Where did we go wrong?

eilo1

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056207054

I woke up early this morning and stumbled across the above discussion on Gerson Therapy.

I was actually upset by some of the opinions expressed!:(

What happened to make people so angry and misguided about medicine??!?!

opinion guy

People are afraid of cancer.
Magical fantastical thinking gives people hope.
Simples.

eilo1

Im more concerned and upset by the posters comments! This notion that just eating fruit and veg will cure everything! WTF:eek:

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

it's the conspiracy theories forum...

eilo1

Your right it is, but we see the same stuff popping up in here about Homeopathy and other "alternative" therapies. Its so frustrating!

aquarian_fire

I know what you mean, but that's the way people regard science nowadays. They think just because they hear something on the news, watch a documentary, or read a website that they know the facts even without having an ounce of experience in science. It's the same reason that so many parents opted out of having their children vaccinated against MMR and Tuberculosis and are now paying the price, with TB and mumps outbreaks all over the place. People don't give science the respect it deserves, there's a reason people can spend their whole lives trying to learn even the tiniest bit about something new in their field. It's a shame that people can then come along out of nowhere and negate the years of work with no experience in that field, with a few big words on a tabloid.
This is pretty much the same thing, it's a documentary that is trying to say that scientists are wrong, they're hiding "the cure" from you to make more profit with the drugs that don't work, etc. and are playing on the fact that most people know someone who has had cancer or have had it themselves. Everyone is looking for a better way to treat cancer but this kind of press just makes it more difficult for those who are trying to work with what we have right now. Plenty of people would watch that documentary and believe what it says, at a cost to their treatment (some people might refuse chemo because they think that eating certain veg might cure them instead). The people that write/make these things should think about what consequences their actions might have on the lives of others, instead of thinking about the ratings.

</rant>

MASTER...of the bra

eilo1 wrote: »

What happened to make people so angry and misguided about medicine??!?!

I didn't follow the link in the first post.

This is the kind of thing that make people untrusting of medicine, Independent.co.uk There are loads of stories like this.

Scandal of the deadly diabetes drug subsidised by French state

By John Lichfield in Paris

Monday, 27 December 2010


AP
President Sarkozy once worked for the company that makes the drug, Mediator, suspected of killing 2,000 people

French politicians of both the right and left are facing severe embarrassment and legal recriminations with the forthcoming publication of an official report on what could become the worst health scandal in the country's history.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has promised "the most complete transparency" on how a drug which is now suspected to have killed up to 2,000 people was officially approved, and subsidised, for 33 years by the French health service.

Despite repeated warnings from scientists in France and abroad, the Mediator drug was prescribed to 5,000,000 French people, originally to fight diabetes and later as an appetite-suppressing, slimming pill. A report from the French health inspectorate, due in mid-January, will investigate why successive French health ministers, of the left and right, failed to heed advice that the drug – produced by the French pharmaceutical giant, Servier – was at best useless, and at worst highly dangerous.
Separate French press investigations have focused on an alleged campaign of intimidation and disinformation by the Servier company to keep the drug – and a lucrative predecessor, eventually banned in the US in 1997 – on the market.

Servier, the second largest French drugs company, founded 50 years ago by Jacques Servier, 88, a French doctor, is known for its cult of secrecy and its excellent relations with French politicians. President Sarkozy himself once worked for the company as a lawyer during his brief legal career, when he was a young man.

Mediator contains a substance called benfluorex, which has been alleged in a series of scientific investigations to attack the cardio-vascular system and, in particular, to damage the valves of the heart. Despite a series of warnings, the drug remained legal – and its use was even officially subsidised by the French health service – until late last year.
Approval was finally withdrawn after the publication of a study in April 2009 by a Breton lung specialist, Irène Frachon, which linked Mediator to scores of patients with otherwise unexplained heart valve problems. In November this year, the agency which runs the finances of the French health service calculated that the drug was responsible for at least 500 premature deaths. Another study, leaked to the newspaper Le Figaro, put the death toll at between 1,000 and 2,000.

The French Health Minister, Xavier Bertrand, has promised that the investigation will examine why a string of his predecessors failed to respond to warnings that Mediator was potentially dangerous. His predecessors include himself. In a previous stint in the job, in 2006, he decided to maintain the 65 per cent refund to patients who bought Mediator, despite an official report linking it to heart valve disease.
Other health ministers who have ignored previous reports criticising Mediator include, in 1999 and 1998, Martine Aubry, now leader of the main opposition party, the Parti Socialiste and Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médécins sans Frontières. Both say they have no recollection of the warnings.

In a series of investigative articles, the newspaper Libération accused the Servier company, which emplys 20,000 people, of using "techniques of intimidation" to try to keep a cousin of Mediator, called Isoméride, on the lucrative US market in the 1990s. Researchers who criticised the drug recalled receiving anonymous threats, incuding parcels containing miniature coffins, but no direct link with Servier was established. The drug was banned in the US in 1997.

Or the fact that doctors employed by the big drug companies are the very same people who sit on the board of the FDA and approve said drug companies new "breakthrough" medication.

Or the fact I can spend 5 minutes googling something before going into my GP and know more about an illness than him, they hate that, I found one that didn't take offence to it, I stuck with him.

SleepDoc

MASTER...of the bra wrote: »

I didn't follow the link in the first post.

This is the kind of thing that make people untrusting of medicine, Independent.co.uk There are loads of stories like this.
Or the fact that doctors employed by the big drug companies are the very same people who sit on the board of the FDA and approve said drug companies new "breakthrough" medication.

Or the fact I can spend 5 minutes googling something before going into my GP and know more about an illness than him, they hate that, I found one that didn't take offence to it, I stuck with him.

Could you name one doctor that sits on the board of the FDA and is simultaneously employed by a big drug company?

The reason GP's hate people coming to them googled to the eyeballs about one partcular illness is because they usually don't have that illness and don't differentiate between reputable and disreputable websites.

opinion guy

SleepDoc wrote: »

Could you name one doctor that sits on the board of the FDA and is simultaneously employed by a big drug company?

The reason GP's hate people coming to them googled to the eyeballs about one partcular illness is because they usually don't have that illness and don't differentiate between reputable and disreputable websites.

To be fair there was a scandal in the last year or two about with regard to high ups in the FDA making rulings on mercury amalgams and having ties to dental companies (share deals etc).
http://www.wellsphere.com/life-as-a-doc-article/fda-8217-s-deputy-commissioner-joshua-sharfstein-covers-up-mercury-neurological-harm-nexus/1122385

sam34

SleepDoc wrote: »

The reason GP's hate people coming to them googled to the eyeballs about one partcular illness is because they usually don't have that illness and don't differentiate between reputable and disreputable websites.

indeed. am not a gp, am a psychiatrist, but had a patient recently come in telling me they had bipolar disorder and were currently psychotic.

turns out they did not have bipolar and were not psychotic. nor were they ever psychotic.

but they had self-diagnosed via some reaaaaaaaaaaaaally dodgy websites.