Stop the corona hysteria and throw away the masks
Now we can no longer survive without looking like bank robbers when it comes to shopping. In a few years, we have gone from mask ban to mask in order to reduce the risk of becoming infected with coronavirus, but it probably does not work. Read article
Why donate to the Institute for Scientific Freedom?
Abhishek Anand, PhD in computer science from Cornell University, Ithaca, had made a donation to the Institute and allowed me to tell why he did that.
Many people donate their hard-earned money to charities with noble sounding names line the “Lupus Foundation” thinking that the money helps people with such diseases. Most of such organizations, however, are heavily controlled by pharma and are more about the interests (profits) of those drug companies than about reducing human suffering. Pouring money into such organizations may actually be hurting humanity. There is a serious rot at the foundations of “health and medical science”. There isn’t much hope until we fix that. There is one organization whose members have a history of fighting against this corruption even at the cost of deep personal sacrifices. They have been successful many times in exposing pharma’s scientific fraud and in improving the laws around transparency and thereby make the evidence used to approve drugs available. If somebody wishes to use their money towards improving the health of humanity, this is the organization they should donate to: www.scientificfreedom.dk.
Australian of the Year takes on Big Food, says our diet is ‘killing us’
The nation’s flawed dietary guidelines have much to answer for, with more than 5000 people losing their lives “unnecessarily” from Type 2 diabetes in the past three months. With evidence showing diet can improve underlying health conditions, in a time of rising COVID-19 infections it is more important than ever to revise the dietary guidelines, writes Dr Maryanne Demasi. See the article here.
Rushing a coronavirus vaccine might undermine proven vaccines
Rushing a coronavirus vaccine As we’ve seen in Australia already, compliance with childhood immunisation schedules has been linked to pre-school admission (No jab, no play) and to family assistance payments (No jab, no pay) … some are warning that linking vaccination to access to services will only invigorate the anti-vaccination movement …
Censorship in medical journals is harmful, also for patients
It has become increasingly difficult to publish articles in medical journals that are critical of drugs or the drug industry, or that expose fraud and other wrongdoing committed by doctors. It is also difficult to publish articles documenting that the status quo in a medical specialty is harmful for the patients even though such articles should be warmly welcomed. Read my article about this.
Remdesivir against coronavirus, hope or hype?
On 22 May 2020, preliminary data from a placebo-controlled randomised trial of remdesivir in 1063 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 with lower respiratory tract involvement was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). There was a lot of enthusiasm and governments in many countries immediately declared that they would make remdesivir available. I shall discuss here what the trial report showed and didn’t show or didn’t tell the readers about, and how it was inappropriately hyped by two co-authors on the trial report, Jens Lundgren and Thomas Benfield, professors of infectious diseases in Denmark who have constantly been in the TV news offering their guidance to the Danish population during the coronavirus epidemic. Read the article
The review on antidepressant withdrawal that Cochrane won’t publish
Peter Gøtzsche and Anders Sørensen on trying to get a review of methods for safe antidepressant withdrawal published in Cochrane: “They sent us on a mission that was impossible to accomplish” to “protect the psychiatric guild.”
About half of the patients on depression pills, or over 50 million people worldwide, will experience withdrawal symptoms when they try to come off them, and in half of these, the symptoms are severe. This dependency is a major reason why many people continue taking the pills for decades or even lifelong. A review of methods for safe withdrawal of depression pills would therefore be hugely important. We describe here what happened when we tried to get a protocol for a Cochrane review approved. The process took two years and we did not succeed. It seems to us that the Cochrane group sent us on a mission that was impossible to accomplish, raising their demands along the way to absurd levels with many irrelevant requirements in a face-saving operation aimed at protecting the psychiatric guild and its false beliefs. Read our article about the scandal here.
The mantra of evidence-based medicine stifles important psychiatric research
“We live in the era of evidenced-based practice. If an approach is not funded, then it will never acquire the kind of data that would allow it to be considered evidence-based. This creates a closed loop: only research that is hypothesized to be of value is funded; understudied approaches that might be of value are ignored because they are not considered evidenced-based.” The 4,500-word long interview in Psychiatric Times with psychiatrists Sandra Steingard and Scott Waterman is well worth reading. It provides a thoughtful analysis of important obstacles for meaningful psychiatric research and practice. Read the article here: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/qas/integrating-academic-inquiry-and-reformist-activism-psychiatry
Defamation and editorial misconduct in a Wiley journal
It is a serious offence to fabricate and publish defamatory lies about a colleague in a medical journal and even worse when the journal and the publisher cover this up. I discuss here my futile attempts to get the truth out and to rebut a mendacious essay published by Oxford professor Trisha Greenhalgh and three colleagues in a Wiley owned journal, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice.
More drug deaths: Merck and PTC Therapeutics want clinical study reports to be secret
Yet again, two US drug companies are trying to reintroduce secrecy. Merck and PTC Therapeutics have appealed an initial ruling that clinical study reports should not be considered confidential. On 11 September, Advocate General of the European Court of Justice, Gerard Hogan, found that disclosure of the documents would harm the companies’ commercial interests. The cases are now awaiting a final judgment from the European Court of Justice. It would be a serious setback for public health if the two US companies prevailed in court. The lack of access to the raw – unfiltered, uncoded and unselected – harms data in clinical trials is a major cause of the horrible situation we are in, documented by several independent studies with different methodologies, that our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer. Merck has previously demonstrated a callous disregard for human lives.