[CO-CURE] ACT: Voices of Unreason

[Guest guest]

From Gurli Bagnall <URSULA:

 

WHAT DOCTORS DON'T TELL YOU READERS' BROADCAST -

E-news broadcast. 260 -

25 May 2006

 

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News content

 

VOICES OF UNREASON: The NHS, alternative medicine and Prof Baum

MULTIVITAMINS ARE SAFE: So how soon can we ban them?

HERCEPTIN: From hope to hype, and don¹t pass proof

ANTIDEPRESSANTS: They make everyone suicidal

 

 

VOICES OF UNREASON: The NHS, alternative medicine and Prof Baum

 

The move by Professor Michael Baum and chums to get alternative medicine

banned on the National Health Service is an over-reaction so extreme that it

borders on paranoia. Prof Baum and 12 other signatories including Edzard Ernst,

Britain¹s first professor of complementary medicine¹ (family motto: " I have not

come to praise alternative medicine, I¹ve come to bury it " ) have written to

the UK¹s primary care trusts, urging them to stop offering alternative

medicine. Irony of ironies, the private letter was leaked¹ to The Times so that

it

could be publicised on the day that Prince Charles made a call at the World

Health Assembly for a more integrated approach to medical care that embraced

complementary medicine. On the face of it, Prof Baum¹s exhortations seem like

the

voice of reason itself. After all, why should public funds be wasted on

therapies that clearly don¹t work? According to Baum, ³unproven or disproved

treatments are being encouraged for general use in the NHS². This statement is

true,

as virtually no surgical procedure has ever been scientifically tested, and

most drugs have very limited value, as GlaxoSmithKline has admitted. But Baum

isn¹t talking about conventional medicine. He¹s referring to homeopathy, which

he describes as an implausible treatment for which over a dozen systematic

reviews have failed to produce convincing evidence of effectiveness¹. This is

untrue. In the past 24 years there have been 180 controlled, and 118

randomized,

trials into homeopathy, which were analysed by four separate meta-analyses.

In each case, the researchers concluded that the benefits of homeopathy went

far beyond that which could be explained purely by the placebo effect. Another

meta-analysis found that 65 of the 89 trials analysed had produced an effect

way beyond placebo. Worse, Baum and co have uncovered an overt promotion of

homeopathy in parts of the NHS, including the NHS Direct website¹. This will

come as a surprise to the NHS, whose website actually states: It is difficult to

assess how well many complementary therapies actually work, as there is

little clinical evidence available¹. In fact, the NHS repeats Baum¹s claim, and

it

certainly doesn¹t read to us as an overt promotion. The statement may also

come as a surprise to a medicated nation, 99 per cent of whom have never been

offered alternative medicine by their doctor or consultant. (Untypical day in

the oncology unit: " Hhmm, I was thinking of giving you aggressive chemotherapy

for your cancer that¹s now in its third stage, but actually there¹s a zesty

little homeopathic remedy called Rhus Tox that I¹ve taken a bit of a fancy to. " )

Baum and chums also need to keep a sense of proportion. Of the £70 billion

spent on the NHS every year, just £3m has been spent on researching

complementary therapies and, of that, £324,000 on alternative cancer care. Of

course, the

whole thing is a storm in a test tube. Prof Baum is not the most popular of

figures in the NHS, mainly for his continual attacks against the

breast-screening programme. The NHS has gone on record to state that Baum

³would do well

to check the relevance of the facts he quoted which are 25 years out of date. .

..this is yet another case of Prof Baum launching unnecessary attacks.² Now we

can add another one from the increasingly marginalized Baum and Ernst.

 

 

MULTIVITAMINS ARE SAFE: So how soon can we ban them?

 

Multivitamins are the safest things that anyone can take and are even safer

than drinking coffee, an expert panel has discovered. Its findings are

revealed at a time when American regulators are taking the lead from their

European

counterparts and are seeking to control the supply of vitamins in the States.

