Placebo, Nocebo, Hexing

If you believe you can, or believe you can’t, you are right!
Henry Ford

Placebo
- wiktionary: A dummy medicine containing no active ingredients; an inert treatment.

Placebo effect: Also called the placebo response. A remarkable phenomenon in which a placebo -- a fake treatment, an inactive substance like sugar, distilled water, or saline solution -- can sometimes improve a patient's condition simply because the person has the expectation that it will be helpful.

Nocebo
- wiktionary: A substance which a patient experiences as harmful due to previous negative perception, but which is in fact pharmacologically (medicinally) inactive.

The nocebo effect, placebo’s evil twin [www.worldcrunch.com]

Hex
- wiktionary: To put a hex on (a spell, especially an evil spell).

Medical hexing, case in point: Was Angelina Jolie “Medically Hexed“? by Lissa Rankin, MD [lissarankin.com]

In this New York Times article, A-list actress Angelina Jolie bravely announced that she made the tough decision to undergo elective bilateral mastectomy after her doctors warned her that she has an 87% risk of developing breast cancer and a 50% risk of getting ovarian cancer because her mother died of breast cancer and she carries the BRCA1 gene. While I fully support Angelina’s right to write The Prescription for herself, and while I admire her courage to go public with what some might hide, as an OB/GYN physician with a passion for mind-body medicine, this breaking news concerns me for a variety of reasons.

The Nocebo Effect

In Chapter 2 of Mind Over Medicine, I share the scientific data about “the nocebo effect,” the opposite of the placebo effect, when we think something will harm our health – and it does. In one case study, a man was misdiagnosed with cancer and told he would only live 3 months. He died exactly 3 months later and was found to have no cancer on autopsy.
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Beware The Modern Medical Hex William Sears MD [drsearswellnessresearchfoundation.org]

Doctors Often Hex Their Patients
Health Alert #229

The next time you go to your doctor complaining of an ache or pain, pay close attention to what happens during your visit.

Be wary if your doctor pulls out a prescription pad right off the bat. Taking drugs doesn’t just keep you from finding a cure – it can make you even sicker since many pharmaceutical drugs put a strain on your body because they are toxic to your system. Blindly accepting prescription drugs indicates that you believe that your body can’t heal itself without powerful prescription drugs.

Today I’ll show you how to break the “prescription drug” curse that’s afflicting millions of Americans every day and protect yourself from bodily harm.

Modern Day Hex – Are You A Victim?

Amazing as it sounds, modern day hexing exists. It all starts when you quietly accept prescriptions without considering alternatives. Or when a well-meaning doctor tells you something like, “You’ll never get that under control with just diet and exercise alone. I’ll need to prescribe something for you.”



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 05/28/2016 08:56PM by Moerk.

This is just one of the many reasons why I implicitly trust my Functional Medicine MD who is a Board Certified Family Medicine practitioner. She initially studied to be a nutritionist and became so immersed in the potentials of holistic healing, went on to become a physician. After that she became certified with the Institute of Functional Medicine and continues with their ongoing courses. She also became certified to offer Thermography and has that equipment. And for the past several years, she has been studying and practicing energy medicine as well.

She is reluctant to use the Rx pad. My use of Armour thyroid Rx is now void because of my age and the risk of that contributing to AF...so we use natural glandulars.

With the cost of Rx drugs these days, I'm relieved to have to rely only on the half dose of Eliquis...as that pricing has increased tremendously since I began in May of 2014. Hopefully, soon I can be done with that as well.

As I commented in my response to Toni's post, I've endured a huge amount of damage from well-meaning physicians and I'm very cautious about treatment options and Rx drugs.

Jackie

Medical hexing: By direct-to-consumer advertising Merck killed 60,000 people


By Dr. Mercola
May 14, 2012 [articles.mercola.com]

What would you say if you knew someone had killed 60,000 people? Would you call it a felony of the worst kind, times 60,000? If you totaled up the value of all those lives in criminal court, what would you say they're worth?

Billions? Trillions?

Or—how about a measly $321 million in exchange for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor? When you consider that this involves the second-largest drug maker in the U.S.—Merck—and its deadly drug Vioxx, then you'll probably agree that a misdemeanor and a $321 million fine amounts to nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

Business analysts were estimating a $25 billion judgment when the drug was taken off the market, but even when combined with the $4.85 billion in payouts to patients who suffered heart attacks and strokesi, the final bill is nowhere close to original estimates of the damage.

