Absolute Life Chiropractic

Watch the video “When The Children Cry” by clicking on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjveFXLK8vA
It is possibly the most important video of this age.
 
Suicide, School Shootings, and Violent Crimes  
 
In October 2004, the FDA added a black box warning about an increased risk of suicide in children and adolescents after a review of data showed a doubling of the risk of suicide associated with the drugs. However, In December 2006, the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee held a public hearing to review the suicide data on adults and recommended that the black box warning to be extended to them as well.
 
Unfortunately, it has been discovered that doctors encourage people to ignore these warnings and, as would be expected, the manufacturer of these drugs deny the dangers altogether.
 
Recent, tragic events of the last few years have brought to light something that is as great a threat as suicide. It is homicide - in the form of school shootings and the killing of close family members and friends.
  
In September 2005, following confirmation that Red Lake Indian Reservation school shooter, Jeff Weise, was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac, the National Foundation of Women Legislators, together with American Indian tribal leaders, called for a Congressional investigation into the correlation between psychiatric drug use and school massacres. Congress has yet to investigate the role of psychiatric drugs relating to school shootings despite international drug regulators warning these drugs can cause mania, psychosis, hallucinations, suicide and homicidal ideation.
 
At least eight of the recent school shooters, like those at Columbine, were under the influence of such drugs. According to media reports, investigators working on the Virginia Tech school shootings found that Cho Seung-Hui was taking drugs for “depression.”
 
Part of the problem may be the disconnect with reality that these drugs sometimes reportedly cause the acts of violence. In another study of the links between antidepressants and violence, a 12-year-old boy who killed his grandparents while he was on a course of antidepressants said that the whole incident seemed like a dream, and he was unsure whether or not it had really happened.
 
The Physicians’ Desk Reference lists the following adverse reactions to antidepressants among a host of other physical and neuropsychiatric effects: manic reaction (mania), emotional liability (or instability), abnormal thinking, alcohol abuse, hallucinations, hostility, lack of emotion, paranoid reaction, amnesia, confusion, agitation, delirium, delusions, hysteria, psychosis, sleep disorders, abnormal dreams, and discontinuation (withdrawal) syndrome. Adverse reactions are especially likely when starting or discontinuing the drug, increasing or lowering the dose or when switching from one SSRI to another SSRI. Adverse reactions are often diagnosed as bipolar disorder when the symptoms could be entirely iatrogenic (treatment induced).  Withdrawal from any of these medications can also cause severe neuropsychiatric and physical symptoms.  
 
In addition to the adverse reactions listed in the Physicians’ Desk Reference, the FDA published a Public Health Advisory on March 22, 2004 which states (in part): “Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia (severe restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”
 
The most shocking part of the psychiatric medical model is that prominent psychiatrist, Robert Spitzer M.D., one of the doctors who wrote the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), admits that psychiatric diagnoses (depression, hyperactivity, ADHD, etc.) are not based on science! 
 
Anxiety, panic, learning disorders, ADHD, and depression are very real, painful conditions to the unfortunate children and adults suffering from them. However, these conditions, in most cases, are symptoms of underlying health problems brought on by specific causes and circumstance. The answer is not dangerous and unscientific diagnosis and drugs. There are real, safe solutions that lie outside of these deadly medications. Solutions that get to the underlying, complex cause of the problem and do not simply attempt to chemically alter the mind to cover them up.
 
The Maximized Living Model includes nutritional care, toxicity issues - typically related to drugs and standard American nutrition, exercise, stress management, spinal corrective care, and counseling. Treatments that are given with the Maximized Living Model have no side effects and have been shown to have equal or greater results than drugs.
 
Maximized Living is a best first line of defense against health concerns, rather than the medical model, and absolutely necessary for anyone receiving dangerous medical treatments of any kind.  
 
If you or your children are already taking a mind-altering drug, always consult an M.D. when coming off of it and never quit cold turkey. 
 
To find a Maximized Living Mentor or to visit a Maximized Living Health Center, go to  http://maximizedliving.com/AllInOneSearch/
 
If you have not seen it already, view “When the Children Cry” now at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjveFXLK8vA

Make sure you are telling as many people about Maximized Living Healthcare doctors. With your help we will make this world a better place.

Big Pharma, Bad Science
by NATHAN NEWMAN

[posted online on July 25, 2002]

In June, the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most respected medical journals, made a startling announcement. The editors declared that they were dropping their policy stipulating that authors of review articles of medical studies could not have financial ties to drug companies whose medicines were being analyzed.

The reason? The journal could no longer find enough independent experts. Drug company gifts and “consulting fees” are so pervasive that in any given field, you cannot find an expert who has not been paid off in some way by the industry. So the journal settled for a new standard: Their reviewers can have received no more than $10,000 from companies whose work they judge. Isn’t that comforting?

This announcement by the New England Journal of Medicine is just the tip of the iceberg of a scientific establishment that has been pervasively corrupted by conflicts of interest and bias, throwing doubt on almost all scientific claims made in the biomedical field.

