Prescription heart drugs kill dozens of hospital patients in Pakistan

Tainted pharmaceuticals from unnamed manufacturers are confirmed to have killed dozens of people, and likely many more, in Pakistan. Reuters reports that thousands of doses of contaminated heart drugs freely distributed by the Punjab Institute of Cardiology, a government…

Pilot faked his way as a prestigious doctor for 20 years, duping AMA and receiving millions in medical grants

(NaturalNews) Dr William Hamman is a prestigious cardiologist with high-ranking posts at universities and hospitals. He led teamwork training sessions at the American College of Cardiology and was recognized and supported by the American Medical Association. He received millions of dollars in medical grants and even trained other doctors by teaching Continuing Medical Education (CME) classes. He was also credited as the author of several articles in science journals. There was only one problem with all this. Dr William Hamman wasn’t a doctor at all. What the AMA, the hospitals and the CME system didn’t realize for twenty years is that his credentials were faked. How to quack like a doctor For two decades, William Hamman had been conning his way into the medical system, and he fooled all the health authorities. Apparently, if you walk like a doctor and quack like a doctor, people don’t ask very many questions. But here’s the really fascinating part of this story. The American Medical Association had scheduled a seminar featuring “Doctor” William Hamman as an instructor. When the AMA found out they had been duped, did they cancel the training? Nope. They simply altered the course materials, removing the word “Doctor” in front of his name and replacing it with the word “Captain!” William Hamman is a pilot, you see, and the AMA apparently didn’t care whether a doctor or a pilot was giving a medical seminar as long as they could slap some kind of authoritative-sounding word in front of his name. This should raise huge red flags about the credibility of the AMA itself. CME system hands out fraudulent education credits In these revelations, the entire Continuing Medical Education (CME) system also sees its own credibility dissolve right before us. This is the system that trains doctors, nurses and other medical professionals to keep them “up to date” with the latest in medical technology. We already know that many CME courses are little more than Big Pharma propaganda. Some are even paid for by the drug companies who often hold them in exotic locations such as Honolulu where doctors show up for a few minutes a day, sign the attendance sheets, and then head out to the beaches to catch up on some leisure time (I observed this first-hand in Hawaii a few years back). Now we know that the CME system was granting CME credits to students who were being taught by a con artist . So is the CME system going to revoke those credits, given that they now know those classes weren’t being taught by a credentialed cardiologist? Of course not. All those CME credits still stand. Which means the whole system of CME credits is now highly suspect. If you’re seeing a doctor who has been trained in something through the CME system, you have no way to know whether that doctor was trained by an actual doctor or a clever con artist posing as a doctor . CME, in other words, now stands for “Con artist Medical Education.” Much of conventional medicine is a con to begin with None of this surprises me in the least. Most of conventional medicine is a grand con to begin with. The idea that you can “treat” cancer by poisoning patients with chemotherapy is a con. Seasonal flu vaccines are a complete con to anyone who cares to look hard at the evidence (http://www.naturalnews.com/029641_vaccines_junk_science.html). Heart bypass surgeries are a con, diabetes drugs are a con, and conventional medicine still remains utterly clueless at how to prevent degenerative disease even after decades of promising cures. The life expectancy in America is falling (http://www.naturalnews.com/030687_life_expectancy_disease.html) even as medical costs are skyrocketing. The real health issues facing Americans — such as widespread vitamin D deficiencies — remain utterly ignored by virtually all conventional doctors, drug companies and researchers. If William Hamman is a little con, then conventional medicine is a really big con. The real con, actually, is that when young intelligent people survive eight years of Big Pharma indoctrination through medical schools and residency trainings, they are handed the title “Doctor.” They should be handed the title, “Pharmaceutical Rep” because that’s truly what they are. Having received virtually no training in nutrition, they are granted power of our health even when they have no knowledge of health. They graduate as experts in disease and pharmacology — which is all great if you want to stay diseased and drugged. But they know virtually nothing about disease prevention, the healing power of the medicine found in foods, or the true healing potential of acupuncture, chiropractic care, herbal medicine or energy medicine. The simple truth of the matter is that most doctors are nutritionally illiterate regardless of how many CME credits they’ve accumulated. CME classes don’t teach much about nutrition. They’re primarily drug seminars organized or influenced by the drug companies. I suppose if we could all just drug our way to perfect health, then we really would have the best medical system in the world. Doctors would be useful for preventing disease, and medical journals might be credible texts rather than laughable pharmaceutical advertising rags. But that’s not the case. What we see today in the world of conventional medicine is one elaborate, high-profit fraud that continues to kill hundreds of thousands of people a year while claiming to be “treating” them. No wonder all the really healthy people I encounter tell me the same thing: “I never see conventional doctors and wouldn’t even dream of it.” Because, let’s face it: Conventional medicine is the sick-care system for the nutritionally illiterate . It is health care for people who don’t care about their health. It’s a system of surrender for those who have given up trying to be healthy and now want somebody else to manage their disease while they slowly die at the hands of their clueless doctors. The really healthy people avoid hospitals; avoid doctors; avoid pharmaceuticals and steer clear of mammograms, chemotherapy and unnecessary surgeries. Because in the end, the only way to avoid being conned by conventional medicine is to avoid USING conventional medicine. One final note: I’ve always said that conventional medicine does have a place in the realm of emergency medicine . Western doctors are phenomenal at saving lives from gunshot wounds, car accidents and so on. They work miracles in those emergency rooms. Anesthesiologists are miracle workers, too, and even antibiotics have a place in medicine (even though they are widely abused in actual practice). But in treating degenerative disease, western medicine is an absolute failure. And more than nine-tenths of all the money spent on sick care today is spent in the useless treatment of degenerative disease — a realm in which western doctors remain utterly clueless about how to truly help people. You want to really prevent or reverse disease? Check out Gerson Therapy (www.Gerson.com) or visit Dr Gabriel Cousens at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center (www.TreeofLife.nu). These centers represent the future of medicine — a future based on healing foods, not dangerous drugs. Sources for this story include: Associated Press: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jBxaiqsVbaXa3ZMAWcqGw9E-d0MA?docId=9f5bcfa0af644d19b98ea0ebc5aa0431

