Dana Ullman Posted: April 30, 2010 07:13 AM [Great article! Go to website to read it all!- bfg]
...The idea of scientific medicine is a great one, but is modern medicine truly, or even adequately, "scientific"?
... just because a drug treatment seems to eliminate a specific symptom does not necessarily mean that it is "effective." In fact, getting rid of a specific symptom can be the bad news. Aspirin may lower your fever, but physiologists recognize that fever is an important defense of the body in its efforts to fight infection. Sleep-inducing drugs may lead you to fall asleep, but they do not lead to refreshed sleep, and these drugs ultimately tend to aggravate the cycle of insomnia and fatigue, while conveniently (for the drug companies) tend to create addiction...
...a scientist can set up a study that shows the guise of efficacy. In other words, a drug may be effective for a very limited period of time and then cause various serious symptoms. For example, a very popular anti-anxiety drug called Xanax was shown to reduce panic attacks during a two-month experiment, but when individuals reduce or stop the medication, panic attacks can increase 300-400 percent (Consumer Reports, 1993). Would many patients take this drug if they knew this fact, and based on what standard can anyone honestly say that this drug is "effective"?
To get FDA approval to market a drug, most of the studies for psychiatric conditions last only six weeks (Angell, 2004, 112). In view of the fact that most people take anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medicines for years, can these short studies be scientifically valid? What is so little known and so sobering is that research to date has found that placebos are 80 percent as effective and have fewer side effects and a lot cheaper (Angell, 2004, 113).
Marcia Angell, MD, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of the powerful book The Truth about Drug Companies, said it plainly and directly: "Trials can be rigged in a dozen ways, and it happens all the time" (Angell, 2004, 95).
She further expresses real concern about research reliability: It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. As reprehensible as many industry practices are, I believe the behavior of much of the medical profession is even more culpable.
Angell gives many examples of why reading research studies is not reliable:
A review of 74 clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that 37 of 38 positive studies were published. But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome (Turner, 2008).
Conventional drugs used today are so new that there is very little long-term research on them. There are good reasons why a vast majority of modern drugs used just a couple of decades ago are no longer prescribed: they don't work as well as previously assumed, and/or they cause more harm than good....
The primary reason that modern medicine fails so many times is that it tends to assume that symptoms are just something "wrong" with the person that then needs to be managed, controlled, or suppressed. Distinct from this medical viewpoint is an ancient and futuristic model that recognizes that symptoms represent DEFENSES of the body that should be nurtured and augmented as a way to treat disease processes....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-ullman/medical-research-lies-dam_b_555525.html