Olympics 2012: GlaxoSmithKline and it's five athletes

It is ironic or, symptomatic, that one of the most corrupted* laboratories, GlaxoSimithKline, that sells highly expensive drugs that contributes to make people sick, iatrogenesis is the third cause of death in America, is responsible for the anti-doping tests of the Olympic games:



GSK aims to keep the Olympic Games clean

July,16, 2012



"Olympics sponsor GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has launched its first UK advertising campaign to promote the role that anti-doping science will play in making the London Olympics the fairest possible.

The campaign launches on the same day as the official London 2012 anti-doping laboratory, which is being provided by GSK in partnership with the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog) and King’s College London.



The lab, based at GSK’s Harlow, Essex, site, becomes operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week from today (16 July). More than 150 scientists, led by Professor David Cowan from the Drug Control Centre at King’s College, will carry out more tests (up to 6,250 samples) than at any other Games. Every medallist and up to 50% of all competing athletes will be tested.



The advertising campaign will feature British Olympic medal hopefuls Phillips Idowu, Beth Tweddle, David Weir, Graham Edmunds and Marlon Devonish and will appear on TV from today and outdoor advertising space across the UK from 23 July." (keep reading)

 (emphasis added)



I wonder how much GSK payed for these medal hopefuls for these outdoors. Let's see if the "hopefuls" will win. Clean from the doping test but dirty because of the greed.

Money is the measure of all things.

President Barack Obama received money from the Big Pharma for his campaign. There he is!



* GSK to pay ‘unprecedented’ $3 billion fraud charge

Published on 03/07/12 at 10:09am



GlaxoSmithKline will pay $3 billion in fraud charges, the largest of its kind in US history.



The charges relate to the off-label promotion of its antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin for unapproved uses, such as for the treatment of children and adolescents and for sexual dysfunction."





GSK ruling: Another failing, but will the industry learn?

Published on 04/07/12 at 01:16pm



"Big pharma heads were involved in the off-label promotion of Advair/Seretide

Court papers surrounding GSK’s $3 billion fraud charge make for grim reading, and further damages an industry that already struggles with its reputation."





GSK’s Stiefel accused of shares fraud

Published on 13/12/11 at 11:05am



The US financial regulator has charged a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline with defrauding staff by buying back shares from them at less than they were worth



Update:

"Anti-drug testing has traditionally been carried out by the International Olympic Committee in conjunction with the World Anti-Doping Agency and the respective national authority of each country that hosts the Games." The Guardian,

Pharmageddon by David Healy: Another book about the crimes committed by medicine

While people are discussing the health care in US people are being put on drugs with low benefits and a huge amount of risks.

This is another book about the creepy story of how Americans are being silently killed by drugs prescribed by physicians. What happens in America  happens in many countries around the world.



The list of books written by physicians is getting longer. I wrote a post about John le Carrè's "The Constant Gardener", John Braithwaite "Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry", and many posts about medicine.



This is another one.

You should visit David Healy's blog: and take a look at what he is writing and also at the other books he wrote.

The first time I read about the concept of  Pharmageddon was at Charles Medawar site Social Audit. Here is where it's described,



This is what is written about Pharmageddon at Dr. David Healy's site and I have to disagree with the part where it is said that physicians fail to recognize the side effects of the drugs because they are under a Stockholm Syndrome and there is no help for those who suffer such a condition.

It is amazing that after all that is being written and all the clinical data physicians behave as if nothing was happening but excusing them because they suffer from a condition that has no cure sounds out of this planet.

Iatrogenesis is the third cause of death in America. Still physicians don't know about it?

No. If physicians suffer from any disease it would be blindness but who but the blinds on is what has to be discussed.

_________________________________________________

"Pharmaceutical companies have hijacked healthcare in America, and the results are life-threatening.

Dr. David Healy documents a riveting and terrifying story that affects us all.

Pharmageddon is the story of a tragedy.