Statin drugs are over prescribed in healthy people who have no evidence of heart disease

(NaturalNews) Mainstream medicine has been calling for more and more people to be placed on “miracle” drugs known as statins that lower cholesterol. There have even been suggestions that statins should be sold over the counter or given out free when people buy junk, fat-loaded fast food (http://www.naturalnews.com/029467_statin_drugs_fast_food.html). After all, the rationale goes, by lowering cholesterol, arteries won’t clog and heart attacks and strokes can be prevented. However, there have long been two obvious flaws in that theory. For starters, high cholesterol along with most other cardiovascular risk factors can be lowered in most people naturally by lifestyle changes such as exercise, a healthy diet and keeping weight under control. Secondly, statins come with a host of dangerous and even deadly side effects, including liver damage, impaired brain function (http://www.naturalnews.com/025718_brain_health_statins.html), sometimes irreversible muscle damage and eye disorders (http://www.naturalnews.com/025718_brain_health_statins.html). And now there’s a third reason not to jump on Big Pharma’s money making band wagon known as statin therapy. Johns Hopkins research just presented November 16th at the American Heart Association’s (AHA) annual Scientific Sessions in Chicago, gives clear evidence these drugs are over-prescribed. In fact, pushing these drugs as “preventive therapy” for future heart attacks in healthy men and women who don’t already have artery clogging calcium deposits is just plain bad medicine. The new findings are from the Johns Hopkins-led Multi-Ethnic Study on Atherosclerosis, or MESA. The research was designed to be the first to pinpoint exactly who among the more than 6 million healthy American adults with normal blood cholesterol levels should be candidates for so-called preventive statin therapy. According to results of the JUPITER trial (short for the Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention: An Interventional Tool Evaluating Rosuvastin) published in 2008, the statin drug rosuvastatin (sold and widely advertised on television as Crestor), was effective in preventing heart attack and stroke in some individuals, all of whom had high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP). But when the Johns Hopkins team checked these findings with a new investigation — they came up with a dramatically different conclusion. They selected MESA study participants, who met the same criteria used for the JUPITER study, from a pool of 7,000 ethnically diverse adults, including African Americans, Chinese Americans, Caucasians and Hispanics. All the 950 volunteers were monitored at Johns Hopkins and five other medical centers in North America. The results showed that only the people with measurable buildup of artery-hardening calcium in their blood vessels had a high rate of heart emergencies over the course of the six year study. But almost half of the study participants had no detectable levels of calcium in their blood vessels and those people had a very low rate (about 5 percent ) of heart-disease related events — meaning that taking daily statin drugs as a “preventive measure” wouldn’t have offered any coronary protection. But taking the drugs would have exposed them to potentially serious side effects. So, despite all the cholesterol measuring near-hysteria of past decades, the Johns Hopkins researchers are now calling for an emphasis on measuring coronary artery calcium deposits to find out who is really at risk of suffering a heart attack “It certainly is not the case that all adults should be taking it (statin therapy) to prevent heart attack and stroke, because half are at negligible risk of a sudden coronary event in the next five to 10 years,” lead investigator Michael Blaha, M.D., a cardiology fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and its Heart and Vascular Institute, said in a media statement. And remember all the media hype claiming that high levels of CRP in the blood are predictive of a future heart attack? Participants in the Johns Hopkins study were found to have varying blood levels of the inflammatory byproduct, which has been called a predictor of all kinds of coronary disease. But it turns out, according to the new research, that’s not true either. In fact, an elevated CRP score at or above 2 milligrams per liter offered no predictive value after established risk factors were taken into account, including age, gender, ethnicity, hypertension, blood cholesterol levels, obesity, diabetes, smoking and a family history of heart disease. Bottom line: the new statistical comparison of results showed that few if any heart attacks or strokes would have been prevented within five years had anyone in the study taken statin drugs, unless there was already some calcium buildup in their blood vessels. But even in people with moderate calcium buildup, only one heart attack would have been averted in every 94 people treated, and one stroke in every 54. “Statin therapy should not be approached like diet and exercise as a broadly based solution for preventing coronary heart disease. These are lifelong medications with potential, although rare side effects, and physicians should only consider their use for those patients at greatest risk, especially those with high coronary calcium scores,” study co-investigator and cardiologist Roger Blumenthal, M.D., a professor and director of the Ciccarone Preventive Cardiology Center at Johns Hopkins, emphasized in a press statement. He also pointed out that as many as 5 percent of people on statins develop serious side effects, such as muscle pain. In addition, one in 255 will develop diabetes because of the drugs. Be sure to watch the Health Ranger’s new comedy animation on statin drugs at: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=2D691570EF29BA0517C767D6ED6667C0 For additional information: http://www.naturalnews.com/025718_brain_health_statins.html http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/heart_vascular_institute/clinical_trials/preventive/mesa.html http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2004/11_09c_04.html

