“The secret emails you weren’t suposed to see”

BBC Panorama – report May 2011…

“The paper trail that reveals how the results of drug trials were glossed over to cover up a link with suicide in teens. Now Glaxo Smith Kline faces trial for fraud.

“When you take your child to the doctor you assume that the medicine they are prescribed is safe and will help them get better.

If your teenager is depressed you certainly don’t expect that the drug they are given can make them want to kill themselves.

But we’ve uncovered the story of how one company tried to hide the fact that it’s medicine did exactly that.”

Glaxo Smith Kline is the fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the world and paroxetine – known as “Paxil”  in N America and  “Seroxat” in UK  – is the biggest selling psychiatric medication  in the world – a “blockbuster” drug making blockbuster profits.

Here’s the story of how they get to make so much money – by being less than completely honest and open about the facts.

This story is but one example of how pharmaceutical companies hide and modify the facts from their secret trials intended to ensure that new drugs coming to market are both useful and safe…

Glaxo Smith Kline for years  kept data secret that showed its product was both not effective and also caused dangerous and adverse reactions and yet reported it  as “generally well tolerated and effective”, “remarkable effective and safe”.

Originally rejected by at least two scientific journals GSK marketing department persisted until they found another that published its PR copy presented as scientific reporting.

“This is a drug that was reported as curing suicide when in fact it was causing some teenagers to become suicidal.”

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Thinking of coming off ?

Please, if you take psychiatric medications please do not stop taking them abruptly – that can be very, very risky.

The safest known way to come off psychiatric medications is slowly, gradually and sometimes very, very slowly – it takes time and support. Your body has gotten used to having them around and you will do better if you allow yourself time to adjust…

Withdrawal

Now, neither pharmaceutical companies nor doctors like to call it by the term we can understand . Instead, for prescription drugs they  prefer to hide behind technical-sounding terms like cessation syndrome  that effectively blame you for wanting to cease using their product because it doesn’t work or it makes you feel like crap, or both. 

For every other kind of chemical dependence we call the process “withdrawal”

You will do well do learn a lot about what to expect and prepare – you will also do well to have many “wellness tools” you can use to help you.

For more on managing your medications, try…

• https://recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com/resources/coming-off-medications/
• www.paxilprogress.com

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If you experience an adverse drug reaction …

Rxisk.org is an online tool you can use report your adverse drug reactions tdirectly to a global database.  A team of independent scientists will analyse your data along with millions of others reported by patients and Doctors. You will be able to print off a report and take it to your Doctor.

The idea behind Rxisk.org is to put real data about medications into the hands of doctors and patients together – so you can work as a team with real information rather than trusting  info  that has been finessed and filtered by a cockeyed system that seems do the opposite of what was intended.

• www.Rxisk.org

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Pharmageddon?

If you want to learn more about how the system we created – thinking it would make drugs safe –  creates this monster, read Dr David Healy’s book Pharmageddon.

 If you are a Doctor prescribing these meds a question for you:

• Which are you: Doctor or Spin Doctor ? – are you sure it’s the best advice you can offer?

Related

• http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/04/30/more-on-infamous-paxil-study-329/

• Paxil Withdrawal: A Mother Speaks (recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com)

• Rxisk.org (recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com)
• How drug companies continue to hide the true story of Tamiflu and other drugs from the American public (madinamerica.com)
• Why everyone on medication needs Rxisk.org (leoniefennell.wordpress.com)