On the surface, this doesn’t sound so bad; nobody likes the idea of crazy people running around with guns. Yet a close examination of the concepts of mental illness and mental health care proves that the entire argument for such laws is based on hysteria and, in some cases, pseudoscience.

President Obama and other advocates of “mental health care” are playing on widespread ignorance about mental health, the human brain, psychology, psychiatry, and history. These advocates of public safety want to give authorities the power to strip average citizens of their basic rights based on some very questionable criteria. In other words, the argument for restricting the freedom of the mentally ill is based on emotion, not science.

What Science Really Says About Psychology and Psychiatry

The main reason we should be worried about efforts to use “mental health” as a criteria to strip people of their rights is the questionable science behind psychology and psychiatry. In recent years it has been determined that there is no scientific basis for most popular notions about psychology and psychiatry.

Neurologists (scientists who actually study how the human brain works) have determined that most human behavior is determined by the functioning of the brain. They have found little or no evidence to support Freudian psychology (the basis of most “therapy”) or such ideas that dreams and childhood experiences are at the root of behavioral problems and mental illness. Instead, as football fans know, they’ve discovered that a lot of mental illness is actually caused by brain damage or physical or biological problems with the brain.

Scientists have not determined how the human brain works or the cause of a lot of human behavior. Instead, they have some suspicions that contradict most of the theories of Sigmund Freud and other famous psychologists. Even President Obama himself admits freely that we don’t know a lot about the human brain, as his BRAIN Initiative to spend $100 million to map the brain shows.

How It Could Threaten Second Amendment Rights

Science cannot define what mental illness is or what causes it. Yet liberals want to use it as an excuse to restrict our freedoms. Who would lose the right to carry a gun under these restrictions?

One bothersome answer is anybody who might have suffered a brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder. This could include anybody that was in a car accident, played high-school football, participated in boxing or wrestling, or any veteran that saw combat in the armed forces. Recent research indicates all of those people might have suffered brain damage that could lead to mental illness. Will you need to pay for an expensive MRI scan of your brain to get a hunting license at some point in the future? That’s where the liberal talk about mental illness is leading.

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There are calls for a national mental health registry, a list of anybody that has ever seen a psychologist. This list could include anybody whom a psychologist or psychiatrist thinks is dangerous or potentially violent. Those on the national mental health registry would be deprived of basic rights such as owning a gun.

What’s even more frightening is that it could lead to even worse violations of our freedoms. One of these could be the forced drugging of people branded mentally ill by bureaucrats. Persons that think this scenario sounds far-fetched should remember that overactive children are now routinely dosed with Ritalin, Prozac, and other psychiatric drugs in the public schools. The drugs are often recommended or prescribed by poorly trained school psychologists—yes, in some states, psychologists (who are not physicians) can prescribe medications.

Could You Be Forced to Take Psychiatric Drugs?

The abuse of mental health could lead to an even greater nightmare than the loss of second amendment rights. Average citizens could be forced to take “psychiatric drugs” such as Prozac and Ritalin to “cure” their mental illness. In other words, the practices in the public schools could be extended to the rest of society.

This is a particularly frightening scenario because the psychiatric profession is deeply divided on the use of such drugs. Some psychiatrists, including former Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Peter Breggin, actually contend that psychiatric drugs cause mental illness and violence. In September 2011 a judge in Winnipeg, Saskatchewan, Canada, ruled that Prozac caused a teenager to murder an acquaintance. The judge’s ruling was based on Breggin’s testimony.

So there is strong evidence that the most popular method of treating mental illness—psychiatric drugs—might not work and could make the problem worse. Yet there is strong pressure to increase funding for mental healthcare. Obama has issued an executive order requiring states to use Medicaid funds to pay for “mental healthcare” for the poor.

How Big Pharmaceutical Companies Could Profit From Rights Violations

Not only could people be forced to take psychiatric drugs, your tax dollars could be used to pay for the drugs. That’s particularly frightening because it could lead to huge profits for big pharmaceutical companies. Get the picture of who is really behind this concern about mental health care?

Big drug companies have a disgusting history of using fraud to sell psychiatric drugs. Last year the Food and Drug Administration fined GlaxoSmithKline $3 billion after it determined the pharmaceutical company literally paid doctors to prescribe its antidepressant Paxil to patients. Doctors that prescribed large amounts of the drug got such rewards as all-expense paid trips to Jamaica. The New York Times reported that GlaxoSmithKline paid a Harvard professor to publish an article that showed how Paxil “helped” children as part of its marketing efforts.

It isn’t hard to imagine such companies trying to get psychologists or psychiatrists to diagnose poor people as mentally ill and prescribing psychiatric drugs to them. Medicaid would pay for the drugs. In other words, Obama wants to expand Medicare and Medicaid fraud into mental health care. People that want health insurance for their children could be forced to sign up for mental health care. The mental health care will consist of a quack prescribing pills in exchange for a kickback from a drug company.

One has to wonder how much of the Obama administration’s interest in mental health care is motivated by the pharmaceutical industry. The real agenda is to increase the market for “psychiatric drugs,” not to help the mentally ill.

A Double Standard That Will Make Life For The Mentally Ill Worse

There is one final problem with the liberal mental healthcare agenda: it will probably keep many mentally ill people from actually seeking treatment. Since people will be afraid of losing basic rights, such as owning guns, and of being forced to take questionable drugs; nobody will want to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist.

We’ll have a situation where the truly mentally ill are not getting the help they need while many average people will be receiving questionable treatment at taxpayers’ expense. Worse, many physicians will be afraid to diagnose anybody with mental health problems out of fear of lawsuits. Persons whose names get placed on the registry will probably sue doctors, making it difficult or impossible for psychiatrists to practice.

The liberal mental healthcare agenda is not only a threat to our rights. It is another reason to be very afraid of government-administered healthcare.

Bacteria like the CREs are often called superbugs because they are so difficult to kill. The result is that people are dying from bacterial infection, something that seemed unthinkable just a couple of decades ago. So far, infections with CRE are still fairly rare and are only being seen in hospitals and nursing homes, but they are killing people. Doctors are resorting to using an antibiotic called polymixin because nothing else will stem the infection. Unfortunately, the reason this drug is not widely used is because it also causes kidney failure. The choice for some patients becomes death by bacteria or renal failure.

Bacteria

Bacteria are one of the earth’s oldest and simplest life forms. They are single-celled organisms, and they outnumber all other organisms on the planet. In fact, your body contains more bacterial cells than your own. We would not survive without these little life forms, but some of them cause infection, diseases, and even death.

Bacteria reproduce through a process called binary fission. Each cell grows to a certain size, copies its genetic material, and then splits in two. They do this quickly. A colony of bacterial cells can double in a matter of minutes. This quick reproduction means that bacteria can evolve quickly as well. This is the key to antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotics

Also known as antimicrobial drugs, antibiotics are medications that fight bacterial infections by killing bacterial cells. The first antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming. This led to the development of more drugs that could be used to kill bacteria. The first medical use of antibiotics occurred in the 1940s and it revolutionized medicine. Before antibiotics, death from bacterial infection was common. Today, we forget how different life was before antibiotics could cure simple illnesses like strep throat or an ear infection.

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Different antibiotics work in different ways, but they all kill bacterial cells. Drugs are classified by the way in which they operate and destroy cells. Penicillins, for instance, act on the cell wall or membrane and disrupt it. Quinolones and sulfonamides interfere with enzymes in bacterial cells. Tetracyclines act on the synthesis of proteins. Some antibiotics are narrow-spectrum, meaning they target one or two species of bacteria, while others are broad-spectrum and kill a range of bacteria.

Overuse Of Antibiotics

The current problem that the CDC has recognized is not new. Before CRE, the concern was VRE bacteria, and before that MRSA, or resistant staph bacteria. The reason that these bacteria become resistant to antibiotics is because they divide and reproduce quickly and evolve quickly. Bacteria can evolve to develop resistance to drugs. They are a tough life form, and this ability to evolve into so many different forms is why they have been around on the earth since it first began.