Yet that's the plea agreement Merck recently made with a federal court in Boston on April 19th, after being charged with illegal promotion of Vioxx for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, before it was approved for that use.

The sad tale brings up memories of what I tried to warn readers about in 1999, when I showed that people taking this drug were at a massively increased risk of dying from heart disease and stroke. It's tragic that Vioxx was removed only AFTER 60,000 people died.

It's even more tragic that a court would consider Merck's illegal promotion of the drug a misdemeanor rather than a felony, since this tactic clearly exposed far more people to the dangerous drug than it would have otherwise. And, adding insult to injury, instead of the billions that Merck anticipated paying out, it got away with such a paltry sum.

Hired Writers Responsible for Some of Merck's Vioxx Studies?

Particularly galling is the fact that these deaths could have been so easily avoided, were it not for the deceptive maneuvering of parties who stood to profit handsomely from the success of the drug.

Ghostwriting has become an increasingly troublesome problem in the medical science community, and the Vioxx debacle is a perfect example of why ghostwriting medical research is a devious practice that needs to be rooted out.

Merck has previously acknowledged that it has been known to hire professional writers to develop research-related documents that eventually get published under the name of reputable leaders in the medical community. Critics rightfully doubt the validity of such research, and question the actual involvement of the scientists listed as authors of these ghostwritten papers.

Back in 2008, Dr. Joseph S. Ross of New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine came across ghostwritten research studies for Vioxx while reviewing documents related to lawsuits filed against Merck.

According to an April 16, 2008 article on MedHeadlines:

"In about 96 journal publications, Ross and his colleagues discovered internal Merck documents and e-mail messages pertaining to clinical study reports and review articles, some of which were developed by the company's marketing department, not its scientific department. In others, there is little evidence that the authors recruited for the report made substantial contribution to the research itself. ... Some of the authors listed in the Merck study reports of concern... question the true nature of ghostwriting. One neurologist originally listed as "External author?" and then listed as Dr. Leon J. Thal, of the University of California, San Diego in the final draft, died a year ago in an airplane crash."

An editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that year by Drs. Psaty and Kronmal also questioned whether Merck might have deliberately manipulated dozens of academic documents published in the medical literature, in order to promote Vioxx under false pretenses.

Blockbuster Drugs Tend to Be More Unnecessary than Others

Vioxx was a so-called blockbuster drug—a designation given to extremely popular drugs that generate a minimum of $1 billion in annual sales. Vioxx was marketed in more than 80 countries, and pulled in $2.5 billion in worldwide sales in 2003 alone (the year before it was pulled from the market due to its heart risks). So despite paying out fines in various lawsuits over the drug, Merck certainly made enough from it to cover all such expenses and still make obscene profits while patients were dying in droves.

An important strategy for creating a true blockbuster drug—at least in the United States—is the use of direct to consumer advertising.

A little over 20 years ago direct-to-consumer advertising for drugs was not allowed in the US. Drug advertising is still illegal in most countries around the world, except for the US. If Big Pharma wanted to sell a product, they had to do it through the person prescribing it—your doctor. If a physician didn't have time to listen to sales reps or attend conferences where new drugs were pushed, well then, sometimes they just didn't get pushed on you.

But ever since drug advertising became legal in the U.S., Big Pharma has been making big bucks selling you pills that not only are expensive, but intended to keep you hooked on them for life. As with most advertised consumer products, drugs with blockbuster potential are not necessarily important life-saving drugs. No, rather than curing actual disease, these drugs tend to be focused on the treatment of symptoms—symptoms that many people tend to experience and which may or may not be caused by a particular disease...

Oftentimes, symptom complexes will be given official-sounding designations, to make it appear more like an actual disease. Either way, since these types of drugs cannot cure anything, they must be taken indefinitely—until you die or cannot afford them anymore. According to Melody Petersen, author of Our Daily Meds:

"Most blockbusters are pills for conditions such as anxiety, high cholesterol or constipation that must be taken daily, often for months or years. They are designed for rich Americans who can afford to buy them."

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/01/2016 02:58PM by Moerk.