The standard announced in June was only for the reviewers. The actual authors of scientific studies in medical journals are often bought and paid for by private drug companies with a stake in the scientific results. While the NEJM and some other journals disclose these conflicts, others do not. Unknown to many readers is the fact that the data being discussed was often collected and analyzed by the maker of the drug involved in the test. An independent 1996 study found that 98 percent of scientific papers based on research sponsored by corporations promoted the effectiveness of a company’s drug. By comparison, 79 percent of independent studies found that a new drug was effective. This corruption reaches from the doctors prescribing a drug to government review boards to university research centers.

There have long been worries about the advertising and promotional gifts given to doctors to influence which drugs they prescribe. But it turns out that even deeper financial ties extend to the medical experts setting nationwide professional guidelines for treating conditions ranging from heart disease to diabetes. Surveys have found that nine out of ten experts writing such guidelines have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, yet those ties are almost never disclosed in the treatment guidelines, which are often published in medical journals and endorsed by medical societies.

The Food and Drug Administration, for reasons similar to those of the medical journals, routinely allows researchers with ties to the industry to sit on drug approval advisory committees. In many cases, half the panelists on such committees have a financial stake in the outcome, through links to the drug manufacturer or to a competitor.

Increasingly, the industry has converted academic research centers into subsidiaries of the companies. The billions of dollars of academic government funding essentially pays to flush out negative results, while private industry gets to profit from any successful result. Industry now provides 7 percent of university research funding, but they are manipulating the system to gain a far more substantial benefit. At the University of California at Berkeley, Novartis agreed to pay $25 million to the campus in exchange for the first right to patent a range of basic plant research produced by the university.

Where once university research was oriented to producing independent knowledge that any other researcher could access and improve upon, university research is increasingly being locked up in patents. What’s more, scientists at universities are often allowed to have stock options in companies benefiting from the research they are conducting. As Dr. Marcia Angell, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, noted in the Baltimore Sun, “What would be considered a grotesque conflict of interest if a politician or judge did it is somehow not in a physician.”

And the results are expensive and sometimes tragic for the public. Experimental clinical drug trials are hazardous to participants and, more broadly, critical to those with life threatening conditions who need to know which treatments are fruitless to pursue. Yet researchers on industry payrolls end up pressured to suppress negative results.

At the most basic level, researchers who defy their corporate sponsors know they may lose their funding. When one Toronto scientist revealed in 1998 a serious side effect of deferiprone, a drug for a blood disorder, her contract was terminated. More dramatically, when a number of researchers concluded that Remune, an anti-AIDS therapy, was of little benefit to patients, the company funding their research, the Immune Response Corporation, sued the scientists in 2001 for $10 million for damaging its business.

And these are the examples of scientists who spoke out. Many others just go along with the demands of their corporate sponsors and suppress negative evidence. In the early 1990s, a pharmacologist at the University of California at San Francisco, Betty Dong, found that a generic thyroid hormone worked as well as Synthroid, the brand-name drug made by the funder of the research. According to the Washington Post, the company, Knoll Pharmaceuticals, successfully blocked publication of the findings for seven years. Only in 1997 was this fraud discovered, and in 1999 Knoll had to pay 37 states $42 million to settle a suit for consumer fraud in promoting the superiority of its drug.

This pattern of suppression means that medical knowledge is being stunted and delayed, as other researchers aren’t informed of dead ends that might have helped steer their own research. And by locking up knowledge produced at academic centers in patents, what should be free knowledge for the public (free in both the intellectual and economic sense) instead feeds the profit margins of the pharmaceutical industry.

Universities once opposed patents for any academic research. Yale University’s 1948 policy on patents stated, “It is, in general, undesirable and contrary to the best interests of medicine and the public to patent any discovery or invention applicable in the fields of public health or medicine.” That policy was later abandoned and Yale now holds a key anti-AIDS drug patent jointly with Bristol Myers. Facing massive global protest, Yale last year agreed to relax its patent rules, but the fact that universities routinely now balance who will live and die against their own profit motive is a degradation of their public purpose.

This corruption of academic science is pervasive and the costs are extremely clear, but what is remarkable is how easy it would be to end. Federal and state governments still supply the overwhelming percentage of university research funding. If all such funding was conditioned on ending non-disclosure agreements and on barring the licensing of government-funded results to private industry, the public would benefit both scientifically and financially. We’ve paid for the knowledge once. We shouldn’t have to do so again in increased costs of medicine and increased deaths due to suppressed knowledge.

STUNNING MEDICAL FACTS AND DRUGS THAT KILL
When people ask why the United States is the sickest country in the world, with more degenerative disease than any other country, our answer surprises them. Research clearly points to a lifestyle characterized by the SAD (Standard American Diet) and insufficient exercise, but that’s only reason #2. The #1 reason that we are #1 in sickness and disease is our medical philosophy. Our philosophy says, “Treat the symptoms with toxic drugs rather than addressing the cause of illness.”