We have spurred this evolution of antibiotic resistance by overusing the medications that are no longer working on some bacteria. Every time bacterial cells are exposed to antibiotics and survive, they have the opportunity to evolve resistance. They can change their enzymes, their proteins, or their cell walls in order to overcome the drug. The more we use antibiotics, the more opportunities the bacteria have to evolve and change.

This ability to quickly evolve in the face of an antibiotic is why the drugs come with a warning to finish the course of antibiotics. If you have ever taken antibiotics, your doctor warned you to keep taking the full course, even if you start to feel better. Taking the full course ensures that you kill every one of the infecting bacteria. If you do not kill them all, the ones that survive can evolve to develop resistance to that drug, and your infection will come back, stronger than ever. When we overuse antibiotics, we do this on a worldwide scale and create superbugs that cannot be killed with any antibiotic we have.

What To Do?

The solution to the problem is to limit the use of antibiotics to situations in which they are truly needed. For example, many people confuse bacteria with viruses. Viruses are different from bacteria. They are smaller and even simpler than bacteria. Unlike bacteria, they cannot live long outside the body of an animal. Viruses cause illness and disease, but they cannot be killed by antibiotics. Too often, people see their doctor when they are sick and are prescribed antibiotics when really, the infection is viral. The common cold, for instance, is viral, not bacterial. Doctors prescribe antibiotics anyway because it makes patients feel better to have some sort of “treatment.” The practice needs to stop.

Another overuse of antibiotics is the prevalence of antibacterial soaps. Washing your hands thoroughly with warm water and regular soap is enough to adequately remove bacteria. The use of antibiotics in soaps is unnecessary and has only contributed to the evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains. Factory farming is another source of overuse of antibiotics. Farm animals are pumped full of antibiotics to prevent disease. According to the FDA, factory farms use 30 million pounds of antibiotics every year. Those antibiotics end up in the food and water supply.

Everyone can do their part to slow the evolution of bacteria into antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Stop using antibacterial soaps, only use a course of antibiotics when it is necessary, and stop supporting factory farms. It is also important to prevent infections when you have a wound. You can use hydrogen peroxide, soap and water, or rubbing alcohol. If a wound becomes infected in spite of your best efforts, however, you may need antibiotics. It is important to remember that you should use antibiotics when they are needed. If your doctor says you need a course to fight a particular illness, you need to do so. If everyone uses antibiotics wisely and only when necessary, we can stop these superbugs from forming.

by Jessica Whited, R.N.

With hospitals mandating the flu shot and government agencies recommending it to be given to children as young as six months old every year for the rest of their lives (1), many would assume it must be proven to prevent most respiratory illness and is completely safe, right?  Let’s look at some facts, and then you can decide for yourselves.

First of all, there are many different types of viruses that cause respiratory illness; the influenza virus, or the flu virus, only causes about 5 to 15 percent of those illnesses in a year (2). Next, the flu shot has three different types of the flu virus in it, but there are many more different types, or strains, of the flu virus.  So the amount of flu-like illnesses the flu shot can prevent is very limited. It has to be an influenza virus, and it has to be one of the three strains in the flu shot or very closely related to them (3).

Additionally, the flu strains change constantly and can change even in the middle of the flu season, yet the flu vaccine has to be developed months before the flu season.  When the experts pick which flu strains to put in the flu vaccine, they are picking three strains they think will be most dominate in the months ahead, and they have their fingers crossed that they don’t change (1).

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Of course, a key point when deciding to get the flu shot is will it even work?  I mean, why put something in your body if it doesn’t actually prevent disease?  Within the information about the flu vaccine Flulaval, it says there have been no trials showing a decrease in the flu after being vaccinated with it (4).  In addition, the Center for Disease and Control (CDC) stated in a meeting that they do not do follow up to see how many people who received the flu shot actually got the flu (5).

The Cochran Collaboration, a non-profit organization, took hundreds of studies on the flu shot, and here are some of the conclusions they came to:

1. The flu shot was very ineffective, only decreasing the number of participants who got the flu by 6 percent. (6)
2. The vaccine did not change the number of people hospitalized or the number of people missing work. (6)
3. For every one million people who receive the flu shot, one case will develop a horrible neurological disease called  Guillain-Barre syndrome caused from the flu vaccine. (6)
4. There is no evidence that the flu vaccine prevents complications in pneumonia or prevents transmission. (8)
5. The review of this study did not support universal immunization in healthy adults. (6)
6. After reviewing 274 studies, they found that studies funded by companies that make a profit off of the flu shot were more likely to be published in big-name, prestigious journals than studies funded by public sources.  In addition, the studies that showed the most favorable conclusions regarding the flu shot were from the studies funded by the industries that would profit from the flu vaccine. (6)

After reading all that, it makes sense that when vaccine production is low, we still don’t see an increase in flu deaths (7).  It also clears up why the CDC is so vague on how many people die from the flu, ranging their numbers from 3,000 to 49,000 (8).  It is also important to note that those numbers are not only people who die from the flu alone, but people who already had a chronic illness and the flu contributed to their death (8).  Of the people whom the flu was a possible contributor to their death, 90 percent are the elderly (9).

Finally, I would think an important issue in whether to get the flu shot or not would be is it safe?  To do that, there must be long-term studies that show if we get a flu vaccine year after year for the rest of our lives that there will be no negative effects from it.  Unfortunately, there are no such long-term studies evaluating the flu vaccine’s health effects (15).  If you read the pamphlet sent with the flu vaccines, the clinical studies range from three days to six months (4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14).  They follow the short-term effects, most of which sound like flu symptoms (4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14).  Yet, some of the events reported after the vaccines were approved are much more serious, such as the previously mentioned Guillain-Barre syndrome, along with thrombocytopenia, lymphadenopathy, Bell’s palsy, dyspnea, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, encephalopathy, limb paralysis, and Leigh syndrome, just to name a few (4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14).  As of July of 2012, there had been 84,000 cases of reactions, hospitalizations, injuries, and deaths following influenza vaccination reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) (16).

That doesn’t sound very safe to me.  When looking even further into some of the ingredients in the flu shot, it gets even more disturbing.  One of them is formaldehyde, which has been named a cancer-causing agent by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).  Also, in 2011, the National Toxicology Program, an interagency program of the Department of Health and Human Services, named formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen in its 12^th Report on Carcinogens (19).  The World Health Organizations (WHO) reported similar findings (20).

Another ingredient in flu vaccines is mercury.  One study took two groups of children, with one group receiving a mercury-free tetanus shot while the other group received the tetanus shot with mercury.  The children in the group that received the tetanus shot with mercury had significantly increased odd ratios for autism, mental retardation, speech disorders, personality disorders, and thinking abnormalities based on the adverse events reported to VAERS (21). In 1999, the EPA and the FDA directed the vaccine manufacturers to take mercury out of all childhood vaccines.  The Institute of Medicine (IOM) also recommended such measures (16).  Yet, many influenza vaccines in the U.S. still contain the mercury preservative, some in amounts above the federal safety guidelines (16).

Before government agencies recommend the flu shot for the rest of our lives and before hospitals start mandating that their employees receive the flu shot for the rest of their professional careers, more studies need to be conducted.  Until then, the guinea pigs are the children of this generation and our health care workers.  I think Barbara Loe Fisher, of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), was correct when she stated, “It will be a national experiment that could have a far higher financial and long term health price tag then is currently appreciated” (18).