Pharmaburger documentary launches as episode one of Food Investigations series

(NaturalNews) What do you get when you combine fast food with Big Pharma? Pharmaburger! That’s the name of episode one of the new “Food Investigations” mini-documentary series created by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, editor of NaturalNews.com. Food Investigations (www.FoodInvestigations.com) features short documentary videos (under 10 minutes each) exposing little-known facts about fast food and processed food products. The videos are free to watch at the website, and they’re also available at www.NaturalNews.TV where thousands of other holistic health videos can be viewed for free every day. The Pharmaburger mini-documentary takes issue with the doctor from Imperial College London whose study, published in the American Journal of Cardiology , led him to recommend that statin drugs be handed out like ketchup packets at fast food restaurants. This, he claims, would “counteract” the heart risk dangers of fast foods. Just pop a pill every time you chow down a junk food cheeseburger, in other words, and the health risks will be cancelled out. It’s a juvenile, short-sighted point of view about health and nutrition, of course, but the idea has a surprisingly large number of followers among practitioners of mainstream medicine (many of which are arguably illiterate when it comes to nutrition in the first place). Ultimately, the idea seeks to turn fast food restaurants into pharmacies, lining up gullible customers to be dosed with powerful prescription pharmaceuticals based on no diagnosis, no doctor visits, and absolutely no consideration of their current health condition or possible drug interactions. To call it “medicine” is an insult to the very definition of the word. The sad truth of the matter is that some members of the medication profession want to intoxicate everyone with dangerous chemical medications , and they are hoping to use fast food restaurants to achieve that goal. This Pharmaburger mini-documentary tells the rest of this story which will surprise most viewers. Watch “Pharmaburger” at www.FoodInvestigations.com or www.NaturalNews.TV (search for “Pharmaburger”).

Doctor urges fast food restaurants to hand out statin drugs like ketchup packets (opinion)

