The Danish doctor Peter C. Gotzsche, exposes the pharmaceutical industries and their fraudulent behaviour, disregard for human lives and their charade of research and marketing.
In his 2013 book “
Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime; How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare”, Gotzsche argues that big pharma is actively racketeering.
I found the freely viewable chapter 18 from Gotzsche´s controversial 2013 book. It´s about psychiatry.
While the information is good, I found it difficult to read (and this isn´t because I´m not familiar with the topic). Maybe this is because it´s no good to start reading a book in the middle or maybe because English isn´t Gotzsche´s first language.
Here´s my summary of the chapter.
Rigging medical trials
An internal Pfizer memorandum shows that a medical trial was rigged deliberately:
If we were going to have to increase dothiepin dosage from 75 mg to 100 mg, we should do so at 1 week rather than at 2 weeks, which would result in a high drop- out rate on dothiepin due to side effects. By 2 weeks, patients have learnt to live with side effects.
Cipramil/Cipralex fraud
Before the patent for citalopram expired, Lundbeck patented the active half and called the same drug Cipralex (Celexa, Lexapro), which it launched in 2002. After the patent for citalopram expired, Cipramil became much cheaper, but the price of Cipralex remained high. In 2009, in Denmark Cipralex cost 19 times as much as Cipramil.
A paper was published in a journal edited by a person who is paid by Lundbeck with the claim that the same drug Cipralex worked faster than Cipramil in some cases. One of the academic authors was Stuart Montgomery, who once concealed that he worked for Pfizer at the same time as he worked for the UK drug regulator that approved Pfizer´s drug sertraline.
Gorman appeared as an expert and said that 80% of the compulsive shoppers had slowed their purchases on Cipralex. Even though such a disorder hasn´t even been invented by the almighty DSM.
While medical doctors were stimulated to poison depressed children with Cipralex, Forest executives for 3 years kept the results of a medical trial secret that didn’t show any benefits of Cipralex as a depression treatment for children.
Weight gain – Zyprexa, Seroquel
Lilly agreed to pay more than $1.4 billion for illegal marketing for off-label uses of Zyprexa, although its adverse effects are substantial, inducing heart failure, pneumonia, weight gain and diabetes.
In 2006, internal Lilly documents were leaked, which demonstrate that in 1999 Lilly’s chief scientist, Alan Breier, told employees in 1999 that “
weight gain and possible hyperglycemia is a major threat to the long-term success of this critically important molecule”, but Lilly kept the 1999 study secret, which also showed that blood sugar levels in the victims increased steadily for 3 years. Lilly’s own studies showed that 30% of the patients gained at least 10 kg in weight after only a year on Zyprexa.
AstraZeneca silenced a trial that showed that quetiapine (Seroquel) led to high rates of treatment discontinuation and significant weight increases, while the company at the same time claimed that the drug helped psychotic patients lose weight.
Kit and at least one journal article wrote that quetiapine didn’t increase body weight while internal data showed that 18% of the patients had a weight gain of at least 7%.
GlaxoSmithKline - Paxil
In 2001, GlaxoSmithKline published a fraudulent scientific report that Paxil (Seroxat, paroxetine) was effective with minimal adverse effects. GlaxoSmithKline lied to its sales force that a trial showed “REMARKABLE Efficacy and Safety”, while the company in internal documents admitted that the study shows that Paxil wasn’t effective at all.
At least 8 children became suicidal on Paxil versus 1 on placebo (a significant difference).
There were 11 serious adverse effects in 93 children posioned with Paxil and 2 among 87 children on placebo (this was also significant).
GlaxoSmithKline, Lilly and Pfizer, routinely added suicide cases to the placebo arm of their trials, although they occured before the patients were randomised to placebo.
In data submitted by GlaxoSmithKline to the FDA in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the company had included suicide attempts from the washout period before the patients were randomised in the results for the placebo arms of trials.
In 2004, a researcher used the full reports of Glaxo’s trials that were made available as a result of litigation, and he found that Paxil significantly increased suicidal tendencies.
He included 3 trials, among them the unpublished study 377, which showed that Paxil isn´t better than placebo.
Suicidal from the drugs
Some of the psychiatric drugs that cause suicides are:
Prozac;
Zoloft;
Cipralex.
Even though his mother Nancy put information on the internet on the suicide of her son Brennan after he was poisoned with Cipralex, but “search” engines don’t find it.
An internal Lilly memo from 1984, shows that the German drug agency described 2 suicides and 16 suicide attempts among only 1427 patients on Prozac (fluoxetine). A Lilly Germany memo listed 9 suicides in 6993 patients on fluoxetine.
This doesn´t add up, when compared to only 5 suicides in FDA’s analysis of 52,960 victims on SSRI drugs. This is less than 1 per 10,000 patients, although you would expect 13 per 10,000 victims.
In a 1995 meta-analysis, 5 suicides in 2963 patients on paroxetine were reported (17 per 10,000). This meta-analysis wrongly reported 2 suicides on placebo, which occurred in the washout period.
The UK drug regulator reported 11 suicide attempts in 3455 victims on paroxetine and 1 in 1978 on placebo.
Higher death rates by psychiatric drugs
Antipsychotics increase the risk of dying through a variety of causes, including suicide, cardiac arrhythmias, diabetes and weight gains.
The use of psychiatric drugs both off-label and “legal” is exploding. The use of antipsychotics went up eight-fold between 1993–1998 and 2005–2009, and doubled in adults.
In 2007, more than 20 million people were poisoned with Zyprexa (olanzapine).
A meta-analysis shows that victims poisoned with Zyprexa that were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia had a 3.5% death rate compared to 2.3% on placebo. Thus, for every 100 patients poisoned, there was one additional death on the drug. The true death rate is likely even higher.
If we take one death in a hundred for a reasonable estimate of the deaths caused by Zyprexa, this would mean that 200,000 of the 20 million died because of Zyprexa alone.
Chapter 18 from Gotzsche - “
Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime; How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare” (2013):
http://web.archive.org/web/201502260331 ... chpt18.pdf
On 13 September 2018, Peter Gotzsche was expelled from the Cochrane Collaboration (both from its Board and as a member) that he co-founded, even though Cochrane’s hired Counsel had found no evidence of wrong-doing.
Gotzsche claims he was expelled because he objected against Cochrane becoming to positive on our destructive healthcare.
Gotzsche estimates that about 200,000 persons die annually just in the US from side effects or medical errors. Many patients/victims die, because of drugs, the third biggest killer in the world.
The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don't sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. This is what makes drugs so different from anything else in life… Virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors… the reason patients trust their medicine is that they extrapolate the trust they have in their doctors into the medicines they prescribe.
The patients don’t realize that, although their doctors may know a lot about diseases and human physiology and psychology, they know very, very little about drugs that hasn’t been carefully concocted and dressed up by the drug industry… If you don t think the system is out of control, please email me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death… If such a hugely lethal epidemic had been caused by a new bacterium or a virus,or even one-hundredth of it, we would have done everything we could to get it under control.
https://youtu.be/dozpAshvtsA