Every drug has a side effect, and 218,000 people died last year from side effects alone. (JAMA, Vol. 284) In 2003, over one million Americans died from medicine, thus making medicine our nation’s #1 killer. Our staff’s primary goal is to help you from becoming yet another health statistic of the traditional medical philosophy. When you partner with us and embrace that goal, then we can educate you regarding some of the most dangerous drugs out there.

See the following links:

ADD/ADHD
Autism
Ear Aches, Strep Throat, Sinus Infections, and Colds
Fevers
Flu
Headaches
Sore Throat
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LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH IN AMERICA: MODERN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM
The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million. The number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million in 1995, now tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics in 2003 are prescribed.

The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million. The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million. The total number of iatrogenic (induced inadvertently by a physician of surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures) deaths shown in the following table is 783,936.

American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251.

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ANNUAL PHYSICAL AND ECONOMIC COST OF MEDICAL INTERVENTION
Condition Death Cost Author
Adverse Drug Reaction 106,000 $12 billion Lazarou, Suh
Medical Error 98,000 $2 billion IOM
Bedsores 115,000 $55 billion Xakellis, Barczak
Infections 88,000 $5 billion Weinstein, MMWR
Malnutrition 108,800   Nurses Coalition
Outpatients 199,000 $77 billion Starfield Weingart
Unnecessary Procedures 37,136 $122 billion HCUP
Surgery-Related 32,000 $9 billion AHRQ
TOTAL: 83,936 $282 billion  

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ANNUAL UNNECESSARY MEDICAL EVENTS STATISTICS
Unnecessary Events People Affected Latrogenic Events Hospitalization 8.9 million 1.78 million Procedures 7.5 million 1.3 million TOTAL: 16.4 million 3.08 million

Our projected statistic of 7.8 million iatrogenic deaths is more than all the casualties from wars that America has fought in its entire history.

MEDICAL ERRORS
A survey of a 1992 national pharmacy database found a total of 429,827 medication errors from 1,081 hospitals. Medication errors occurred in 5.22 percent of patients admitted to these hospitals each year. The authors concluded that a minimum of 90,895 patients annually were harmed by medication errors in the country as a whole.

A 2002 study shows that 20 percent of hospital medications for patients had dosage mistakes. Nearly 40 percent of these errors were considered potentially harmful to the patient. In a typical 300-patient hospital the number of errors per day were 40.

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TELEVISION DIAGNOSIS
By 1995 drug companies had tripled the amount of money allotted to direct advertising of prescription drugs to consumers. The majority of the money is spent on seductive television ads. From 1996 to 2000, spending rose from $791 million to nearly $2.5 billion. Even though $2.5 billion may seem like a lot of money, the authors comment that it only represents 15 percent of the total pharmaceutical advertising budget.

The leading cause of adverse drugs reactions are:

Antibiotics (17 percent)
Cardiovascular drugs (17 percent)
Chemotherapy (15 percent)
Analgesics and anti-inflammatory agents (15 percent)
In America, over 3 million pounds of antibiotics are used every year on humans. With a population of 284 million Americans, this amount is enough to give every man, woman, and child 10 teaspoons of pure antibiotics per year.

Almost half of patients with upper respiratory tract infections in the United States still receive antibiotics from their doctor. According to the CDC, 90 percent of upper respiratory infections are viral and should not be treated with antibiotics.

In 2001, Cesarean section is still the most common OB/GYN surgical procedure. Approximately 4 million births occur annually, with a 24 percent C-section rate, i.e., 960,000 operations. In the Netherlands only eight percent of babies are delivered by Cesarean section. Assuming human babies are similar in the United States and in the Netherlands, we are performing 640,000 unnecessary C-sections in the United States with its three to four times higher mortality and 20 times greater morbidity than vaginal delivery.

The Lazarou study was based on statistical analysis of 33 million U.S hospital admissions in 1994. Hospital records for prescribed medications were analyzed with the following results:

The number of serious injuries due to prescribed drugs was 2.2 million
2.1 percent of in-patient experienced a serious adverse drug reaction
4.7 percent of all hospital admissions were due to a serious adverse drug reaction
Fatal adverse drug reactions occurred in 0.19 percent of in-patient and 0.13 percent of admissions
The authors concluded that a projected 106,000 deaths occur annually due to adverse drug reactions
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BEDSORES
Over 1 million people develop bedsores in U.S hospitals every year. It’s a tremendous burden to patients and family, and a $55-billion health care burden. The mortality rate in hospitals for patients with bedsores is between 23 percent and 36 percent.

MALNUTRUITION IN NURSING HOMES
A report from the Coalition for Nursing Home Reform states that at least one-third of the nation’s 1.6 million nursing home residents may suffer from malnutrition and dehydration, which hastens their death. We find 108,800 premature deaths due to malnutrition in nursing homes.

Between 4 percent to 18 percent of consecutive patients in outpatient settings suffer an iatrogenic event leading to:

116 million extra physician visits
77 million extra prescriptions
17 million emergency department visits
8 million hospitalizations
3 million long-term admissions
199,000 additional deaths
$77 billion in extra costs
*http://www.mercola.com/healthcare.htm

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