(NaturalNews) It sounds like an April Fool’s joke, but it isn’t: A doctor from Imperial College London whose study was published in the American Journal of Cardiology has proclaimed that people who eat burgers and milkshakes at fast food restaurants should be given free statin drugs (like ketchup packets) to counteract the cholesterol effects of eating burgers. “Fast food outlets could provide statin drugs free of charge,” says Dr. Darrel Francis, lead author of study, who goes on to complain that statin drugs shouldn’t be prescription drugs at all. People should be able to get them as easily as asking for a packet of ketchup: “It makes sense to make risk-reducing supplements available just as easily as the unhealthy condiments that are provided free of charge,” Francis says, calling statins a “supplement” instead of a drug. Yeah, as if it were a nutrient or something. What Francis doesn’t mention is the disastrous side effects of statin drugs: Extreme muscle pain and weakness, kidney failure, the loss of CoQ10 (a vital nutrient for heart health), liver damage, erectile dysfunction, constipation and much more. I know people who say they were almost killed by statin drugs but who thankfully recognized the symptoms and stopped taking these dangerous chemical medications before things got worse. But this doctor from Imperial College London apparently doesn’t believe such side effects are a big deal. Statin drugs are so safe, he says, that fast food restaurants should just hand them out like candy. Dangerous advice from a doctor The very premise of this argument is extremely dangerous: That you can go ahead and keep eating toxic fast food as long as you “protect” yourself by taking dangerous chemical medications. Gee, could you possibly get any worse health advice? It’s no wonder this advice is coming from a conventional M.D. The idea that you can block the harm from fast food by swallowing a patented chemical medication with your meal is so absurd as to be stupid. Really: It’s just a simplistic, low-I.Q. conclusion from a doctor who obviously knows nothing about nutrition. What’s he going to recommend next? Free chemo pills to counteract the cancer-causing effects of bacon and sausage? Here, kids, chow down on a little chemo before you head off to school. It’s good for ya! Maybe the industry will come up with gummy-shaped chemo bears for kids. (Don’t laugh. I’ve made similarly comical suggestions in the past that turned out to be true…) But here’s the best part of Dr. Francis’ absurd logic: He compares taking statin drugs to the safety of wearing a seat belt while driving! “When people engage in risky behaviors like driving or smoking, they’re encouraged to take measures that minimize their risk, like wearing a seatbelt or choosing cigarettes with filters. Taking a statin is a rational way of lowering some of the risks of eating a fatty meal,” he says. Sure it is — if you enjoy kidney disease, liver disease, muscle weakness, CoQ10 depletion and other side effects. If you’re a foolish consumer who thinks you can counteract the dangerous chemicals in fast food by swallowing another dangerous chemical to “counteract” it, then free statin drugs might sound downright brilliant. But in the real world, where the laws of biochemistry don’t cater to the absurd ideas of drug-pushing researchers, fast food is bad for your health… and so is taking chemical medications. If you combine them, you don’t neutralize your health risk — you increase your total health risk by expanding it into all the areas of statin drug side effects. So now, instead of just destroying your heart and pancreas by wolfing down fast food, you’re also threatening your liver and kidneys with a chemical drug. That a doctor would actually recommend giving out free statin drugs to fast food customers is yet more proof that conventional medical training is a total failure and that mainstream doctors continue to remain clueless about real answers to health. The real answer to health, in this case, is to stop eating fast food hamburgers and milkshakes . And stop taking dangerous chemical medications while you’re at it. If you really want a healthy heart, blend up a superfood smoothie for lunch, or eat some heart-healthy fresh fruits and vegetables. What’s next from medical Loonyville? Now, think about this story. If Imperial College London can actually issue a press release touting this quack research (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_12-8-2010-11-24-54), and if a high-level researcher like Dr Darrel Francis (http://www1.