References:

1. www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/keyfacts.htm
2. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(05)70270-X/fulltext#article_upsell
3. http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/types.htm
4. http://us.gsk.com/products/assets/us_flulaval.pdf
5. http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/03/transcripts/3922t1.htm
6. http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent- influenza-in-healthy-adults
7. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/flu-shots-panacea-or-prop_b_831696.html
8. http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.htm
9. http://www.flu.gov/at-risk/seniors/index.html
10. www.drugs.com/pro/fluzone.html
11. https://www.novartisvaccinesdirect.com/fluvirin/fluvirinabout
12. https://merckvaccines.com/Products/Afluria/Pages/home
13. https://www.gsksource.com/gskprm/en/US/adirect/gskprm?cmd=ProductDetailPage&product_id=1244169218783&featureKey=600572
14. www.medimmune.com/pdf/products/flumist_pi.pdf
15. http://www.nvic.org/nvic-vaccine-news/September-2010/forcing-flu-shots-on-health-care-workers-who-is-n.aspx
16. www.nvic.org/vaccines-and-diseases/influenza.aspx
17. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18425905
18. http://www.nvic.org/Downloads/3770Reaction.aspx
19. http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/risk/formaldehyde
20. http://www.euro.who.int?__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/123062/AQG2ndEd
21. http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/pubmed/15764492

While the anti-gun forces came out in legion following the killings at the movie theater in Colorado, the data connected with this disturbing pattern of atrocity destroys the theory that these horrible cases of mass murder have anything to do with the easy availability of weapons and the absence of laws mandating gun control. There is simply no correlation between the rise of mass murder and changes in gun laws, and anyone who is looking for a connection here is clearly barking up the wrong tree.

Those who are looking for a cause-and-effect relationship between violence in society and violence in the media and in video games are standing on somewhat firmer ground. There has been plenty of research to show that constant exposure to violent images will lead to desensitization toward real-life violence, and it is hardly a stretch to think that young people in particular who spend many hours a day wallowing in the muck of movies, television shows, and video games that glorify and celebrate homicide, rape, war, and vigilantism might occasionally end up striking out at the world in terrible and tragic ways. There has been a plethora of ghastly crimes carried out by young people under the age of eighteen over the past twenty years, and the proliferation of violent media images over that period of time could very well be presented as evidence in favor of the mass murder/media violence thesis.

But while violent imagery in the media might explain violent behavior in youth to a certain extent, the bizarre and twisted nature of crimes such as the Joker massacre and the homicidal attack on peaceful Sikh worshipers would seem to suggest that something more is going on here. These singularly evil acts appear to be the work of completely deranged minds under the control of something that can only be seen as demonic, and this requires an explanation that goes deeper than what can be provided by normal sociological analysis.

For those who believe in such things, demonic possession could be seen as one possible answer, but there is another explanation that fits the evidence quite well and does not require speculation about the intervention of supernatural forces. In a shockingly high number of the most infamous cases of mass atrocity that have been committed on U.S. soil in recent years, the perpetrators were people who had been in treatment for psychiatric disorders and had been under the influence of powerful, mind-altering psychiatric drugs in the weeks and months leading up to their deadly violent outbursts.

Manufacturing Illness And Harvesting The Profits

The profit margins of pharmaceutical companies will inevitably rise as the health of the American people gets worse. Therefore, it is clearly in the best interests of the drug industry to have us all diagnosed with as many health maladies and chronic conditions as possible, so physicians and psychiatrists will have a good excuse for giving us the prescriptions that make the legal drug business so lucrative. Whether or not those maladies actually exist and whether or not we actually suffer from them is essentially irrelevant; the important thing is that we be diagnosed with them so that we can be given the medicines that the pharmaceutical giants want us to have.

In recent years, depression and anxiety disorders have proven to be especially profitable for the drug industry here in the U.S. On the depression index, France has now moved into the number-one position with 21 percent of its population estimated to suffer from this condition, but the United States is still holding strong in second place at a competitive 19.2 percent. Meanwhile, according to statistics from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, up to 25.8 percent of the adult population, or almost 58 million people, are suffering from one kind of anxiety disorder or another. Many of the folks suffering from these ailments are double dippers, meaning that they have been diagnosed with both depression and anxiety disorder. These individuals in particular often end up being doused with pharmaceutical wonder drugs by psychiatrists who are convinced that changing brain chemistry is the only sensible way to cure psychological disorders. Overall, approximately 11 percent of all Americans are currently taking prescription medications for depression and anxiety disorder, and this is a number that is continuing to rise all the time.

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But are “illnesses” like depression and anxiety disorder actually illnesses at all?  By putting labels like “disease” and “disorder” on troubling mental states, medical science has been basically conjuring up biological explanations for what were once considered psychological conditions. This approach has fattened the pocketbooks of the drug companies and has been a boon to the psychiatric profession, but whether it has really benefited those suffering from chronic sadness, frustration, and despair is open to long and heated debate.

Depression and anxiety disorder most definitely do exist, but they are problems that arise when people’s most fundamental needs are not being met – i.e., the need for love, friendship, personal and financial security, meaningful work, interesting hobbies and pastimes, and so on. When viewed from this perspective, it seems clear that depression and anxiety are not so much diseases as they are coping mechanisms of minds frustrated by the trying and difficult circumstances of their lives. In such instances, changing those circumstances would seem much more likely to produce good results than simply taking some kind of drug, which will not do anything to alter the basic life realities of someone struggling to overcome depression or anxiety.

But rather than focusing on the importance of changing our relationship with the world and with our fellow human beings as the best way for restoring sound psychological health, psychiatry has decided to take the easy (and profitable) way out instead by labeling depression and anxiety as “diseases” that can only be cured by taking drugs that alter brain chemistry in profound and troubling ways.

SSRIs And Other Antidepressants: A Closer Look

The types of antidepressants most often prescribed for adults, and increasingly for adolescents and children, are from a class of drugs called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. Another class of drugs known as serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, or SNRIs, are also starting to catch on, as most of the focus of medical professionals attempting to treat depression with drugs has been on finding ways to regulate levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which appears to be lacking in the brains of those suffering from this mental health disorder and in the brains of those diagnosed with anxiety conditions as well. Drugs like these inhibit the natural process through which serotonin is re-absorbed by brain cells after use in message transmission, and the result is that the brain is suddenly flooded with new supplies of a chemical that has been proven to have an affect on mood and behavior.

Given the total reliance of psychiatry these days on altering serotonin levels to create desirable changes in brain chemistry, it is surprising to discover that the connection between serotonin and depression is far from established. In fact, many researchers have concluded that this idea is completely lacking in merit, and non-biased research carried out on the effectiveness of SSRIs would seem to validate their point. In one important study that took place back in 1997 at Harvard Medical School, it was found that 82 percent of the supposed effectiveness of SSRIs in treating depression could be dismissed as placebo effect – in other words, these drugs basically didn’t work at all except in a small percentage of cases, and even there the possibility that lifestyle changes or behavioral therapy used in conjunction with antidepressants was making the decisive difference could not be ruled out.

Prescribing drugs for medical disorders that really may not be disorders at all is bad enough. When those drugs probably don’t even work in the majority of cases, however, giving these brain-altering chemicals to millions of adults – and millions more below the age of eighteen whose brains are still in the process of developing – falls into the realm of outrageous scandal. But believe it or not, the situation with serotonin-inhibiting drugs actually gets even worse, because while they may not really be assisting the brain in overcoming depression and anxiety, they can affect the brain in other ways that are scary, grotesque, and incredibly dangerous.

The Proven Side Effects Of SSRIs

Of course, not everyone accepts the research that has called the effectiveness of antidepressants into question. There is too much money and power involved in the equation for either the drug industry or the psychiatric profession to go down without a fight, and both insist that the majority of the studies carried out support the utility of drugs that alter serotonin levels in the brains of the depressed and the stressed. But because these medicines have been around for awhile now (the first SSRI, Prozac, came on the market in 1988), there has been plenty of time for their toxic side effects to be observed in actual patients taking these drugs in clinical settings, and there is no way for any of the actors involved to suppress the truth about what has been discovered. They can minimize it, but they can’t completely suppress it.