"In 1962 a sleeping pill called thalidomide caused a horrific drug disaster whose emblematic images of limbless and handicapped babies born to distraught mothers linger to this day.The United States Congress swung into action. They wanted to prevent such a tragedy happening again. They were also determined to rein in the marketing excesses of the pharmaceutical industry. Three steps were taken.



First, new drug development was rewarded with product rather than process patents. Second, new drugs were made available on a prescription only basis. Third, new drugs had to prove they worked through controlled trials before they could be marketed.



In 1962 it looked like these steps would make for safer and more effective drugs and ultimately reduced healthcare costs.

In 1962 it looked like these steps would make for safer

and more effective drugs and reduced healthcare costs.

On the 50th anniversary of the 1962 FDA bill enacted by Congress, Pharmageddon shows how these very arrangements have led to an escalating number of drug induced death and injury, how in some areas of medicine drug induced death is the commonest form of death, and how the costs of treating these problems exceed the costs of the entire drugs budget.





Medicine and the marketers



Pharmageddon also shows how these same changes have turbo-charged pharmaceutical industry marketing. The horrors are best caught by the example of the increasing numbers of pregnant women who religiously steer clear of alcohol, tobacco, soft cheeses, or anything that might harm their unborn child, but who are nonetheless being urged by their doctors to take drugs like the antidepressants — now the most commonly prescribed drugs in pregnancy — even as the evidence accumulates that these drugs cause birth defects, double the rate of miscarriages, and cause mental handicap in children born to mothers who have been taking them.

Pregnant women who religiously steer clear of alcohol, tobacco, soft cheeses, or

anything that might harm their unborn child are urged by their doctors to take antidepressants.

This example of a shepherding of innocents into pharmaceutical killing fields is not an isolated incident. Life expectancy in the US, the country that consumes most of the latest life-saving drugs is falling rapidly compared to the rest of the world. For diseases like schizophrenia, we are now doing 10 times worse in terms of life expectancy than we were 100 years ago.

Not even the FDA has access to the data.*

The means to protect ourselves from a recurrence of the thalidomide disaster have been our undoing. Product patents gave an incentive to pharmaceutical companies to produce blockbuster drugs — drugs that were so valuable to a company and its survival that the incentives to breach regulations and hide any safety data that might be inconvenient for the company are so huge that entire trials are hidden, that almost all trials are ghostwritten to ensure the data looks right, and no one, not even the FDA, has access to the data. (read the entire description at David Healy's site."

* If FDA had no access to the data now it has and is even helping the BIG PHARMA using artifices like evergreening.

R. D. Laing On DSM-3: the project of homogenization of experience

This is a three minutes video and it's worthy every second because it talks about our normal experiences of life being considered as mental disorders. There are two parts and the second is about the psychophobia. At the beginning he tells a very funny story about a psychologist that asks it... watch the video.

 I just did transcript these excerpts:



"One characteristic of our culture I think it is a, what I call "psychophobia". Psycophobic... we are frightened of their own minds, of our own psyches.




There is no other book going arond that is more explicit about it than the DSM-3 "Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association 3rd edition which calls itself as a compendium of criteria for mental disorder.



Any unsual perception experience is a criteria for mental disorder... any unusual perception...



I feel the presence of a dead person who is not there. You're allowed to do that for three weeks after your mother dies. After that it is a criteria for mental disorder.



what seems to be a massive project of 
homogenizing experience. We are all experiences at the same time



nobody will gonna be allowed to experience diferently, diferent from any one else. It's not allowed to see the sky as grey if other people see as blue.  ...

Blue, grey, white? There is only one answer.

Image: roujo at Flickr

Drugwatch: Prescription drug deaths on the rise

This article from DrugWatch portrays the dimension of the harms of prescribed drugs.

It's a must-read since all people will have to face a health problem.

Information is the weapon not to be harmed by medicines that are on the market because of greed but are harmful some in a lethal degree.



Excerpts:

Prescription Drug Deaths On The Rise



The statistics and the facts are staggering: More than 40 people a day across the country die from prescription pain medication overdoses; more and more doctors are getting huge payouts from pharmaceutical companies to promote these drugs; and in the past 10 years, U.S. spending on prescription drugs rose 475 percent.



The relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical goliaths has reached the point of being suspiciously cozy, ethically questionable and life-threatening to unsuspecting patients at risk of drug addiction and death. And those most affected aren’t who you think.



Gone are the days when society’s drug addicts are the strung-out junkies living in crack houses – people you see on the 11 o’clock news. No, many of today’s addicts are your neighbors, church friends and children – maybe even your own children. And many of them got their start from their own trusted physicians.



Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Fox News that doctors are handing out narcotics like candy. Some doctors are giving patients prescriptions for narcotics for minor injuries when other medications could work just as well.



“When I went to medical school, we were incorrectly assured, ‘Don’t worry, if patients have short-term pain, they won’t get hooked. That was completely wrong, and a generation of doctors, patients and families learned that’s a tragic mistake."



Painkiller Epidemic



"In November 2011, the CDC, the country’s national public health institute, announced that deaths from prescription drugs more than tripled in the past decade. Nationwide, the most abused medications are narcotic pain relievers like hydrocodone (Vicodin) and oxycodone (OxyContin); depressants like diazepam (Valium); and stimulants such as Adderall. (keep reading)

Is science free to research? Are there dissents in science?

Science is about truth and with the help of the imagery of laboratories where serious people try experiments with colorful liquids, the glamour of equations that are impossible to understand, the seemingly speed of technological progress some people don't doubt. The mainstream media also helps promoting science as the unquestionable truth.

However receiving money to conduct a research and having a hypotheses accepted as a theory is not that simple.

These paragraphs help us understand what happens.




The New Thought Police – Suppressing Dissent in Science



by Mae-Wan Ho and Jonathan Mathews

Entire article: here.



Excerpts:



"Science has seldom lived up to its ideal as an open, disinterested enquiry into nature, as any scientist who has ever tried to publish genuinely new ideas or findings in the ‘peer-reviewed’ scientific journals will know too well. Nobel Laureate Hans Krebs’ discovery of the metabolic cycle that would eventually bear his name was rejected from the journal Nature. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, another Nobel prize-winning biochemist, never got funded for work on the relevance of quantum physics to living organisms, which is crucial for understanding living organisms and why cell phones may be harmful, for example.



In the course of liberating itself from the Church, the scientific establishment has inherited many of the trappings of fundamentalist religion. There can be but One True Science, and everything else tends to be treated as nonsense or heresy. Within the past 50 years, the suppression of dissent has plumbed new depths, as the scientific establishment is increasingly getting into bed with big business. At first, it was mostly physics and chemistry, now it is pre-eminently biology.



And as corporations are growing bigger and more powerful, so the suppression of scientific dissent is becoming more sophisticated, insidious and extensive. As the scientific and the political mainstream have both come to identify with corporate aims, so their established power structures are brought to bear on squashing scientific dissent and engineering consensus. Witness the seamless way in which the corporations, the state and the scientific establishment are co-ordinating their efforts to force feed the world with GM crops, known to be unsafe and unsustainable, and to offer no proven benefits whatsoever either to farmers or consumers."



Source: psrast org

R.D. Laing a Homage2: Tranquilizers as chemical straight jackets

Ohio State University Conference in 1984 about George Orwells Book 1984

R. D. Laing spoke here. Filmed and produced by moi.

Making profit out of cancer: American Cancer Society

There is no other word for profiting from diseases and making people sick by prescribing drugs which risks overweight the benefits: crime.

That's why omnipresence of the consortium that profits at the expenses of sickness always amazes me.

I have seen many times people defending them in discussions in social networks and blogs of people who raise awareness of the way medicine is being dictated by pharmaceutical industry.

The third cause of hospitalization in USA is iatrogenesis: disease caused by the treatment, mostly prescribed drugs.

When I joined Second Life I was advised that the pharmaceutical industry was there by a woman who was part of a sort of PETA's group.

I  joined a group that allegedly helps depressed people and another a kind of suicide hot line. 