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/people/d.francis/) can genuinely conclude that free medications should be handed out to customers like ketchup packets, then what else might these people come up with? Happy Meals with free antidepressants , of course! Buy a Happy Meal and your kid gets some psychiatric drugs included with the toy. Munch away, kiddies! Or how about free diabetes drugs with every 12-pack of Coca-Cola products . Drink up all that liquid sugar, folks, and just be sure to swallow your diabetes pills that are included! Why not have free chemotherapy pills in every pack of hot dogs? That way, little kids can eat their hot dogs and then experience just enough nausea to vomit the processed meat back up. Problem solved! See, this whole idea that you can just throw more chemical medications at consumers and thereby “protect” them from food-induced diseases is pure medical madness. That someone from the world of conventional medicine would even suggest such a thing speaks poorly about the credibility of the medical industry at large. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to even mainstream consumers that following the health advice of conventional doctors is a very bad idea . Hey, why not just sell statin drug sandwiches where the drugs are baked right into the bread? Don’t laugh: It wasn’t too long ago that doctors in America suggested they drip statin drugs into the water supply because the drugs were so safe and effective that everyone needed them! Yeah, just like fluoride, if you can believe that. You know, I think the bottom line here is that too many medical researchers are taking their own drugs. Because one of the very first side effects from taking daily medications is a loss of cognitive function and impaired ability to reason. And when that goes, there’s no telling what kind of whoppers these people will come up with. Sources for this story: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_12-8-2010-11-24-54

Vitamin D prevents heart disease, too

(NaturalNews) An increase in blood levels of vitamin D can significantly reduce a person’s risk of heart disease, according to a study conducted by researchers from Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City and presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Atlanta. Researchers reviewed the health records of more than 9,000 people who had been diagnosed with vitamin D insufficiency and who had also undergone vitamin D testing at a later date. They found that approximately 50 percent of all patients had achieved healthy vitamin D levels of at least 30 nanograms per milliliter by the second test. Rates of heart disease were significantly lower in this group than among patients who were still deficient in the vitamin. Prior studies have shown a correlation between low levels of vitamin D and a higher risk of heart disease. Yet researchers have been unable to determine whether there is any direct connection between the two factors, since low vitamin D levels might also correlate with a number of other cardiovascular risk factors such as general poor health, poor diet or lack of exercise. The only way to firmly establish a connection would be to conduct an experiment where only half a group of vitamin D-deficient participants is supplemented while the rest receive a placebo. Because vitamin D deficiency has been proven to increase the risk of other diseases, such a study would not be ethical and cannot be conducted. “What we did was observational and not definitive, but we think it adds significantly to the story,” said lead author J. Brent Muhlestein. “It’s at least a reasonable piece of evidence to add to the hypothesis that low vitamin D is causative of cardiovascular risk and treatment can reduce cardiovascular disease risk.” The body synthesizes vitamin D naturally upon exposure to sunlight. Low levels of the vitamin have been linked to weakened bones and higher risks of infection, cancer and autoimmune diseases. Sources for this story include: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-sci-vitamind16-2010mar16,0,3491955.story?track=rss.

