Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD notes that the RECORD trial of the diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia) was terribly manipulated by GlaxoSmithKline.

An article published in the New York Times on July 9, 2010 titled, “Caustic Government Report Deals Blow to Diabetes Drug” revealed that Dr. Thomas Marciniak, a reviewer at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), found a dozen instances in which patients taking Rosiglitazone (Avandia) suffered serious heart problems that were not counted in the study’s tally of adverse events.

The article also notes that “It [ Rosiglitazone (Avandia) ] has been shown to increase the risks of bone fractures and to cause swelling that can lead to heart failure and eye problems.”

The article also notes that “Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, a former editor of The New England Journal, said the Record trial raised the question “whether the entire system is corrupt.””

2 out of 20 healthy volunteers given 50-100 mg of sertraline (Zoloft) became suicidal became suicidal notes Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD in this video clip.

The study he is referring to can be download here.

“Vioxx [ rofecoxib, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, a Cox-2 inhibitor ] is estimated to have killed about 30,000 people,” says Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD in this video clip.

“Merck HID cases of myocardial infarction [ heart attacks ].”

Merck lied about heart attacks with it’s drug, Vioxx [ rofecoxib, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, a Cox-2 inhibitor ] which is estimated to have killed about 30,000 people notes Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD in this video clip.

Merck was told by the FDA to tell American doctors, but instead, they told doctors that the risk of heart attack with it’s drug was one-eighth (1/8) that of other drugs notes Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD.

“What the drug industry publishes, even in the New England Journal of Medicine, should be viewed as an ADVERTISEMENT and nothing else,” notes Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD in this video clip.

In a study of the SSRI antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil) in adolescents, 8 children developed suicidal thoughts while on the drug, but the study published in a medical journal did NOT mention any of these 8 children, and instead said that there was only one (1) adverse event related to the drug, a headache in one person, notes Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD in this video clip.

Stopping an antidepressant can make people feel depressed or suicidal notes Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD in this video clip.

This happened to my mother in 1994.

“We CANNOT trust the published [medical] literature. It is flawed and some of it is fraudulent,” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“What I have seen in psychiatry [with psychiatric drugs] is worse than I have seen anywhere else. It is just incredible the extent to which the drug industry has cheated with its trials and how it has withheld even lethal harms—suicides— from public view,” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“Antipsychotics are extremely dangerous drugs. Zyprexa [Olanzapine], for example, ... I have estimated that with that drug, Eli Lilly has killed around 200,000 people,” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“These death tolls are just enormous and tells us that we need to be much, much more conservative with drugs than we are currently.”

“[Prescription] drugs are so dangerous that doctors cannot handle them safely and our authorities—the FDA—cannot guarantee the safety we need to take drugs… otherwise it [prescription drugs] would not be the 3rd leading cause of death, that’s pretty obvious,” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“Psychiatry is the drug industry’s paradise because it is so easy to manipulate just about everything [in psychiatry]. The way you come up with a diagnosis is easy to manipulate,” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“If we are not cautious, we will all end up being psychiatric patients if we don’t fight against this.”

“I don’t know why people can kill so many patients in psychiatry and nobody does anything.”

“[Antidepressants and psychiatric drugs] can have an effect in some patients, in the short-term, but if you continue using them, they create psychiatric diseases which is a disaster,” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“My conclusion is that doctors can’t handle this duality, that they [antidepressants and psychiatric drugs] can be useful in the short term but harmful in the long-term.

“They [doctors] cannot handle it.

“Many doctors go on [giving psychiatric drugs] for months or years, harming their patients in this way.

“It is terribly sad that the psychiatrists… cannot see how much harm they are causing.

“After having studied this in some detail, I conclude in my book that it would be better for mankind if none of these drugs existed.”

“What do you do with a specialty [psychiatry] that to some extent, live on a lie? I’ve heard so many psychiatrists, also professors, say that starting an antidepressant is like giving insulin to a diabetic, which is completely wrong, and yet they still say this nonsense…,” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“The hypothesis about [depression being caused by a serotonin deficiency] is stone dead.

“What these drugs do is they do NOT correct a chemical imbalance.

“That’s another lie that psychiatrists love, that you have a chemical imbalance like a diabetic that lacks insulin…

“It’s a LIE.”

“They are CREATING a chemical imbalance.

“And it is exactly for this reason that it is DIFFICULT for patients to stop [these drugs] after 2 or 3 months.”

“Psychiatry has gone the wrong way. [Robert] Whitaker has described this beautifully and his book Anatomy of an Epidemic: [Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America],” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“If it were really true that psychiatric drugs help correct some kind of [chemical] imbalance in the brain, then we would expect people who receive pension and cannot work [the number of people who are disabled] to go down.”

“[But] what have we seen?”

“[Just] the opposite.”

“The number of… people [on disability] has exploded at the same time that we introduced these drugs.”

“How can people not see this?”

“We are doing, more or less, the exact OPPOSITE of what we should be doing. These drugs [antidepressants] are DANGEROUS,” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“They should be given [for] as short [a] period [of time] as possible, and then stopped.

“Very many patients should NOT get them at all.

“Most depressed patients recover by themselves.

“So why not wait and see, for some weeks, then many of them would not get [or need] an antidepressant.

“Then they would have no problem stopping [these] drugs.”

“What the psychiatrist then say… is… Well, it is important to give these drugs because they reduce the risk of suicide. [But] as far as I can see, this has NEVER been documented. Quite [to] the contrary,” says Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

“We know that these drugs INCREASE the risk of suicide in young people up to the age of 40 according to FDA data.

“And we don’t really know what they do above the age of 40 because the drug companies have CHEATED SO ENORMOUSLY in the randomized trials.

“So when the worst case, these drugs might increase the risk of suicide in all age groups.”

I am going to read a section from this wonderful book Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare by Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, MD.

The section is about drug-induced side effects in the elderly which doctors are often BLIND to.

The reason that I am telling this story is that the SAME THING happened to my mother.

My mother suffered from drug-induced side effects for 40 years, and tragically for the last 3.5 years of her life, and yet my mother’s doctors were blind to this.