According to the Physicians’ Desk Reference, which is referred to as “the most trusted and commonly used drug information reference,” the entire class of drugs known as SSRIs, including Prozac, Luvox, and Paxil, has been shown to cause the following adverse reactions in a statistically notable percentage of those who take them:

• Manic reaction (kleptomania, pyromania, dipsomania, nymphomania)
• Hypomania (poor judgment, over spending, impulsivity, etc.)
• Abnormal thinking
• Hallucinations
• Personality disorder
• Amnesia
• Agitation
• Psychosis
• Abnormal dreams
• Alcohol abuse and/or craving
• Hostility
• Paranoid reactions
• Confusion
• Delusions
• Sleep disorders
• Akathisia (severe internal restlessness that can lead to suicide)
• Withdrawal syndrome
• Impulsivity

This list of side effects is disturbing in any circumstances. But when we discover that many of those who have been involved in mass killings (the Columbine shooters, the Virginia Tech gunman who murdered thirty-two people in an on-campus rampage, a Louisville man who shot and killed nine people at the Standard Gravure Company, a sixteen-year-old Native-American boy who gunned down nine on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota, just to name a few) had been taking SSRIs during the time of their killing sprees, everyone’s alarm bells should be ringing loudly. Again, it must be emphasized that we are not just talking about a few isolated incidents here – most of the perpetrators of mass murder over the past fifteen to twenty years had been taking prescription medicines at the time of their killings, and the drugs they had been taking were usually SSRIs or other medications commonly used to treat depression and/or anxiety disorders.

And this relationship is not just confined to mass murder. Dr. Ann Blake Tracy, who authored a book called “Prozac, Panacea or Pandora?”, studied thirty-two murder-suicides involving mothers and their children, and she found that in twenty-four of those cases the women had been taking Prozac at the time of the homicides.

Of course, defenders of psychiatric drugs have an obvious out here. Since those who are prescribed these medicines are being treated for mental illness, it can always be claimed that their psychological problems were the real cause of their crimes. But this idea has now been refuted, thanks to a study performed by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, an independent organization not affiliated with any government agencies or drug companies. ISMP researchers used information from the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System to compile a list of the ten medicines most frequently implicated in violent behavior, carefully adjusting the statistics to account for any other factors that might possibly have explained violent outbursts in psychiatric patients taking these drugs.

By this time, no one should be surprised to read that antidepressants dominated this list, locking down five of the top ten spots on the “most violent drug” list. And it is highly enlightening that all five of these drugs came from the two classes of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors that have become the antidepressants of choice for psychiatrists everywhere. The fatal five include the SNRIs Pristiq and Effexor and the SSRIs Luvox, Paxil, and Prozac, the latter of which came in at number two on the list, causing violent reactions in those ingesting it at a frequency almost eleven times greater than the average pharmaceutical drug.

Living In The Age Of Chemical Madness 

The documented side effects of antidepressants are frightening and, at least in some cases, apparently lethal. The human mind is the most finely tuned instrument found anywhere on the planet, and putting people on drugs that can disrupt its carefully crafted balance is a risky and unpredictable enterprise at best. While it can hardly be said that the connection between extreme violence and antidepressant consumption has been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, the fact that so many bizarre and horrific crimes have been committed by those under the influence of serotonin inhibitors in particular certainly should be enough to stimulate investigations by Congress, the White House, the FDA, the mainstream media, and any private health organizations truly concerned about the welfare of the American people. That this is not happening is a testament to how powerful the pharmaceutical companies have become, and how influential their pro-drug propaganda continues to be.

As for the two most recent incidents of mass murder to take place on U.S. soil, all of the early evidence suggests that the deceased shooter in the attack against the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, Wade Michael Page, was a fanatical white supremacist who was filled with rage and hatred for people of different races and religions. Page does not seem the type who would have ever visited a psychiatrist, so it is unlikely that he was taking any sort of prescription medication at the time of his rampage.

But the story with James Holmes, the madman responsible for the massacre in Aurora, Colorado, appears to be quite different. It is now confirmed that Holmes had been seeing a psychiatrist over the past several months, and that his doctor had been so concerned by what she heard in their sessions that she broke the rules of doctor-patient confidentiality and warned officials at the University of Colorado that Holmes might be a threat to himself or to others. At this point, it is not known what if any medicines this psychiatrist had prescribed for Holmes during their time together. But if it is eventually revealed that Holmes was in fact on antidepressants at the time of his attack, no one who has been paying attention to what has been happening in our society over the past fifteen to twenty years will be the least bit surprised.

©2012 Off the Grid News

Modern science has led the way in the campaign to lift human society above its indigenous, earth-bound roots, and one area where much success has undoubtedly been achieved is in the field of medicine. Average lifespan has increased dramatically over the past two hundred years, and it is clear that western medical research and treatment practices have played a significant role in the overall improvement in human health and longevity that we have seen during this period of time.

Despite its outstanding achievements, however, the one-size-fits-all approach to attacking illness and disease that has been preferred by modern medicine clearly has its limits. Basically, western medical science treats microbes that cause sickness as if they were enemy combatants in a war, and all of its efforts have been devoted to finding ways to destroy these microscopic invaders after they appear inside the human body. But the problem with this approach is that it has always been based on the assumption that agents of disease are mindless and inflexible, incapable of responding to the brilliant techniques and strategies developed by medical professionals. What researchers and physicians have come to realize is that, on the contrary, there is a basic intelligence in nature that constantly surprises arrogant human beings who think they have everything all figured out.

The Art of War

When Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in 1928, it ushered in a new era in medical science that ultimately led to the development of dozens of powerful antibiotics with the ability to kill bacteria. But the confidence of medical researchers that they had finally found the answer to banishing bacterial infection and disease forever proved to be premature, as bacteria have responded to the introduction of antibiotics by demonstrating a sophisticated ability to furiously mutate until they develop immunity to the drugs used to attack them.

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As wedded as they are to the military model of fighting sickness, medical science has answered this challenge in the only way they know how: by retreating to their laboratories to synthesize brand new antibiotics that can kill bacterial agents immune to the antibiotics already in use. This is of course equivalent to one of the oldest of all military strategies, where the leaders of armies instruct their technicians to come up with new and better weapons in order to jump back ahead of enemies who were smart enough to come up with countermeasures to defend themselves against the previous generation of weapons – and so the process goes, around and around without end.

But in this case, it appears the microbes are going to have the last laugh. What are now starting to appear are a type of bacteria known as “superbugs”— vigorous and vital specimens that are demonstrating widespread immunity to many different classes of antibiotics that have been routinely used to combat dangerous microbial agents. The rise of the superbug appears to suggest that bacteria have somehow gotten wise to what physicians have been up to, and in response, they are starting to mutate in a way that will make it harder and harder for medical science to stop them.

The Return of Colistin and the Polymyxins

In a number of countries around the world, superbugs have been blamed for new outbreaks of a whole variety of contagious diseases, some of which have proven deadly. In the U.S., a potentially dangerous mutated form of a microbe called Klebsiella has been sweeping through nursing homes and has now been found in thirty-seven states. This bacteria, which occurs naturally in the human bowels, is harmless when confined there; however, when spread to others through contact with unclean hands, it can cause serious pneumonia-like symptoms and has a fatality rate that may run as high as 40 percent.

Superbugs like this Klebsiella variant, while difficult to treat, have not yet acquired immunity to classes of drugs to which they have not been exposed, and for this reason physicians have begun using antibiotics known as polymyxins to treat some of these new troublesome strains. In particular, a polymyxin called colistin has proven to be so effective against some of the peskier fledgling superbugs that it has gone from total obscurity to widespread usage in a matter of only a year or two. This drug, which was originally discovered in the 1940s, had been abandoned because it has been found to cause kidney ailments in up to 50 percent of all patients who use it, a characteristic that it has in common with most other polymyxins. Physicians are rationalizing the use of colistin by claiming that most of the kidney troubles it causes are reversible, but it is a clear sign of just how desperate the situation is becoming that doctors are now turning to such a powerfully toxic substance in order to treat dangerous runaway infections. Already, some of the bacteria colistin has been used against are showing signs of becoming immune to it, and based on current patterns, many experts are anticipating the arrival of a “post-antibiotic era” when there may be no antibiotics left that actually work anymore.

