Soil Bacteria Work In Similar Way To Antidepressants

UK scientists suggest that a type of friendly bacteria found in soil may affect the brain in a similar way to antidepressants.

Their findings are published in the early online edition of the journal Neuroscience.

Researchers from Bristol University and University College London discovered using laboratory mice, that a "friendly" bacteria commonly found in soil activated brain cells to produce the brain chemical serotonin and altered the mice's behaviour in a similar way to antidepressants.

They are suggesting this could explain why immune system imbalance could make some people vulnerable to mood disorders like depression.

Lead author, Dr Chris Lowry from Bristol University said, "These studies help us understand how the body communicates with the brain and why a healthy immune system is important for maintaining mental health". 

"They also leave us wondering if we shouldn't all be spending more time playing in the dirt," he added.

Read More:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/66840.php

Data, Drugs, and Deception: a True Story

Last week The Lancet published a meta-analysis of 27 statin trials, an attempt to determine whether patients with no history of heart problems benefit from the drugs—true story. The topic is controversial, and no less than six conflicting meta-analyses have been performed—also a true story. But last week’s study claims to show, once and for all, that for these very low risk patients, statins save lives—true story.

Actual true story: the conclusions of this study are neither novel nor valid.

The Lancet meta-analysis, authored by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists group, examines individual patient data from 27 statin studies. Their findings disagree with an analysis published in 2010 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, and with analyses from two equally respected publications, the Therapeutics Letter and the Cochrane Collaboration.* Despite this history of dueling data the authors of last week’s meta-analysis, in a remarkable break from scientific decorum, conclude their report with a directive for the writers of statin guidelines: the drugs should be broadly recommended based on the new analysis.

As an editorialist points out, if implemented, the CTT group recommendations in the United States would lead to 64 million people, more than half of the population over the age of 35, being started on statin therapy—true story.

Read More:

http://smartem.org/content/data-drugs-and-deception-true-story

Nosolitol - Pharmacy Drug Commercial Parody Tin Foil Hat Times (Video)

Are you tired sometimes......? Make sure you listen to the disclaimer at the end

When we take the world too serious we forget that none of us are getting out of here alive. Here is a bit of humor from our first two years. The TFHT productions crew is always busy creating something new. From music to commercials to skits and interviews, this section highlights the lighter side of the Conspiracy Researcher.

Rising Infertility And Cancer Rates Possibly Linked To Pharmaceuticals And Household Chemicals

According to the European Environment Agency (EEA), household products, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and food all contain endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) which may be causing significant increases in diabetes, obesity, cancers and increasing infertility. 

In recent decades, the incidence of many human diseases and disorders including diabetes, breast and prostate cancer, and male infertility has increased significantly and many scientists believe this is due to increasing levels of exposure to mixtures of some chemicals in widespread use.

The report also highlights that EDCs negatively effect early development of the brain, immune, reproduction and metabolic systems. These affects are often unnoticeable until several years or decades after exposure.

Jacqueline McGlade, EEA Executive Director explained:

"Scientific research gathered over the last few decades shows us that endocrine disruption is a real problem, with serious effects on wildlife, and possibly people. It would be prudent to take a precautionary approach to many of these chemicals until their effects are more fully understood."

Even though there is sufficient evidence of harm from EDCs in some wildlife species and in laboratory studies using rodent models for human health, it is difficult to demonstrate the effects of EDCs on humans due to the length, cost and methodological challenges with these types of studies.

Read More:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/245485.php

Mike Feder - Act Now!

Listen to Mike weekly at 4pm on Monday's with "The Turning Point" and at 1pm on Thursday's with "Occupied Territory." Both at Eastern Time.

With those bizarre wonder-drug ads in magazines and on TV, I thought this little satire might provide some needed relief.

Are You Suffering?

When you look in the mirror, do you only see a frown? Does life seem grim, empty and meaningless? Have you been asking yourself: What happened to that old energy, that zest for life? Can I ever get it back?

Yes, you can!

Now you can leave all that doubt, worry and discomfort behind. Now you can just be you again.
Because now there is... SMILIZENE.

Do you have a throbbing or aching sensation in your limbs and extremities; frequent or painful urination; asthma, chest pains, rapid or slow hearbeat; inability to concentrate or follow simple directions; insomnia; recurrent nightmares; sudden attacks of anxiety or depression; an increasing sense of isolation, unreasonable suspicions of loved ones or total strangers; distorted or suicidal thinking, and an overall sense of unease about your life, accompanied by mild dyspepsia?

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-feder/prescription-drug-warnings_b_1511554.html

Martha Rosenberg - How Big Pharma and the Psychiatric Establishment Drugged Up Our Kids

In his book Psychiatryland, psychiatrist Phillip Sinaikin recounts reading a scientific article in which it was debated whether a three-year-old girl who ran out into traffic had oppositional-defiant disorder or bipolar disorder, the latter marked by “grandiose delusions” that she was special and cars could not harm her.¹

How did the once modest medical specialty of child psychiatry become the aggressive “pediatric psychopharmacology” that finds ADHD, pediatric conduct disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, mixed manias, social phobia, anxiety, sleep disorders, borderline disorders, assorted “spectrum” disorders, irritability, aggression, pervasive development disorders, personality disorders, and even schizophrenia under every rock? And how did this branch of psychiatry come to find the answer to the “psychopathologies” in the name of the discipline itself: pediatric psychopharmacology? Just good marketing. Pharma is wooing the pediatric patient because that’s where the money is. Just like country and western songs about finding love where you can when there is no love to be found at home. Pharma has stopped finding “love” in the form of the new blockbuster drugs that catapulted it through the 1990s and 2000s. According to the Wall Street Journal, new drugs made Pharma only $4.3 billion in 2010 compared with $11.8 billion in 2005—a two-thirds drop.²

