OK, Let’s Poke Some Fun!
Having lived in the USA for a dozen years, I am struck by the most common marketing technique used here, which is outrageous and shocking lies! Just make any wild claim you like, to get the sale. So long as you get rich doing it, everybody seems to approve (sort of)!
The second commonest trick is claiming your competition is filthy, degraded, doesn’t work and is a fraud. Both are often used together, of course.
So, no surprise when the pharmaceutical industry resorts to both these sleazy, dishonest tactics.
What am I talking about?
A meeting of the North American Menopause Society (NAMS) held recently on my home turf (Las Vegas), in which industry crooks have become so alarmed at the sale of compounded women’s bioidentical hormones, they are clamoring for a regulatory ban! They want this women’s’ freedom of choice stopped and only their dangerous filth be allowed for sale.
NAMS officials and a panel of discussants spent an hour decrying the practice of prescribing “unsafe and unapproved” compounded hormones during an all-present meeting (plenary), supported by a grant from Pfizer, here at the 2015 Annual Meeting.
[first thing to note is Wyeth, a subsidiary of Pfizer, produces a hormone replacement therapy: premarin, which is made from horse piss (pregnant mare urine, get it?), and sold at vast profit. Plenty of conflict of interest, then!]
False Claim 1. Only FDA approved hormone replacement therapy is safe and effective.
False Claim 2. Compounded drugs lack an FDA finding of safety, efficacy, and manufacturing quality (identity, potency, purity and sterility).
In fact, according to one of the attendees, bioidentical is not even a scientific term and there’s no uniform definition in the medical dictionary. “The term bioidentical is an anachronism that should be removed from our lexicon,” he demands. “The FDA has said this is not an acceptable term.”
So, you dope, is “bioidentical” in the medical dictionary or not? You say it isn’t in… but it should be removed!
Shades of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four here; where words were defined for you and the “thought police” (that’s now become a lexicon term) would not allow you to use certain words because they were seditious.
By the way, this man also doesn’t seem to know what an anachronism is: It’s something out of time, like using leeches to cure a fever would be an anachronism. Of course I don’t need to point out to my educated readers that leeches were orthodox medicine once upon a time. Like the Big Pharma conspiracy hormone replacement therapy!
What got this bunch of turkeys upset was – the finding from a survey they conducted. It showed that 41% of hormone users reported choosing compounded products — often referred to as bioidenticals — over those approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“We have a large population of women really insisting that they want compounded hormone replacement therapy,” said Judith Hersh, an Ob/Gyn from Bedminster, New Jersey.
And, according to Ricki Pollycove, MD, from San Francisco. “After the 2009 appearance of Suzanne Somers on Oprah, the number of my patients who got into this was astounding.”
But medical science moves on… Even “good doctors are capitulating and signing these prescriptions,” said Julia Files, MD, from the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Ha! So they even slip in the innuendo that doctors who don’t share their cynicism and greed are not really good doctors! They “capitulated” meaning they switched sides. They are just offering the patients what makes them happy and not what makes the pharmacists happy!
Imagine: giving into the patients and giving them what they want. It’s unthinkable, before you know it, these rogue doctors will be talking about disgusting topics like patient care, service, harmony, and even… God forbid, natural …not profits!
The professionals don’t want medical freedom. They spent their time at this meeting, not discussing better patient care, but how to stop the rot and grab back their profit machine. “I’d like the panel’s opinion as to where we can intervene, beyond not just capitulating and writing the prescriptions,” said James Simon, MD, from Washington, DC, who is past-president of NAMS.
“It’s too late; the cat’s out of the bag,” said panelist Lauren Streicher, MD, from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “We can all sit here and talk and talk about it, but until the FDA comes out with regulations, I don’t think it’s going to make any difference.”
Ah, so now we are getting to it. We greedy, lazy, incompetent, sleaze balls want the FDA to step in, destroy those nasty freedom-of-choice people, and give us back our robbery system.
42% of women users who responded to the survey considered compounded bioidenticals much safer than FDA-approved HRT therapies (and even by 25% of FDA-approved hormone users, incidentally).
This is a “fantasy” that NAMS is trying hard to debunk, said Wulf Utian, PhD, professor emeritus at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who is outgoing executive director of NAMS.
Apparently, the proven sickness which follows the use of conventional HRT is either a fantasy or is not important. The fact that breast cancer incidence has dropped dramatically since women gave up such filth in favor of natural hormone products cuts no ice with this crowd. They want profits… at whatever cost to the patients.
A clinician in the audience reported that compounded estradiol cream costs her Medicare patients a fraction of FDA-approved equivalents.
“I fully sympathize,” said Dr. Utian. “I am shocked by the price increments in the brand products over the past 5 years. There is absolutely no excuse to the extent those prices have gone up.”
Good for profits, though, eh?
Of course they tried to turn the safety thing around and attack bioidenticals. To do so, they resorted to miserably unscientific tricks like opinion…
Of 92 women who experienced adverse effects related to compounded hormone therapy, four women reported uterine cancer. In contrast, there were no cases of uterine cancer among the 191 users of FDA-approved hormone therapy.
A “show of hands” from the audience suggested that at least 10 practitioners had seen similar cases of uterine cancer in their patients who were taking compounded hormones.
That means NOTHING. Without proper controls and/or age-matched and ethnically similar groupings, such figures are worthless. And you might ask: for how long? What if the FDA-approved users had been on their medication only a year and the bioidentical users for 20 years, average?
Its just anecdotes, which of course they attack us for. Can you imagine the furore and derision I’d fall into if I published figures showing that, according to “a show of hands”, alternative therapies are effective at curing most cancers?
And what if the FDA-approved users had no uterine cancers, but did experience a vastly increased incidence of breast cancer? They didn’t mention that, though most educated medical scientists are aware that’s actually what happens. According to the Women’s Health Initiative, the orthodox combination of estrogen and progestin caused a significantly increased incidence of breast cancer and death due to breast cancer.
The reason isn’t hard to grasp: progestin is a synthetic compound, not natural, and is dangerous. But it’s patented and “FDA approved” folks! Follow the money!
It goes without saying that several members of the board at the plenary session had financial ties with the HRT industry.
Anyway, I just wanted to introduce this political Big Pharma conspiracy, to show you some of the depth of fury and prejudice that holistic doctors have to face today. It’s sickening…
To freedom of choice!
References:
1. North American Menopause Society (NAMS) 2015 Annual Meeting: Plenary 11. Presented October 3, 2015.
2. NHLBI Women’s Health Initiative (WHI). (2010, September 21).
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