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The Mass Production of the Superbug

To some extent, the arrival of the superbug was inevitable, as nature is once again showing its ability to resist all attempts at conquest. But even if it was only a matter of time before the antibiotic revolution ran its course, it may all be happening about two hundred years prematurely, thanks primarily to the massive use of antibiotics in healthy farm animals. This ridiculous practice, which has been adopted by factory farmers in the United States and elsewhere around the world, makes animals grow bigger while protecting them from the infections that frequently run rampant on filthy modern agribusiness operations. It is hard to believe, but about 70 percent of all the antibiotics used on the planet are injected into farm animals, and the circulation of all these chemicals through the food supply and the biosphere has accelerated the rise of the superbug by perhaps dozens of generations. With this much exposure to the antibiotics that were originally developed to protect human beings from disease, things are getting incredibly easy for bacteria, which are having very little trouble developing mass immunity to chemicals that at one time would have stopped them dead in their tracks.

The list of organizations that have criticized or condemned the injection of antibiotics into food animals reads like a who’s-who of the top public health organizations, and includes the:

• American Medical Association
• American Academy of Pediatrics
• American Public Health Association
• Infectious Diseases Society of America
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• U.S. Food and Drug Administration
• World Health Organization

The scientific studies that have established the danger of this practice have been more than good enough to convince these groups to advocate change, but the U.S. Congress remains unimpressed. Or perhaps we should say, the huge agribusiness interests that control the U.S. Congress remain unimpressed. The House and Senate have repeatedly blocked any attempt by the FDA to publicize what it knows about the folly of using antibiotics in healthy farm animals for the purposes of weight gain, and in the most recent House agriculture appropriations bill, an amendment was added by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) that was specifically designed (according to the Congressman himself) to prevent the FDA from prohibiting or restricting this practice in any way.

This Time, There Really Is a Wolf

Predictions about killer epidemics have become so familiar that they have begun to be regarded by most as little more than annoying background noise. Year after year of hysteria over the latest strain of the flu, which have helped the drug companies who sell vaccines pocket billions, have left the public cynical and suspicious about the utterances of public health officials who seem to be in bed with the pharmaceutical industry. But superbugs appear to represent a real, legitimate threat to the health of human beings everywhere, and if we dismiss the warnings we are being given by scientists everywhere we will be doing so at our own peril.

Once again, nature has demonstrated its ability to outsmart the best minds and the best ideas that humanity has to offer, and the threat to our collective health that we will all be facing in the years to come could be very grave indeed as a result.

©2012 Off the Grid News

Trying to select the most dishonest and disreputable United States government agency would be a daunting task indeed. But the Food and Drug Administration would have to be considered a strong contender for that dubious distinction. Allegedly created to make sure the foods we eat and the drugs we take are safe, the FDA long ago abandoned its mission in order to more effectively promote the interests of agribusiness and the pharmaceutical companies. While some – but not all – of the scientists who work for the organization are honest, the bureaucrats who make the final decisions at the FDA are mostly concerned with protecting the profit margins of the industries they are allegedly regulating. As a result of this corruption, the food companies are left free to inundate the market place with nutritionally empty, additive-laden, overly processed junk food. Even more egregiously, the pharmaceutical companies are given a free hand to sell drugs whose side effects lead to the premature deaths of over 100,000 Americans each year.

But remember, this is a quid pro quo relationship we are talking about here, and in return for their cooperation the FDA requires the drug companies, along with the manufacturers of medical devices, to pay what are referred to as “user fees.” Ostensibly, these fees are paid to cover the costs of the testing and review process that the FDA must undertake before allowing any new drug to enter the marketplace, but critics charge these payments are little more than a form of legalized bribery that all but guarantees a favorable response every time a pharmaceutical company submits a new product for review. Given how frequently pharmaceuticals granted FDA approval end up being recalled because of the high number of deaths and permanent injuries they cause, this view would appear to have some basis in fact. At this point, the FDA’s oversight of the drug industry is essentially a joke.

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The legislation that established these rates was due to expire in September of this year, but thanks to Congress, that problem has now been eliminated. On May 24, by a vote of 96-1, the Senate passed the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, which reauthorized the user fee system for another five years. The House of Representatives wasted little time in adding their imprimatur to the FDA’s profitable racket, passing the Food and Drug Administration Reform Act (different name, same idea) just one week later by an overwhelming 389-5 margin. Some negotiations will be necessary to resolve the differences between the two reauthorization bills, but these talks are expected to be little more than a formality, and the hope is that the final version of this legislation will be on President Obama’s desk by sometime in July (his signature is also considered a formality).

Veteran Capitol Hill observers expressed surprise at the near-unanimous support reauthorization received in both congressional chambers, but this is testimony to the absolute control the pharmaceutical industry has managed to gain over both political parties. While it may seem surprising, given the fact that the user fees system costs them money, passage of this bill was considered the number one legislative priority for the drug companies in 2012, and when you spend tens of millions of dollars annually on lobbying and on funding political action committees the way the pharmaceutical industry does, you can be pretty sure that your top concerns will be addressed post haste. Even though it is costing them, Big Pharma probably sees it as a smart and prudent investment.  Now with the smaller pharmaceutical companies, it is a different story – most of them are staunchly opposed to the user fees, which they claim are little more than a shakedown they can ill afford to pay. But remember, government bureaucracies are there to protect the biggest, most entrenched players in the game against upstarts, so this aspect of the user fee system is hardly accidental.

Interestingly, before final passage there were some amendments offered on the Senate floor that would have changed its version of the reauthorization bill substantially. The most hotly debated of these amendments, introduced by John McCain (R-AZ), would have made it much easier for Americans to have their drug prescriptions filled online through reputable Canadian pharmacies. Since many prescription drugs can be purchased cheaply outside the United States, such a move could potentially cut down on the profits of the drug companies significantly, which is why they opposed this idea so vociferously. While the Senate debate was spirited, as McCain himself predicted the power of the pharmaceutical companies was too strong to resist in the end, and the proposal went down to defeat by a vote of 54-43.

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Another worthy amendment opposed by the drug giants was also defeated. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who was the lone dissenter in the final 96-1 vote, wanted to add a clause that would have stripped exclusive marketing rights to particular drugs from any pharmaceutical company found guilty of fraud in connection with the sale of those drugs. This problem is not insubstantial; in 2012, pharmaceutical companies are expected to pay out over $9 billion in penalties as a result of fraud judgments, being found guilty of such acts as price fixing, suppressing negative research findings, cheating Medicaid and Medicare by over-billing, and marketing drugs for conditions they had not been approved to treat. But despite this industry’s sad and sorry history of misconduct, only nine senators voted in favor of the Sanders Amendment, while eighty-eight others voted against the idea of holding the drug companies more responsible for their dishonest and unethical behavior.

One good amendment was proposed by Rand Paul (R-KY), who wanted to disarm FDA agents and stop their raids against raw milk producers accused of violating FDA rules by selling their products directly to consumers. Paul’s amendment would also have stopped the FDA’s vendetta against the herbal medicine/nutritional supplement industry by stripping the agency of its ability to arbitrarily censor information about the health benefits of products sold by supplement retailers and manufacturers. Regrettably, this attempt to limit the power of a rogue government bureaucracy was voted down 78-15, and as a result, FDA agents will still be left free to storm onto private property with guns drawn any time they choose—especially if they believe someone is committing the horrible crime of selling milk that has not yet had its nutritional value completely destroyed by pasteurization. Additionally, the organization will still be able to continue its campaign of slander and insinuation against natural supplements and herbal medicines, which contain ingredients that people have been using to treat disease and illness for thousands of years all across the world. But if the masses started curing their ailments with natural products, they would obviously have no more need for pharmaceuticals, and this is a scenario the FDA would like to avoid at all costs.

