Serious Questions About Pharma

Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at pharmaceutical companies’ profits in the Fortune 500 list of the world’s most profitable companies. She found that the top 10 pharmaceutical companies’ combined profits exceed the combined profits of all the 490 remaining companies!

A new, unproven anticancer drug can be very expensive.

If the NHS objects to a physician using this drug, U.K. newspapers that print what pharma asks them to print will go to bat for the physician against the NHS and the U.K. government, launching half-page photos of a sorrowful mom surrounded by a grieving family she is doomed to leave is she doesn’t get the new wonder drug.

People who never walk the dog will jog to raise money for the cause.

Vitamin C truths are excluded from U.K. newspapers, which print only what won’t damage pharma. A double-page article about vitamin C never mentioned that vitamin C cures many cancers. Cancer articles never mention vitamin C.

Is it possible that nutrients that are naturally present in the bloodstream and essential for life could make one feel sick when taken as supplements?

Trapped overnight in an airport without my vitamins, I had no option but to buy the only vitamin C tablets available. Without my 20 grams a day, I get boils and colds and my chest wheezes. Ten grams won’t do.

So I bought 500-milligram (one-half gram) tablets of vitamin C. After taking five, I was sick. My friend told me the same thing happened to him when he bought glucosamine to treat his arthritis. That set me thinking.

Who makes the supplement tablets? Pharma! With such vast profits from drugs for our ailments, does pharmacy want prevention?

I noticed that aspartame was in the vitamin C tablets I bought at the airport. I wondered: If I were a doctor working for that company, knowing that vitamin C cures, prevents, or delays 100 diseases on which my profits depended, how would I protect my company’s profits and my multimillionaire lifestyle?

I’d think it essential for good public relations to offer pleasant vitamin C tablets. But not TOO pleasant! So I would combine extra bitter bioflavonoids in the tablet along with a considerable amount of aspartame needed to render the tablet acceptably sweet.

The aspartame would do its work. Nobody would take more than the advised number of tablets on the label. My profits would be secure.

How much aspartame is legal? There’s no actual limit—only the recommendation that you don’t drink more than so many cans of soda per day. Would it stop a manufacturer putting half of that amount into a tablet? I’ve never seen a weight listed on a label. 

The 1977 CardioRetinometry article written for the London Daily Mail about vitamin C’s ability to reverse heart disease was replaced by Bayer’s full-page advertisement. Bayer aspirin have also been on front-page headlines twice.

The arthritis drug market is worth billions of dollars. Now what would I put in glucosamine tablets to discourage people from using them?

Dr. Bush practices optometry in the U.K. His website is LifeExtensionOptometry.org