Pfizer: No More Free Lunch in Sandwich

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/mar/23/budget-2011-sandwich-pfizer-jobs

The residents of Sandwich, where the pharmaceutical company Pfizer is soon to close its research and development facility – with a loss of 2,400 jobs – will be watching to see how that pledge materialises over the next few months. Viagra was made, created, designed and invented here; new drugs will not be.

Blowback: Agent Orange in Canada

Excerpt from Blowback: A Canadian History of Agent Orange and the War at Home
at link

Psychology Today interviews Dr. David Healy

The interview is here.
A follow-up blog here got this response from us:

In the 1950's, an American TV show host shocked the nation and made everyone laugh by testing a product he advertised on his show. The host was, I think, Arthur Godfrey; the product was dog food.

We applaud the work of Dr. Healy and other physicians who ask hard questions, of Senator Grassley and the patient-consumer movement in exposing the ties between pharma and the mental health industry.

Exposing and cutting pharma perks might not be as effective as establishing - let's call it the Fido Rule: Anyone who writes assessments of drugs the pharmaceutical companies have on offer must *try* them.

Ready for your medicine, Dr. Ghaemi?

Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disease

Britney Spears' manager gave her medication
It seems there wasn't much bipolar disease before certain psychiatric drugs were put into use by physicians.

"Has the pharmaceutical industry become the Pied Piper of Hamelin–ridding us of lethal diseases only to turn around and “take” our children?
Would a physician from the 1950s “have identified the frenzy to treat bipolar disorders in infants that developed in twenty-first-century American as a mania?”

In his latest book, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disease (the John Hopkins University Press) David Healy, author of Let Them Eat Prozac, looks at the historic roots of our current “medicalized distress” in which half the population is said to suffer a mental illness at some point in life and babies are diagnosed in utero as bipolar.

Bipolar disorder, once called manic depression, has been embroiled in controversy from its first descriptions in Paris in the 1850s. The pharmaceutical companies and academics behind its current popularity as a “catch-all” disease say it dates back to the ancient Greeks.

But David Healy, professor of psychiatry and the director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine at Cardiff University, is not so sure.

References to the frenzied behavior of mental patients found in Hippocrates’ Epidemics books 1 and III, Plato’s Phaedrus and other early writings almost certainly referred to infective states and not what we mean by bipolar disorder
infective disorders with high fevers, hysteria, postpartum manias, catalepsies and melancholies developing into manias, he writes.

Even if the disorder existed before direct-to-consumer television advertising beamed its warning signs into living rooms, it was rare says Healy. Between 1875 and 1924 only 123 patients from North West Wales were admitted to the asylum in North Wales with what we would today call bipolar disorder from a population of a quarter of a million or 12,500,000 person years."

Hmmm... Link
We suspect, too, that nutritional deficiencies have something to do with this.

Video: Supersize My Aspartame, by Trillion

Pharma's GSK promises a new source of GAS: "Alli"

If GSK's petition is approved, we won't have supplements any more - but the gas problem will be solved!

Listen to the wavs of the future here.

Environmental Protection Agency: Corruption worse than we thought

What's in your water?
Censorship exposed at US Environmental Agency
Erin Brockovich Redux: Newsweek reviews a new book on falsification of statistics in industry, "Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health" here

Who pwns your food?

Fascinating information on "green" food production by corporate giants - some of which also produce chemicals, drugs and other products.
Sometimes, where there are hydrogenated fatty acids, there's smoke, too. Did you know that Kraft Foods was owned by (cough cough) Philip Morris, which they have cleverly disguised by renaming it Altria?
How Greenwashing Works

Farmers are disappearing. What will happen if all food production is corporatized?


And we are also concerned about genetically modified (GM) food - some crops have been designed to produce DRUGS...

Rx - A Soap Opera About the Pharmaceutical Industry

Part 1 of 6, so far, with more to come. Adult themes, language advisory.

Pharmaceuticals Anonymous Frogs Poster

Click on the image to download a free fair-use copy.

Apart from dangers of addiction, dependency, health damage and birth defects which some which some medications present, there are environmental concerns we must address.
Scientific American reports that fish you eat may contain a pharmochemical load sufficient to cause
breast cancer
The very same companies that make medications to treat cancer may be making the chemicals that cause it.
Is Avon's cancer ambassador, Reece Witherspoon, aware of this?

Marketing Overdose Campaign

The pharmaceutical industry spends US$60 billion on drugs marketing each year, twice as much as it spends on research and development. Yet consumers know next to nothing about where this money is going. To expose where pharma companies spend this money, how it increases drugs sales, and why this irresponsible behaviour is putting consumer health at risk, Consumers International has produced a series of short, fun films for the Marketing Overdose campaign. Watch them - and get involved.
http://www.marketingoverdose.org/

Don't miss this expose of Pharma manipulation of physicians in Third World countries.
Drugs, Doctors and Dinners

Canada's Dr. Joel Lexchin weighs in on this
in the BMJ

Soft Targets: Nurses and the Pharmaceutical Industry

The pharmaceutical industry recognizes nursing influence on medical prescribing and identifies nurses as a marketing target. The industry has had its eye on nurses and nurse practitioners for over a decade, and is heavily invested in wooing them. The nursing literature has yet to pay much attention to the expansive reach of the pharmaceutical industry into the nursing profession. In this article, some of the key literature on the influence of drug companies upon nurses is examined.
Article here