Fortunately, one anti-supplement amendment that was supported by the pharmaceutical industry was defeated. Richard Durbin (D-IL), a perpetual thorn in the side of the natural health movement, wanted to change registration and labeling requirements for supplement suppliers so that they would be forced to pull their products from the market if they couldn’t meet new stringent reporting rules within a thirty-day period. Since the sellers and manufacturers of these products already have to register them and fully disclose their contents to customers, there was really very little rationale for making this kind of change. Natural health advocates organized a last-minute campaign designed to flood senate offices with phone calls, letters, and emails denouncing the Durbin Amendment, and perhaps in response to the public outcry, the Senate ultimately rejected this thinly veiled attack on the natural products industry by a resounding 77-20 margin.

When the Fox Guards the Henhouse

The user fee system is a clear example of how things work when government agencies do the bidding of powerful private interests. At first consideration, it might seem as if the FDA is simply taking a cut out of the profit margins of the drug companies in order to fund studies that will guarantee that dangerous drugs don’t inadvertently reach the market. But what is actually happening is that pharmaceutical companies are paying protection money to make sure the FDA does not start putting the safety of the public before the needs of their industry. This arrangement is profitable for both sides, and that is why both sides are so interested in seeing the status quo preserved without amendment or alteration.

©2012 Off the Grid News

Such a thing of course would be unthinkable; and yet, somehow, despite all the chronically overheated rhetoric we constantly hear from the government about the “War on Drugs,” a chemical that has qualities to rival some of the most addictive and dangerous illegal drugs on earth was approved for use against pain without any restriction whatsoever.

In the almost two decades since it was first introduced, Oxycontin has been a smashing success. It has generated billions of dollars in profits for Purdue Pharma, which has maintained its exclusive rights to manufacture this potent product. In part, this success is because Oxycontin works extremely well against moderate to severe chronic pain, and many who have used the drug enthusiastically praise its ability to ease their suffering.

But it is Oxycontin’s identity as a mind- and mood-altering substance that is really responsible for its meteoric rise in popularity. Purdue Pharma designed Oxycontin with a time-release formula to moderate the drug’s rate of delivery; however, it was quickly discovered that if the tablets were crushed or dissolved in water, the effects of an entire dosage could be experienced instantly by anyone snorting the powdered form or injecting the liquid form into the bloodstream.

What Happens When The Government Becomes Your Doctor…

Because of its success in the United States, Oxycontin was added to the list of approved drugs for health care coverage in Canada in 2000, and within a few years it became almost as frequently prescribed there as it has been here. But for Canadian health officials, twelve years has been more than enough, and they have now decided to ban Oxycontin and remove it from all pharmacy shelves across the country. At least partially out of anticipation of what was about to happen in their second biggest market, Purdue Pharma had already decided to phase out Oxycontin and replace it with a new drug called OxyNeo, which contains the same ingredients but is supposed to be much harder to crush or dissolve. At this point, however, Canadian health authorities and insurers in most provinces are not planning to approve coverage for the new drug, since its ingredients are really not any different from those found in Oxycontin. OxyNeo will be available, but it appears anyone wanting to use it will need to pay for it themselves, and there will also be new restrictions in place that are supposed to make it much more difficult to obtain a prescription in the first place.

At the present time, there is no indication that the FDA is considering pulling Oxycontin from the market here in the U.S., but now that Canada has taken this action the terms of the debate have been permanently changed, and there is no telling how things may play out in the months and years ahead.

Walking the Fine Line between Pleasure and Pain

Since hitting the market, Oxycontin has been so over-prescribed that it has been as widely available and as easily obtained as any illegal street drug. In the case of prescription drug abuse, doctors are always a big part of the problem – unscrupulous doctors willing to do anything to make a buck, including giving out prescriptions for pharmaceuticals to anyone who asks for them, and doctors fooled by drug company propaganda into over-prescribing based on honest ignorance about the true dangers of the substances they are handing out like candy. While many of its users have no doubt benefited from Oxycontin’s unquestioned ability to reduce severe chronic pain, the illegal trade in this pharmaceutical is where the profit really is, and there is every reason to believe that the fine folks at Purdue Pharma have realized this almost right from the beginning. Sales people from the company were trained to make the hard pitch with general practitioners everywhere to convince them that this high-powered opiate was a perfectly wonderful remedy for anyone suffering from even mild pain, and included in the sales spiel that Purdue reps were pushed to make was a claim that Oxycontin was only addictive in about 1 percent of the people who took it. This is a blatant lie, and Purdue had the data to prove it from very early on, but they continued to push Oxycontin with an aggressive and effective marketing campaign that was the envy of street dealers everywhere.

Purdue’s recent announcement that they will replace Oxycontin with OxyNeo basically represents an admission that much of the money they have made since the late ‘90s by selling the original drug is the definition of ill-gotten gain. But this change is also largely a public relations gesture, since it is highly likely that industrious drug addicts will still find a way to crush or dissolve the new pills so they can be used and abused in a way that will deliver a more potent jolt. And even if they do not, it will still be possible to get heavy doses of the drug by simply taking several tablets at once.

It is important to note that most Oxycontin addicts started out using the drug exactly as prescribed for pain, and it was only after falling deeply into dependence that they began grinding or dissolving their pills so they could snort or inject the drug in larger and more potent doses. Ultimately, Oxycontin is a highly addictive drug no matter how it is ingested, and OxyNeo will be every bit as addictive because it contains the very same ingredients as its forerunner.

Falling Down the Black Hole of Addiction

But while all of this could be seen as an argument for a total ban on Oxycontin everywhere, and a vote of support for the actions of Canadian health officials, things are actually not quite so simple. Like heroin, what makes Oxycontin especially insidious is that its addictive qualities are so strong that it will cause overwhelming and terrible withdrawal symptoms when users are forced to quit cold turkey.

With their supplies of the drug suddenly cut off, Canadian addicts could suffer from a number of significant side effects associated with opiate withdrawal, including:

• Severe anxiety
• Clinical depression
• Nausea
• Insomnia
• Muscle pain
• Panic attacks
• High fever
• Muscle weakness
• Flu-like symptoms

Experts in addiction are predicting that because Oxycontin is a drug primarily abused by those from lower socioeconomic classes who cannot afford to enter drug abuse treatment programs, many of those whose supplies are cut off will eventually turn to heroin, since for an addict one opiate is as good as any other. Crime rates will also likely go up, as OxyNeo will still be available in Canada even though it will no longer be covered by insurance, which means that some of those who cannot afford to buy it on their own will turn to robbery and theft in order to get their hands on the supplies they need to feed their habits.

Banning Oxycontin and reducing the use of its replacement OxyNeo by restricting access may ultimately prove to be a wise decision on the part of Canadian authorities. But doing it the way they are doing it, suddenly and without taking any steps to provide help to those who are addicted, is rash and even cruel, and is likely to lead to a new wave of drug crimes and heroin addiction. While there may be some drug addicts who are not necessarily deserving of our sympathy, most of those who have become addicted to Oxycontin are guilty of no other crime than listening to their doctors and taking a drug that was advertised as a totally safe cure for their pain. If indeed OxyNeo is eventually banned in the United States, or at least removed from all insurance plans, hopefully a way can be found to phase the drug out gradually so millions of addicts and users will not be sent spinning off into a self-destructive oblivion.

The most just and fair way to provide assistance to Oxycontin addicts, here or in Canada, would be to force Purdue Pharma to pay for as much rehabilitation and detox as they can afford – but of course there is no way that will ever happen. No matter how things turn out, in the end the executives and the biggest stockholders at Purdue will all be allowed to walk away rich and free; that is absolutely guaranteed.

