Hi

I've been reading a book called White Coat Black Hat, Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine by Carl Elliot. It's an expose of the history and inner workings of the pharmaceutical industry showing what has led to our current fiasco often called Big Pharma. What's covered gets into how drugs are marketed including ghost writing of journal articles and paid "thought leaders" which are doctors paid to infuse drug propaganda into lectures to other physicians.

Also in case you missed some of this even last time it aired a bunch of advanced alternative doctors including my fr iend Dr Keith Scott-Mumby shared very important natural healing info and it's happening again in the next few days:

  You can check it out right here

Regarding the book instead of sharing a detailed review here's some excerpts to show you some perspective... 

"What makes our contemporary neurobiological concepts different is the extent to which they have been promoted by pharmaceutical marketers. You are not shy; you have social anxiety disorder. You are not absentminded, dreamy or fidgety; you have ADHD. You are not moody; you are bipolar. Each diagnosis comes with a prescription. Your need for medication becomes part of your identity."

Medicine has been spun by well paid public relations companies which alter public opinion to make you want things that don't serve your best interest. I'd like to hope we are moving into an era of transparency when the general public wakes up to this reality. This should lead to a collapse of the pharma industry - especially with the great information that is being sharing with events like this one

Worse yet is how the stakes have changed in the pharma industry. The big change was direct to consumer advertising. 

"In 1997, the FDA agreed to drop its brief-summary requirement, a misleadingly titled rule that required advertisements to consumers to include detailed (and not at all brief) descriptions of the side effects of drugs. These descriptions were often so long and complex that they made television advertising impossible. Once the brief-summary requirement was rolled back, however, the gates were wide open for drug ads on TV."

Up until 1997 drugs were promoted only to doctors. Ads in medical journals were used along with a plethora of pharma funded PR including ghostwritten articles which doctors were paid to put their names on. 

"As Lilly discovered... however, DTC marketing also came with serious hazards. Exhibit number one was, yet again, Vioxx, the notorious pain drug that Merck was forced to withdraw from the market in 2004 (and which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was promoted with ghostwritten articles, phony medical journals, and intimidation of academic critics). Not only was Vioxx the top-selling drug for Merck at the time it was pulled from the market, generating $20 billion in sales, it was also one of the most heavily advertised drugs in America."

TV ads upped the ante making failed drugs cost consumers huge consequences such as the case with Vioxx which has resulted in an estimated 55,000 deaths from heart attacks and strokes - and it's hard to imagine this happening without direct to consumer marketing (DTC). Other stats that I've seen indicate a much higher number for the death toll from Vioxx!

"According to a 2003 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, each dollar spent on DTC advertising yielded an additional $4.20 in sales... By 2005, eight years after the FDA relaxed it's ban, drug marketers had seen the dividends of DTC ads pay off. Spending on DTC advertising had increased by 330 percent, to a total of $29.9 billion annually."

Now it's pretty easy to see why the fat cats are just getting fatter and fatter! But the times they are a changin' and I really feel events like this one are helping level the playing field.

They say their event is about cancer but seeing these great presentations is essential education for anyone! So get signed up for this right here that way when you have a few minutes over the weekend you can check it out.

Best of Health,

Joshua

BTW - we've just now soft launched our new store at Earthly.gifts and we have some specials for the holiday which I'll let you know about soon...