2007 Jul 4;298(1):93-4. Ridker PM, Cannon CP, Morrow D, Rifai N, Rose LM, McCabe CH, Pfeffer MA, Braunwald E; Pravastatin or Atorvastatin Evaluation and Infection Therapy-Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction 22 (PROVE IT-TIMI 22) Investigators. C-reactive protein levels and outcomes after statin therapy. N Engl J Med. 2005 Jan 6;352(1):20-8. Kastelein JJ, van Leuven SI, Burgess L, Evans GW, Kuivenhoven JA, Barter PJ, Revkin JH, Grobbee DE, Riley WA, Shear CL, Duggan WT, Bots ML; RADIANCE 1 Investigators.Effect of torcetrapib on carotid atherosclerosis in familial hypercholesterolemia. N Engl J Med. 2007 Apr 19;356(16):1620-30. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Hyman, MD is a pioneer in functional medicine, practicing physician and best-selling author. A sneak preview of his book "The UltraSimple Diet" is available. See The UltraWellness Blog for more on Medical Industrial Complex: http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog/ --- END ARTICLE --- Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/h/negative-drug-study.shtml#get_code ..................................... TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules (Last Updated: May 11, 2006) Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR: ..................................... *** Digital Reprint Rights *** * If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog, You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as Hyperlinks (clickable links). * Links must remain in the form that we published them. Clean links should point to the Author's links without redirects having been inserted into the copy. * You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks must be retained with articles. You can change where the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do. * Email Distribution of this article Must be done through Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email. * You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display of the article in your website or in your ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests within the article. * You may not use sentences from this article as an input for any software that steals sentences from others in order to build an article with software. The copyright on this article applies to the "WHOLE" article. *** Author Notification *** We ask that you notify the author of publication of his or her work. Mark Hyman, M.D. can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Print Publication Reprint Rights *** If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT publication, you must contact the author directly for Print Permission at: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ..................................... If you need help converting this text article for proper hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl ===================================================================== ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION http://thePhantomWriters.com is a paid article distribution service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com are owned and operated by Bill Platt of Stillwater, Oklahoma USA. The content of this article is solely the property and opinion of its author, Mark Hyman, M.D. http://www.ultrawellness.com/blog/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX --------------------------------------------------------------------- *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* To have your article appear in this distribution list, you must absolutely be a client of thePhantomWriters. We offer a paid article distribution service, and this is one of the more than 60 groups where we submit our client articles. To learn more about our program, visit: http://thePhantomWriters.com/x.pl/tpw/index.htm Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thePhantomWriters/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thePhantomWriters/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