©2012 Off the Grid News

As most everyone is probably aware, vaccinations contain weakened samples of various disease agents that are considered too inactive to cause infection, but still strong enough to prompt the immune system to produce antibodies that are capable of fighting off that illness. This presence of these antibodies is supposed to provide protection against future infection, and if enough people are vaccinated against the most dangerous diseases, then, according to the vaccination industry, the chances of epidemic will be significantly reduced.

Many dispute the real effectiveness of this type of medical intervention, however, claiming that improvements in sanitation, hygiene, and diet have had more to do with the disappearance of diseases such as polio, smallpox, diphtheria, and whooping cough than vaccines. But even beyond the questions that have been raised about the science behind vaccination, there is a medical controversy over whether or not vaccines are actually safe. If vaccines were clean and pure, with nothing more in them than weakened disease agents, it is unlikely anyone would be sounding an alarm. But rather than being pristine, vaccines preparations are actually made up of a complex stew of scary ingredients, some of which have been added intentionally, others of which got there as the result of accidental contamination. When a doctor injects us with a vaccine, or injects it into the arms of our children, what is actually entering our bodies is a filthy broth of substances that no one in their right mind would ever choose to consume voluntarily.

What Happens When The Government Becomes Your Doctor…

But when the medical professionals tell us that we all need to take these toxic brews in order to prevent terrible pandemics, we accept these hysterical assertions without question. Because the whole topic of health, medicine, and disease is very complex, we are taught to leave it to the experts to figure out what is best for us. But if the critics of vaccines are right, what we don’t know about vaccines and what is really in them may be killing us.

Intentional Contaminants

Vaccine manufacturers add all sorts of extra chemical substances to their products, each of which supposedly helps enhance the effectiveness of the main ingredients. The science behind these assertions is complex, but what is beyond dispute is that many of these substances have the potential to cause harm to biological cells and organisms.

Some of the most commonly used secret vaccine ingredients include:

• Mercury
• Aluminum
• Formaldehyde
• Antibiotics
• Yeast
• Gelatin
• Human DNA

Scientists who work for or are funded by the industry claim these substances are present in vaccines in such small doses that they cannot possibly be harmful to human beings. But the science of long-term health effects from exposure to small doses of toxins or other potentially harmful substances is extremely uncertain; some studies that look at the question seem to find connections between illness and such exposures, while other studies claim to have found nothing.

With respect to vaccination, the outcome of such analysis is usually determined by who is paying for the study. When scientific evaluations are funded by the companies that sell vaccines, such as GlaxoSmithKline or Merck, vaccines and the substances they contain are always totally vindicated and found to be completely safe. On the other hand, when the studies are funded by independent sources, possible correlations between vaccines and ill health seem to be found on a disturbingly frequent basis.

Case Study: Vaccines and Autism

By this time, almost everyone has heard about the controversy over whether the mercury in the MMR (mumps, measles, and rubella) vaccine is behind the mysterious rise in autism rates that have been experienced in the United States since the 1980s. Over the past thirty-plus years, the autism rate among children in this country has risen from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 91, an alarming increase that clearly cannot be explained away by improvements in diagnostic procedures. Over that period of time, the number of vaccines routinely given to children under the age of five has expanded from ten to thirty-six, and some medical professionals claim to have found a connection between the MMR shot in particular and the symptoms associated with autism.

Pharmaceutical companies, mainstream medical authorities, and the media have undertaken an aggressive campaign to convince the public that there is no connection between the mercury in the MMR shot that is given to children and autism. This viewpoint may ultimately be proven correct, but the debunking that has been performed by the mainstream medical establishment has been too narrowly focused – while some have blamed mercury for the autism increases because of its well-established ability to cause neurological problems in humans, others have focused more on the concentration of vaccinations in general, and the fact that children in the United States are getting so many shots at such a young age in comparison to other countries where vaccinations are fewer and autism is much rarer. Still others theorize that the inclusion of human DNA in modern vaccines, which coincides with the spike in autism rates, could be the real explanation, since no one can really be sure what all of this extra DNA might be capable of doing once it enters the human body. Whatever the cause might ultimately be, the dramatic increase in autism rates does require an explanation, and those who believe they have found a link between vaccines and autism should continue to receive an open hearing for as long as the question remains unsettled.

Unintentional Contaminants

Accidental contamination of vaccines is commonplace. Some contaminants enter vaccines accidentally as a result of poor laboratory practice or error, while others show up for reasons that are entirely obscure. Part of the problem comes from the fact that animal tissues are used to produce the weakened disease agents for vaccine preparations, and when samples of these agents are removed other organisms and substances indigenous to the species of animal that provided the tissue culture are frequently carried along with them. The polio vaccine for example, which was developed in monkey tissue, was widely contaminated with the SV40 monkey virus during the 1950s and ‘60s. This virus has been linked to some types of cancer, and its presence has been detected in more than 60 percent of all the deadly cancerous tumors that have been examined in autopsies since that time.

Case Study: The Human Papillomavirus Vaccine

At the present time, there is a huge push going on encourage all teenage girls to take the human papillomavirus, or HPV vaccine. HPV is a sexually-transmitted infection linked to genital warts and cervical cancer, and the vaccine industry and their political henchmen have been cooperating in a well-organized propaganda campaign designed to convince parents that their daughters may be in grave danger if they don’t get this vaccination immediately. But independent testing has revealed that every last bit of this vaccine has been contaminated with stray, superfluous recombinant (genetically-engineered) human DNA. How it got there exactly has not been explained, but for some reason it is there. There are now a plethora of horror stories about adverse side effects related to this vaccine (all being violently debunked by mainstream medical authorities, of course), and many are wondering what kind of changes all this trash DNA might be causing in the bodies of the young women who have gotten sick after taking this vaccine.

Be Your Own Investigative Journalist

The debate over whether the extra ingredients in vaccines are responsible for a host of health problems is likely to continue for a long time, in part because the scientists carrying out research are looking for subtle effects that may not be easy to spot, and in part because the pharmaceutical companies are such a powerful special interest. Medicine, like every other field of science, has its disagreements and ambiguities, to be sure. The difference, however, is that while uncertainty and openness to new ideas are accepted in other branches of science, in medicine the interests that profit from the status quo have a tremendous capacity to control the terms of the debate. The drug companies are true masters of propaganda, and this makes it extremely difficult to separate truth from fiction when the subject is vaccination.

The contamination of vaccines with a whole list of possibly harmful substances is something that we should all take seriously, and everyone should be concerned about what these contaminants might be doing to the health of young people in America. Before taking any vaccines, or letting your children take them, you should investigate them fully to find out what both mainstream medical authorities and maverick researchers are saying about them. The one thing you should not do is to simply take the medical establishment’s word for it that vaccines are safe and that anyone who says otherwise is a crazy conspiracy theorist. The purity of vaccines has been compromised by the contaminants they contain, and the purity of the scientific process with respect to this issue has been contaminated by money, arrogance, and casual assumptions of infallibility that may be leading us all down the primrose path.

©2012 Off the Grid News

It’s no longer about your good health, preventing pain, or extending life. Large pharmaceutical companies around the world are spending more on marketing and advertising than they do on research and development, according to York University studies of pharmaceutical promotion. The net result is that what happens to you in the doctor’s office is increasingly driven by Big Pharma marketing initiatives.

Molding Your Doctor

Doctors hotly deny that pharmaceutical companies influence their behavior, but that’s not what the numbers say. For every $1 a pharmaceutical company spends promoting its drugs with physicians, the return on investment (ROI) averages $1.72 in prescription dollars – but it can shoot as high as $10 for every $1 spent when you look at the most aggressively marketed drugs.