Doctors have a “growing fear of prescribing new drugs with unknown side effects,”³explains the Journal, and the government is cracking down on illegal marketing. But also, private and government insurers are less willing to “cough up money for an expensive new drug—particularly when a cheap and reliable generic is available.⁴

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155459/how_big_pharma_and_the_psychiatric_establishment_drugged_up_our_kids

Martha Rosenberg - When Big Pharma Writes the Laws

Just like ALEC, Big Pharma is doing the job of elected officials by writing legislation-ready bills for no charge, says the New York Times.  The new bills seek to prevent health insurers from raising co-pay amounts to a price where patients are unable or unwilling to buy them, especially with expensive drugs. When co-pays rise too high, many people engage in what Pharma calls “prescription abandonment”–leaving the prescription at the pharmacy “altar” or not refilling future prescriptions.

Pharma is losing so much money from rising co-pays and prescription abandonment, it has launched cagey, public service announcement-sounding campaigns about “patients not taking the drugs they need,” as if it is a health and not revenue issue. Pharma has even instituted arrangements with some pharmacies to send visiting nurses to patients’ homes to ensure “compliance,” Big Brother overtones notwithstanding.

Prescription abandonment is an especially thorny issue for Pharma when the drugs are taken on faith, to reduce patients’ “risks” and patients do not necessarily feel them working. It is also a thorny issue when studies suggest the drugs being abandoned may not be necessary to begin with or working.

One such expensive placebo is the drug known by the brand name Risperdal. The Department of Veterans Affairs spent $717 million on the drug to treat posttraumatic stress disorder in Afghanistan and Iraq troops with PTSD over nine years, only to discover it worked no better than a sugar pill! Veterans Affairs doctors wrote more than 5 million prescriptions from 2000 through June 2010 for naught, says a 2011 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Read More:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/11/when-big-pharma-writes-the-laws/

Russ Belville - Sativex (pharmaceutical marijuana) approved in ten more European countries

You want medical marijuana?  Big Pharma is more than willing to sell it to you…

International expansion of UK firm GW Pharma’s cannabis-based spray Sativex is well underway after a further 10 European countries recommended approval of the drug for multiple sclerosis patients.

Health Authorities in Belgium, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia have now given the go-ahead for Sativex (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol), completing its Mutual Recognition Procedure in Europe.

This means that Sativex can be marketed in these countries as an add-on therapy for the treatment of moderate to severe spasticity due to MS in patients who have not responded adequately to other medication, and launches are expected from the end of this year onwards.

Sativex has already been approved in the UK, Spain, and Germany and other European countries:

GW says marketing partner Almirall expects to introduce the drug in the German market in July and before the end of 2011 in Denmark and Sweden. Sativex is scheduled to be launched in Italy, Czech Republic and Austria in 2012.

Read More:

http://stash.norml.org/sativex-pharmaceutical-marijuana-approved-in-ten-more-european-countries

Jim Hightower - The great American medicine show, a spectacle of deceit, manipulation, and flimflammery

Butterflies waft across a beautiful field of spring flowers. A delightful young family bicycles joyously down a country lane. A couple on a park bench leans sensually into each other. A 40-something woman's face radiates with both perfect beauty and internal happiness. "All's right with the world," is the message... as long as you've taken your dosages of Lunesta, Celebrex, Cialis, and Botox.

Welcome to medicated America, where the fix for every problem--from incontinence to erectile dysfunction, stiff joints to mood swings, weight gain to wrinkles-- is just a prescription away. Thus the beautiful images, stirring music, attractive actors, and soothing words in the omnipresent, multibillion-dollar kaleidoscope of drug advertising by Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and other giants of Big Pharma--all pitching their particular brand-name nostrum directly at us hoi polloi (the industry spends a fourth of its income on ads and other promotions, nearly double its expenditures on research and development). The corporate come-ons typically conclude with a phrase that has achieved cliche status in America's vernacular: "Ask your doctor if 'Suprema Wundercure' is right for you."

The better question, though, is one that cartoonist Dan Piraro expressed in one of his "Bizarro" panels: "Ask your doctor if playing into the hands of the pharmaceutical industry is right for you."

One would assume that in a rich, medically advanced, health-conscious nation like ours, dicey decisions about whether to allow a particular pharmaceutical product into our bodies would be among the most rational we make--as determined by (1) the best science available, (2) the strict moral duty of medical purveyors to "First, do no harm," (3) good government regulation, and (4) the profession's fear of public reproach and legal punishment. One would, however, be wrong on all counts:

Read More:

http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/2973

Martha Rosenberg - 6 Kinds of Pills Big Pharma Tries to Get You Hooked on for Life

Why has Big Pharma failed to produce new antibiotics for deadly infections like MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), VRE (vancomycin-resistant enterococci), C. Difficile and Acinetobacter baumannii even as they leap from hospital to community settings? Because there is no money in it.

Pharma executives "have shown less interest in medicines like antibiotics that actually cure disease than in those that only treat symptoms,"writes 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." Nor are medicines for tropical diseases like malaria, which kills a child every 30 seconds, a priority, notes Petersen. They also lack ka-ching.

Since direct-to-consumer drug advertising debuted in the late 1990s, the number of people on prescription drugs -- especially prescription drugs for life -- has ballooned. Between 2001 to 2007 the percentage of adults and children on one or more prescriptions for chronic conditions rose by more than 12 million, reports the Associated Press and 25 percent of US children now take a medication for a chronic condition. Seven percent of kids take two or more daily drugs. Who says advertising doesn't work?

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155170/6_kinds_of_pills_big_pharma_tries_to_get_you_hooked_on_for_life