LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

Drug Research

HONESTY NOT THE BEST POLICY IN DRUG COMPANIES

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I would hope that even the most naive of us do not think that pharmaceutical companies have the patient’s best interest in mind.  Drug companies are large companies with the goal of making money for its principles and shareholders.  Any benefit to the patient is usually secondary.  History has presented us with many examples of how large businesses have concealed the truth of the dangers of their drugs.

Troglizitone and liver failure.  Vioxx and heart attacks.  Hormone replacement having no benefit.  Cigarette smoking being good for us.  Baychol and fatal rhabdomyalysis.  I’m sure there are many more, but these are the quick ones off the top of my head.

When it comes to diabetic drugs, almost every drug out there is more likely to kill you before you die of diabetic complications.  Sulfonylureas destroy the beta cells of the pancreas that produce insulin.  TZDs like Actos lead to weight gain.  The new classes of drugs that affect GLP-1 signalling may increase the risk of thyroid cancer and lord knows what else.

Interestingly, Actos and Avandia, used for diabetes, greatly increases the risk of a patient getting congestive heart failure.  Considering that 70% of diabetic die of cardiovascular complications, one could say this is a slight problem…

The problem with all the drugs on the market today is that we just don’t know.  We don’t know what the true long term effects are.  We don’t know what the true dangers of the drug are.  Everyone who takes a new drug for the first 20 or 30 years are participating in a very large, non-randomized clinical trial.  Many times it is not until decades later that someone realizes that drug A increased the risk of condition C; the relationship might never have been noticed until someone paid attention and then asked the question.  10 years ago, how many people who had heart attacks were wondering whether their anti-inflammatory drug caused it?

This particular note in British Medical Journal relates to the manufacturer of Actos suppressing information on the drugs’ increased risk of both congestive heart failure and bladder cancer.  While this is only a brief report of a lawsuit filed by a disgruntled employee, past examples makes one believe the lawsuit has merit.

HIDING THE EVIDENCE OF ADVERSE DRUG EFFECTS – (07-09-07)

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Dangerous Deception — Hiding the Evidence of Adverse Drug Effects

For many years, mainstream medicine has hidden behind the validity of their approach using pharmaceuticals that were based on clinical trials. The facade has come crashing down in so many ways–funding biases, canceling negative trials, not publishing negative trials, data manipulation… The list has become so extensive as to question every single trial. Is there really ANY validity to intervention trials? I personally lean towards basic physiology trials.

No one has financial interests in these types of studies and bias is not as likely. Funding usually comes from government or universities w/ no goal for a positive or negative outcome. This is a very interesting article outlining the deception that occurred with the study and approval of Bayer’s drug aprotinin and how they hid negative effects from the FDA when they requested approval.

Read entire article here

 

WHY DO WE STILL USE STATIN CLASS OF DRUGS? – (02-11-08)

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DHA supplementation improves fasting and postprandial lipid profiles in hypertriglyceridemic men

It never ceases to amaze me the bias in medicine today against Mother Nature. We see clinical trials with statin drugs that lower levels of triglycerides maybe 20% and the medical community bows down before the might of the HMG CoA reductase inhibitors. Well, here we see good ‘ole DHA drastically lowering both triglycerides (24%) and lowered large VLDL (the worst of the worst for lipids) and incredible 92%. So why on Earth do we still use the statin class of drugs?

Incidentally, this study found that all the changes occurred up to 45 days and not beyond.

Read entire article here

ADVERSE EFFECTS OF INHALED CORTICOSTEROIDS IN FUNDED AND NONFUNDED STUDIES – (03-17-08)

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Adverse Effects of Inhaled Corticosteroids in Funded and Nonfunded Studies

In this study, authors looked at the results and how they were portrayed when the studies on asthma medications were funded by a pharmaceutical company. The funded studies were less likely to find that a side effect was statistically significant, and even more importantly, the authors of the funded studies, when adverse effects were significant, were 3.68 times as likely to describe the drug as “safe” in the conclusions.

The problem is that a busy clinician reading just the abstract without a good idea of what odds ratios or relative risks are may be misled into think the drug is “safe.” Of course, we are assuming that most clinicians actually READ medical literature… The bottom line is that, over the past few years, we have seen that the data supporting medication is flawed in every step of the process, from design to data crunching right down to the wording to describe the data.

Read entire article here

SELECTIVE PUBLICATION OF ANTIDEPRESSANT TRIALS – (08-25-08)

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Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials

There are many who view chiropractic as being unscientific and think there is no evidence to support its use. This attitude permeates much of alternative medicine. Closer to reality, there is research to support alternative medicine, and massive volumes to support functional medicine. Rarely, however, is money to be made on the basis of a published article or two.

This is not true for pharmaceutical research. Quite the opposite. It has gotten to the point that the bias inherent in drug research is so massive and widespread that one has to step back and look and wonder if ANY is truly valid. I can tell you from my standpoint, as someone who reads a lot of medical literature, the evidence supporting MOST of what mainstream medicine does is shaky at best, downright dangerous at worse.

In this particular review, it was found that when the negative studies were thrown into the mix with all the other studies, there is NO evidence to support the use of antidepressants in normal clinical use. It’s not that there are isolated cases of positive response–there are. But for the number of patients on antidepressants given the very weak evidence of benefit (and a long litany of nasty side effects) it is inexcusable. Exercise 3 days a week shows improvements in mood dwarfing medication’s effects. But few stand to make billions on treadmills alone.

Read entire article here

MECHANISM OF ACTION OF NIACIN – (11-24-08)

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Mechanism of Action of Niacin

While I have been aware of niacin’s beneficial aspects on lipids for quite some time, I personally have not recommended niacin to patients, mainly because I’ve viewed it from a pharmaceutical perspective, mistakenly believing that it will lower lipid levels at a superficial level while leaving underlying physiological abnormalities untouched. Well…looks like we can all be wrong sometimes.

This article suggests that niacin actually has cellular effects that shift serum lipids from to a less atherogenic profile (i.e. from a low density fatty molecule to a more dense protein molecule). So, while lifestyle changes still need to be implemented, niacin may well prove to be a powerful ally in getting lipid levels under control and protecting our vasculature in the process.

Read entire article here

INCREASED EXPOSURE TO STATINS IN PATIENTS DEVELOPING CHRONIC MUSCLE DISEASES – (11-24-08)

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Increased exposure to statins in patients developing chronic muscle diseases: a 2-year retrospective study

While we’re on the topic of well accepted by the public but poorly represented in the literature we need to bring up the statin class of drugs. Despite the fact that every (I’m generalizing here…) primary care doctor in this country feels that “prevention” of heart disease means using a statin drug, the research on its efficacy for primary prevention of CVD is almost nil. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the research on the side effects slowly continues to mount.

This study looks at patients who have been diagnosed with chronic muscle disease (polymyositis, dermatomyositis, etc..) and found that these patients had a much, much higher chance of having had exposure to statins (2.73 times the risk), and this risk went up even higher when these patients also had used proton pump inhibitors for control of stomach acid production.

Read entire article here

USE OF THIAZOLIDINEDIONES AND FRACTURE RISK – (11-24-08)

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Use of Thiazolidinediones and Fracture Risk

Continuing on the rant against medication usage in diabetes management, the TZD class of drugs has been shown to increase weight and actually increase the risk of cardiovascular events (70% of diabetics die of CVD-related causes) in patients using them. To top off this wonderful list of side effects, now we’re seeing an over double the risk of fractures in patients who have used these drugs over 12 months. Again and again, we see that lifestyle changes really, truly are the ONLY answer.

Read entire article here