It’s not just direct physician spending (speakers fees, gifts from pharmaceutical reps) that counts. If the pharmaceutical company sponsors a medical conference or continuing education event, each $1 spent on the event turns into $3.56 in drug sales. Your doctor goes hoping to learn something new and comes back with a new mindset instead.

What if your doctor tries to fight that? Many doctors have a policy of not dealing with pharmaceutical representatives, and they don’t go to conferences. So they’re immune from Big Pharma influences, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong!

All doctors read some kind of medical journal, specialty surgical publication, or physician-specific magazine. Big Pharma loves to advertise in these publications, because for each $1 spent advertising in a medical journal or publication, the ROI is a stunning $5 in drug sales.

So much for their denials! Doctors may think they’re making their own decisions, but the influence of Big Pharma is everywhere in the medical industry. From direct contact to filling glossy medical magazines with advertising, pharmaceutical companies are spending an average of $61,000 per physician, per year to move their drugs.

Working the System

This heavy spending by Big Pharma isn’t likely to stop since the ROIs are so good. Pharmaceutical companies are even willing to pay big fines to keep behaving as they please in the marketplace. Over the last two decades, pharmaceutical firms have paid the government $19.8 billion to settle claims of violations of the Fraud Claim Act, illegal promotion of off-label uses for medications, and overcharging Medicare patients.

In the last five years, the size and pace of the settlement announcements has increased. Yet even though the amounts of the fines are going up, the profits for Big Pharma are going up even faster. As a result, they can effectively do as they please with their marketing arms.

What’s Next?

Faced with such a well-financed and poorly regulated industry, your doctor doesn’t really stand a chance. The situation is so far out of control that even members of Congress – who experience more than $150 million in direct pharmaceutical lobbying annually – have put forth a motion to make pharmaceutical companies reveal where and how they are spending their money.

The disclosure requirement is limited to firms who have at least one product covered by Medicaid or Medicare. It covers everything from royalty payments for device development to small items, like free food provided at a medical event. However, the proposal is being delayed by lobbyists (surprise, surprise), and there is no word on when it will go into effect. Violators would have to pay $10,000 per item undisclosed, but given that Big Pharma happily settles multiple million-dollar claims each year, that doesn’t seem like much of a penalty even if the law is enacted.

There’s no denying that the system is a mess. The ObamaCare debate keeps public attention elsewhere, but informed consumers need to know what Big Pharma is doing while everyone’s distracted. It’s the only way you’ll have a chance to protect your health from over-medication when you go to the doctor’s office!

©2012 Off the Grid News

Apart from griping, to combat our ailments or deficiencies, we may find ourselves turning to medicines, pills, procedures, devices, and supplements to keep ourselves in working order. As I look around at my peers, I notice that we all need glasses to focus, most take calcium for bone health, and some are taking medicines to manage cholesterol or blood pressure, or other treatments to counteract the symptoms of the growing list of issues and complaints.

Not that all of us have every one of these problems, of course, and some people, through a combination of genes, lifestyle, and luck seem to dodge every bullet that is out there (I hate those people a little bit). My husband’s 104-year old aunt is one of them. I don’t hate her. I do envy her, though. All she complains about is “a touch of arthritis.” Bless her heart! But most of us get a little rusty, a little creaky, and a little… lots of other things!

If you are someone like me who tries to be careful about what she puts into her body, the whole idea of ingesting a bunch of corrective or medicinal substances in an attempt to get back to “normal” is fraught with challenges. Obviously, some problems are serious, and drugs or other serious measures are sometimes the only steps to take. Other times it seems as though there are too many supposedly “easy” fixes. In an age of total convenience, it is all too easy to dive right in without weighing the risks or considering other options. I have mentioned this in previous articles. In the past if my doctor gave me a prescription, I dutifully filled it; today, I think long and hard about it and seek a natural remedy, should one exist, in its place.

High Cholesterol

One set of “wonder drugs” that people have been using since the 1980s are drugs that contain statins. The drugs work by blocking the body’s ability to produce cholesterol. High cholesterol does not have any negative symptoms per se, but it is one of the big bad risk factors for serious cardiac problems and strokes. As a result, people whose test results return high cholesterol or borderline high cholesterol levels are generally advised to lower it as soon as possible. Statin drugs have also been shown to be highly effective, but there are, of course a list of possible side effects that users expose themselves to, ranging from benign to serious.

However, for some people, getting bad cholesterol to healthy levels with just diet and exercise (or omitting risky activities such as smoking) is a serious challenge. Bad genes will have their say, and other times overall cholesterol will go way down while bad cholesterol will stay relatively high. When that is the case, many people have turned to statin drugs to get their numbers down once and for all. If you are one of those people, you may have already heard about this or will surely want to know about it.

In 2010, researchers released the results from multiple studies that revealed a connection between statins and increased incidences of Type 2 diabetes. As a result, very recently, the FDA began requiring new labels for statin drugs that warn of this connection.

High cholesterol is definitely not something to ignore and can lead to more serious problems in the future, but diabetes is, of course, an equally serious medical problem. This new information, you can imagine, is causing a serious dilemma for high cholesterol sufferers who have relied on statin drugs for years.

One of the major ironies with cholesterol and the new revelations about statins is that most people are not actually suppressing a serious medical issue by taking these drugs. Instead, they are keeping their cholesterol at bay in the hope of preventing future heart attacks or strokes. The unfortunate and unintended irony in all this means that essentially healthy people may end up contracting a serious illness in their attempts to prevent another.

The Hits Just Keep On Coming

As if that weren’t enough, the studies show a stronger correlation between a higher dose of statins and diabetes incidence, when compared to smaller doses of statins. Patients with greater cardiac risk factors or a previous cardiac or stroke incident may be more likely to take a higher dose of statins, thus putting them at greater risk for developing otherwise non-existent or borderline diabetes mellitus.

Statin drugs have been around for over twenty years, but the connections between statins and diabetes only began to emerge around four years ago. And even that information did not become clear cut enough for the FDA to take action until recent weeks.

One big outstanding question mark is whether statin drugs are a direct cause of diabetes for some patients, or whether the correlation is part of some other risk factor present in some patients and not in others. Earlier studies have been challenged because participants were not uniformly screened for diabetes or diabetes risk factors. This implies that some of the diabetes cases popping up in statin studies may not really be related to the drugs at all. Another consideration is the fact that people with high cholesterol and cardiac risk factors may naturally be at greater risk for diabetes because of co-morbidities, such as obesity. It is enough to make one dizzy, I know.

Concerned Cardiologist: Meet Profits Over People’s Mouthpiece

Advocacy can come from seemingly unlikely places. Cardiologist Eric Topol, former chairman of the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner College of Medicine (who is one of the cardiologists who raised concerns about Vioxx, which led to its eventual withdrawal from the market), wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. It staunchly warns against statin use.

In summary, when he looked at these data, he concluded that by taking statins, this could potentially increase the diabetic population by approximately 100,000 new patients. In his opinion, the risks do not outweigh the benefits offered by statins. This is a pretty bold position to take by a cardiologist whose colleagues would benefit greatly from continuing to write prescriptions to their patients and then let the endocrinologists deal with the after math.

Not surprisingly, Forbes magazine launched a series of attacks against Dr. Topol arguing that the benefits largely outweigh the risks. It is difficult to believe that Forbes has genuine concern for patients, given whose interests the magazine serves – Big Pharma, the insurance companies, and Wall Street’s.

The Alternative

Although it seems dizzying, it really isn’t. While Big Pharma’s solution will continue to advocate popping a pill, which the FDA and the insurance companies are all too happy to back up, the solution to all this is pretty clear. The choice is yours, but it seems that if taking statins does lower your cholesterol but it also puts you at risk for myriad side effects and now diabetes as well, why not just opt out? With modifications in your diet and plenty of exercise, you can lower their cholesterol naturally while they continue to hash this one out.

©2012 Off the Grid News