HomeHealth & MedicineGOOD PILL, BAD PILL.

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GOOD PILL, BAD PILL. — 5 Comments

  1. I avoid prescription drugs like the plague. I tend to self-medicate when I feel I need to. I'm even reluctant to take paracetamol, and do so only when I really feel it's necessary. I don't go to doctors, either. I have no faith in either the medical profession or the pharmaceutical industry. Snake oil salesmen, all of them.

    • nisakiman,

      I wish I had your balls!

      But that doesn’t mean I’m not frustrated by it all. If you don’t take the placebos then you increase the risk of something bad and that is the threat hanging over you for refusing the pills. It puts me at varience with the medics because I’m concerned primarily with enjoying life and they just want to keep me alive however miserable I am. From their perspective, if any or all of the side-effects listed were to  overcome me then they’ve still won because my cholesterol is under control and if it isn’t, they raise the strength of the pill making things worse for me. 

      It’s all about the treatment now with no thought of a cure!

  2. You might be interested in a comment / link by harleyrider1978 on Frank Davis's blog https://cfrankdavis.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/the-mysterious-bradford-hill/#comments

    concerning the amount of money deployed by the pharmaceutical companies in inducements to doctors to push their drugs. It's quite eye-watering how much they spend promoting their poisons. The so-called 'Evil Big Tobacco' could only dream about having the facility to push their products to that extent.

    As for cures, Big Pharma isn't interested. There's no long-term profit in cures, only in drugs that (in theory) alleviate the symptoms, preferably with side-effects that will sell more drugs. They've probably been sitting on a cure for cancer for years.

  3. I’m certainly sure that they are sitting on the cure for a whole lot more cancers than the currently paltry numbers from which one can be declared “cancer free” (I understand that for some reason that I’ve yet to fathom, it’s against the law for anyone to claim that anything can “cure” cancer).  I simply cannot believe that with pharmaceutical industries and those self-proclaimed heroes, CRUK, having been around in one manifestation or another for well over a century, none of these – err – “worthy” (and very wealthy) organisations have come up with anything better than the current, quite frankly, pretty archaic treatments which are all that seem to be on offer to cancer patients these days. 

    One has to wonder exactly what they are doing with all the money they make, apart from wasting it on cheesy adverts about fun-runs, paying themselves enormous salaries and giving any excess away to other charities to avoid being taxed.  I mean they must, presumably, do at least some research, so why hasn’t that research come up with something better than the often unsuccessful – and often dangerous – treatments currently available?  CRUK’s latest boastful claim that “over 50% of cancer sufferers now survive” is, firstly, incredibly vague (Survive for how long?  A week?  Six months?  Ten years? 20 years? Until they die of something else? Until the treatment itself kills them?)  And how many “over” 50%? Presumably less than 60%, or they would have quoted that figure instead), and secondly, 50% is actually a pretty poor result after a century’s research.  If researchers trying to find a cure, vaccination or a workable control for smallpox/polio/rickets/TB/AIDS/Ebola had taken this long, then our infant (and adult, for that matter) mortality rates would still be at the levels of the Victorian era.  It also means, ergo, that almost half of all cancer patients are dying, which is an extraordinarily poor showing after the amount of time and money that has been (supposedly) pumped into researching just one group of diseases.

    One cannot help but come to the somewhat worrying conclusion that ultimately an effective, safe, fast-acting cure for cancer (or any one group of cancers) must surely have been stumbled upon – if only by accident – and rapidly suppressed (or funding swiftly re-directed), in the knowledge that such a drug would kill the goose that lays the golden egg for pharmaceutical companies the world over and render organisations like CRUK essentially functionless.

    The bottom line is that the pharmaceutical companies exist primarily to increase their – well – bottom line, and organisations like CRUK exist purely in order to ensure that they continue to – err, well – just exist.  The patients whom they like to pretend that they are working to help are clearly of distinctly secondary importance.  And they have the nerve to paint the big tobacco companies as the bad guys!  Now that's hypocrisy of truly epic proportions!

    • Strangely Jax, in this country the only reliable stats we get are from the Central Statistics Office because they get ’cause of death’ from the, (average) 29,000 death certs issued each year over here. These list primary and secondary causes of death in the opinion of the attending doctor of course. Here’s the problem though. Apparently most lung cancer sufferers finally succumb to pneumonia so for the doctor to do the job, which cause of death do they list as the primary cause? No death certs in Ireland are ever issued with smoking listed as a cause of death though. This is because the truth of the matter is that smoking, “contributes,” to ill-health. It is one of several factors that include hereditary causes, genetic make-up, diet, exercise, stress, smoking & drinking and mental well-being among others. Each of us is subject to all of those and it is impossible to factor out one single trigger for a multi-factorial disease.

      Instead, we have the Irish Cancer Society and their mouthpieces on the media regularly and they are either scaremongering,  suggesting an epidemic of cancer or congratulating themselves on the wonderful progress they are making. It is a form of persistant disinformation designed to confuse us all to the point that we simply believe anything they say. 

      Your point about cancer treatment being dangerous. To discover whether you have a cancer or not they pump your body full of cancer-causing radiation to get an image of your inards. They cut lumps of cancerous organs out and leave you in remission as everyone waits to see if it will re-emerge. This is because nobody has quite discovered what causes that first cell to mutate and turn cancerous. It begins at cellular level and must be treated there as well. 

      One less talked abut issue is barrier to treatment. Access to this is based on wallet-size and good treatment requires many wallets. Our Oncologists are on salaries circa €450,000p.a. so you don’t get to see one of those prima-donnas for nothing.But it does come back to the sheer profitabilty of offering treatment instead of cure. 

      Money is the root of medical evil also!

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