Chocolate lowers blood pressure and slashes risk of heart disease

(NaturalNews) As NaturalNews reported previously, Canadian scientists have found that consuming chocolate regularly significantly reduces the odds of having a stroke (http://www.naturalnews.com/028278_chocolate_strokes.html). Now other researchers have just published a study in the European Heart Journal providing even more evidence that chocolate — especially the dark variety — benefits the cardiovascular system. In fact, eating just one small square of chocolate a day can lower your blood pressure and reduce your risk of heart disease. Researchers at the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Nuthetal, Germany, reached this conclusion after following 19,357 people between the ages of 35 and 65 for at least ten years and studying the research participants’ chocolate consumption. The results? Research subjects who ate the most chocolate (on average, about 7.5 grams a day) had lower blood pressure. What’s more, the risk of chocolate lovers having a heart attack or stroke was dramatically lowered, too. “People who ate the most amount of chocolate were at a 39% lower risk than those with the lowest chocolate intakes,” Dr Brian Buijsse, the nutritional epidemiologist who led the research, said in a press statement. “To put it in terms of absolute risk, if people in the group eating the least amount of chocolate (of whom 219 per 10,000 had a heart attack or stroke) increased their chocolate intake by six grams a day, 85 fewer heart attacks and strokes per 10,000 people could be expected to occur over a period of about ten years.” So what is it about chocolate that has such as profound impact on cardiovascular health? At first glance, chocolate’s documented ability to lower blood pressure would appear to be the key. And, in fact, the scientists found lowered blood pressure due to chocolate consumption at the start of the study did explain for about 12% of the reduced risk of heart attacks and strokes. But they think something else is going on in the bodies of regular chocolate eaters, too, that accounts for the enormous drop in their heart attack risk. One possibility, the researchers noted, is that phytochemicals known as flavanols that are abundant in cocoa (the main ingredient in chocolate) somehow protect the cardiovascular system. Because dark chocolate contains more cocoa — and, therefore, more flavanols — that would explain why dark chocolate has more health benefits than other varieties of chocolate. “Flavanols appear to be the substances in cocoa that are responsible for improving the bioavailability of nitric oxide from the cells that line the inner wall of blood vessels — vascular endothelial cells,” Dr Buijsse explained. “Nitric oxide is a gas that, once released, causes the smooth muscle cells of the blood vessels to relax and widen; this may contribute to lower blood pressure. Nitric oxide also improves platelet function, making the blood less sticky, and makes the vascular endothelium less attractive for white blood cells to attach and stick around.” Does this mean it’s a good idea to grab a chocolate flavored candy bar and scarf it down every day? Not at all. Commercial candy is made with refined sugar, often contains artificial flavorings and other non-healthy ingredients, and is loaded with calories. Instead, consider adding small amounts of plain dark chocolate to your daily diet. “Basic science has demonstrated quite convincingly that dark chocolate particularly, with a cocoa content of at least 70%, reduces oxidative stress and improves vascular and platelet function. However, before you rush to add dark chocolate to your diet, be aware that 100g of dark chocolate contains roughly 500 calories. As such, you may want to subtract an equivalent amount of calories, by cutting back on other foods, to avoid weight gain,” noted Frank Ruschitzka, Professor of Cardiology and Director of Heart Failure/Transplantation at the University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, in a statement to the media. For more information: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20354055 http://www.naturalnews.com/chocolate.html