By comparison, the panel revealed that 784,000 Americans die each year from

drug reactions. They also discovered that 59 Americans died from aspirin use,

two died after drinking coffee, three died after using dishwasher detergent, and

one woman died after applying a makeup lotion. ³Over half of all Americans

take vitamins every day, and one cannot help but ask, where are the bodies?²

said Andrew Saul of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. Well, bodies there

are none, according to the panel, which comprised university faculty, medical

researchers and physicians. They based their findings on the annual statistics

of the American Association of Poison Control for 2003. One panel member, Dr

Michael Janson, commented: " In decades of people taking a wide variety of

dietary supplements, few adverse effects have been noted, and zero deaths as a

result of dietary supplements. There is far more risk to public health from

people stopping their vitamin supplements than from people taking them. " The

report

is unlikely to halt the impetus for vitamin control that¹s coming from the US

National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.

Regulators are concerned that vitamins, especially at higher doses, are

dangerous.

They point to the overuse of iron supplements, which, according to the expert

panel, accounted for two deaths. Trouble is, iron isn¹t a vitamin.

 

 

HERCEPTIN: From hope to hype, and don¹t pass proof

 

The groundswell for the licensing of the cancer " wonder drug " Herceptin

continues to build. Latest to fall in line are the European regulators, the

European Medicines Agency, which has approved the drug in a record 27 days, and

the

UK authorities are expected to follow suit within the next few weeks. The

supposed grassroots support for the drug has been encouraged, and funded, by the

manufacturer ( as E-news No. 248 revealed ) and already the pressure is growing

to use the drug inappropriately. Herceptin (trastuzumab) is designed to treat

late stage, or metastatic, breast cancer that is fuelled by a protein called

HER-2, which represents around 20 per cent of all breast cancer cases. Some

advocates are keen to test the drug on women at an earlier stage of the

disease, even though it will not be licensed for that use, nor have there been

any

safety checks for this group. The hype started with the announcement of the

findings of the Herceptin Adjuvant trial, which revealed that the drug could

reduce the risk of recurrence of breast cancer in 52 per cent of patients. Prof

Ian Smith, the lead investigator, commented: ³This is the biggest treatment

development in breast cancer, in terms of the magnitude of its effect, for at

least the last 25 years, perhaps as big as anything we¹ve seen.² So a legend was

born, and the manufacturer decided to help it along by encouraging grassroots

protests and calls for its adoption in the UK and Europe, even though the

manufacturer hadn¹t submitted any safety records. Everyone had ignored the fact

that the trial had been stopped prematurely, and the results had been skewed.

The drug wasn¹t saving lives, and it was no better than other cancer therapies

after one year. A re-analysis of the data found that the drug was helpful to

some extent in six out of 100 women. Prof Smith has since moderated his

position, and from being the most important drug in cancer treatment ever, it is

now one with only marginal benefit. This shift has gone unnoticed by patients,

the media, politicians and, of course, by our ever-watchful regulators who are

falling over themselves to approve a wonder dug that isn¹t.

 

 

ANTIDEPRESSANTS: They make everyone suicidal

 

Antidepressants such as Prozac don¹t just make adolescents suicidal; they

affect everyone the same way, new research has discovered. Adults who take one

of the family of antidepressants known as SSRIs

(selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) are five times more likely to

commit suicide than if they had taken another type of antidepressant. The one

piece

of good news, if you can call it that, was that the risk reduced

dramatically after the first month of treatment. This worrying discovery came to

light

only when researchers in Ontario reviewed every case of suicide by an adult

aged up to 66 years over an eight-year period. Men were more likely than women

to

commit suicide during the first month while taking an SSRI, and usually by

violent means. Researchers have ruled out the possibility that patients who were

anyway more likely to commit suicide happened to have been prescribed Prozac.

 

(Source: American Journal of Psychiatry, 2006; 163: 813-21).

 

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