When someone asked for help about Paxil/Seroxat withdrawal I answered and... I had the honor of having been banned from the group because I raised some issues about withdrawal and some facts that the pharmaceutical industry doesn't like to see discussed and try hard to keep covering up.

One can write numerous arguments but will be silenced not receiving answers but being labelled conspiracy theorist, scientologist, troublemaker and whatever suits. 

For the whole month this advertisement - click at the image to enlarge - were at the login page of Second Life. The money donated  is for one of the wealthiest non-profit institution: the American Cancer Society.

According to them: " Relay For Life is the signature fundraising event of the American Cancer Society.  The Relay For Life of Second Life is the largest, most successful fundraising event in the virtual world, raising more than $1,200,000 since its first event in 2004." (emphasis added)

The famous institution, that at first glance advocates for cancer patients, has ties with the pharmaceutical industry and has received many critics being  Dr. Samuel S.Epstein*, M.D. one of the most active.

He explains at this link what the American Cancer Society really does.

At this article "The American Cancer Society Trivializes Cancer Risks: Blatant Conflicts of Interest"  he says:

The ACS's indifference to cancer prevention reflects major industry funding. ACS has received contributions in excess of $100,000 from a wide range of "Excalibur Donors," many of whom continue to manufacture carcinogenic products. These include:

•Petrochemical companies (DuPont; BP; and Pennzoil)

•Industrial waste companies (BFI Waste Systems)

•Junk food companies (Wendy's International; McDonalds's; Unilever/Best Foods; and Coca-Cola)

•Big Pharma (AstraZenceca; Bristol Myers Squibb; GlaxoSmithKline; Merck & Company; and Novartis)

•Biotech companies (Amgen; and Genentech)

•Cosmetic companies (Christian Dior; Avon; Revlon; Elizabeth Arden; and Estee Lauder)

•Auto companies (Nissan; General Motors)

 Cancer Prevention Coalition is the best place to search for guidance about cancer. 

Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. is professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition; The 2005 Albert Schweitzer Golden Grand Medalist for International Contributions to Cancer Prevention; and author of over 270 scientific articles and 20 books on the causes and prevention of cancer, including the groundbreaking The Politics of Cancer (1979), Cancer-Gate: How To Win The Losing Cancer War (2005), and Toxic Beauty (2009, BenBella Books).

Eadweard Muybridge and the integrity in science

Today Google's doodle is about Eadweard Muybridge's 1892 experiment for the former governor of California Leland Stanford a businessman and race-horse owner.



Muybridge, an English photographer who lived in America, received $25,000 to perform an experiment to prove  that a horse has all his hoovers off the floor for a very brief moment when trotting.

It was a subject of controversy in horse-racing circles.



It was necessary to capture the images slowly because human eyes cannot see where the legs are.

Muybridge took  numerous pictures in the experiment called The Horse in Motion.



This experiment was used by some artists later like Marcel Duchamp.



I want to stress this aspect of the whole story: Wikipedia:



"Muybridge and Stanford had a major falling-out concerning his research on equine locomotion. Stanford asked his friend and horseman Dr. J. B. D. Stillman to write a book analyzing The Horse in Motion, which was published in 1882.[15] Stillman used Muybridge's photos as the basis for his 100 illustrations and the photographer's research for the analysis, but he gave Muybridge no prominent credit. The historian Phillip Prodger suggested that Stanford considered Muybridge as just one of his employees and not deserving of special credit.[16] As a result of Muybridge not being credited in the book, the Royal Society withdrew an offer to fund his stop-motion studies in photography. Muybridge filed a lawsuit against Stanford to gain credit, but it was dismissed out of court."



This is the way scientists have been working. They receive money from corporations and their work is driven according to the corporations needs.

Scientists research what the corporations tell them to research and the results of their work that is published defend what the corporations need usually with no consideration to those who will use the products. The aim is profit.



This is the way science is being done and this is why there are scientists fighting for integrity in science.

Leland Stanford was the founder of the Stanford University. He considered Muybridge as one of his employees.