Corruption exposed: drug companies gave grants, consulting fees to panelists who issued new cholesterol guidelines that are driving demand for statins
July 15, 2004 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, editor of NaturalNews
Key concepts: corruption, statin drugs, statins
The new cholesterol lowering guidelines are proving to be a windfall for statin drug manufacturers like Pfizer and Merck: most news articles and medical advice concerning the new guidelines recommend drugs -- and drugs only -- to reduce cholesterol level. As a result, the guidelines are perhaps better described as profit generators for pharmaceutical companies. Today, we're finding out why: six out of nine panelists that issued the new decision about cholesterol levels have received grants or consulting payments from statin drug manufacturers. That's right: two thirds of the panel members have financial ties to the very pharmaceutical companies that are being financially helped by the new guidelines.
Not surprisingly, this little detail was left out of the report due to an "oversight," the report publisher says. As a result, the vast majority of journalists and news publishers never even questioned the bias of the report. It sounded scientific to them, so they published it as fact, even while remaining ignorant to the fact that this advice came from a group of people who are essentially on the payroll of these pharmaceutical companies.
What ever happened to full disclosure? Doesn't the medical industry have a responsibility to disclose precisely these sorts of financial ties between panelists who write public health guidelines and the drug companies who benefit from them? To any intelligent outside observer, this whole thing smells like a drug racket. The panelists get paid "consulting fees" and grant money, the guidelines are arbitrarily lowered to a level that suddenly puts millions more Americans into the "high cholesterol" category simply by changing the definition, the popular press runs headlines screaming that millions of people should now suddenly be taking statin drugs for life, and the drug companies receive a windfall in sales and profits. Nice scam there, folks.
It's business as usual in the medical industry: underhanded deals, refusal to disclose financial ties, and the willingness to do practically anything to generate more profits. That's because everybody's on the payroll of these companies: the doctors are getting "consulting fees" for doing nothing other than signing a blank piece of paper, the researchers are getting "grant money" to carry out research that almost always supports the drug companies, and the mainstream media is receiving billions of dollars in ad revenue as long as they keep pushing drugs to customers, both in advertising and news content.
Everybody's in on it. The whole system is disgustingly incestuous.
The problem is that none of this has anything to do with real health. Prescription drugs simply don't make people healthy. All they do is mask symptoms. And these statin drugs have a bewildering array of dangerous side effects such as sudden death, loss of sex drive, osteoporosis and other hormonal imbalances. Statins are dangerous drugs that have no place being taken daily like aspirin. And yet that's the push: to get everybody taking statins, every single day, for the rest of their lives.
The real way to lower cholesterol is, of course, to change your eating habits and take up an exercise program. Natural healing foods like garlic also lower cholesterol, and superfoods like chlorella offer tremendous help. There are also a great variety of nutritional supplements like red yeast rice that treat this condition. But the best way to lower cholesterol is to stop eating the foods that cause it in the first place: hydrogenated oils are the primary cause, followed by saturated animals fats (red meat). Better yet, if you take up an exercise habit and spend just 30 - 45 minutes per day walking or performing some other form of exercise, your cholesterol numbers will improve dramatically.
Prescription drugs are not needed to be healthy. The whole system of promoting these drugs is, as we've seen above, an unprecedented con being perpetrated on the American people. In fact, the system is downright criminal. The FBI should be investigating and prosecuting the players of this industry, using the RICO laws designed to bring down organized crime.
Until that happens, your best bet as a consumer is to avoid prescription drugs entirely and find other ways -- like nutrition and physical exercise -- to attain optimum health. And don't trust anything you hear from the popular press about prescription drugs. In all the articles I've seen about these new cholesterol guidelines so far, only one has mentioned the financial ties between panel members and statin drug manufacturers.
About the author: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, is the editor of NaturalNews. Author of over twelve books, and fifteen hundred articles on natural health, Adams is widely considered the most prolific writer on natural health today.
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