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by Mike Adams
the Health Range
October 28, 2010
from
NaturalNews Website
You know all those thousands of clinical
trials conducted over the last few decades comparing pharmaceuticals
to placebo pills?
Well, it turns out all those studies
must now be completely thrown out as utterly non-scientific. And
why? Because the placebos used in the studies weren't really
placebos at all, rendering the studies scientifically invalid.
This is the conclusion from researchers at the University of
California who published their findings in the October issue of the
Annals of Internal Medicine. They reviewed 167 placebo-controlled
trials published in peer-reviewed medical journals in 2008 and 2009
and found that 92 percent of those trials never even described the
ingredients of their placebo pills.
Why is this important?
Because placebo pills are supposed to be
inert. But nothing is inert, it turns out. Even so-called "sugar
pills" contain sugar, obviously. And sugar isn't inert. If you're
running a clinical trial on diabetics, testing the effectiveness of
a diabetes drug versus a placebo then obviously your clinical trial
is going to make the diabetes drug look better than placebo if you
use sugar pills as your placebo.
Some placebo pills use olive oil which may actually improve heart
health. Other placebo pills use partially-hydrogenated oils which
harm heart health. Yet only 8 percent of clinical trials bothered to
list the placebo ingredients at all!
Stay with me on this placebo issue... because it gets even more
bizarre...
There are no
FDA rules regarding placebos in clinical trials
It turns out there are absolutely no FDA rules regarding the choice
or composition of placebos used in clinical trials.
Technically, a clinical trial director
could use eye of newt or lizard's legs as placebo and would not even
be required to mention such nefarious details in the trial results.
That would cause trouble, trouble, boil and bubble! (Shakespeare
reference for all you literary fans...)
We already know that clinical trials are rife with fraud.
Most of the clinical trials used by
pharmaceutical companies to win FDA approval of their drugs, for
example, are funded by pharmaceutical companies. And it is a
verifiable fact that most clinical trials tend to find results that
favor the financial interests of whatever organization paid for
them. So what's to stop Big Pharma from scheming up the perfect
placebo that would harm patients just enough to make their own drugs
look good by comparison?
Fact: Placebos are usually provided by the very same company funding
the clinical trial!
Do you detect any room for fraud in this
equation?
How drug
companies can fake clinical trials with selected placebo pills
Placebo performance strongly influences whether drugs are approved
by the FDA, by the way.
As the key piece of information on its
regulatory approval decisions, the FDA wants to know whether a drug
works better than placebo. That's the primary requirement! If they
work even 5% better than placebo, they are said to be "efficacious"
(meaning they "work"). This is true even if the placebo was selected
and used specifically to make the drug look good by comparison.
You see, if there are no regulations or rules regarding placebo,
then none of the placebo-controlled clinical trials are
scientifically valid.
It's amazing how medical scientists will get rough and tough when
attacking homeopathy, touting how their own medicine is "based on
the gold standard of scientific evidence!" and yet when it really
comes down to it, their scientific evidence is just a jug of
quackery mixed with a pinch of wishful thinking and a wisp of
pseudoscientific gobbledygook, all framed in the language of
scientism by members of the FDA who wouldn't recognize real science
if they tripped and fell into a vat full of it.
Big Pharma and
the FDA have based their entire
system of scientific evidence on a placebo fraud! And if the placebo
isn't a placebo, then the scientific evidence isn't scientific.
Oh, but wait. They'll call it science because they wish the placebo
to be a placebo.
Yep - the clinical researchers are now psychics,
mediums and fortune tellers who simply decree that little pill of
olive oil to "be a placebo!" while waving their hands over it in a
gesture borrowed from David Copperfield.
James Randi may have never seen a psychic transmute lead into gold,
but he's no doubt seen doctors transmute biochemically active
substances into totally inert materials merely by wishing them so!
It's so amazing!
And this brings me to the really interesting "how-to" part of this
article...
How to make
your own placebo just like clinical researchers do
Are you wondering how to make your own FDA-approved, scientifically
validated placebo? It's easier than you think.
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Step 1 - Find something shaped
like a pill. It could be a pill full of olive oil, white
sugar, palm oil, fluoridated water, chalk dust, synthetic
chemicals or just about anything you can imagine.
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Step 2 - Close your eyes and get
ready to concentrate.
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Step 3 - This is the important
part - Repeat out loud five times while turning
counter-clockwise, "I am a scientific researcher practicing
evidence-based medicine!" You must say this until you
really, truly believe it. If you don't believe it strongly
enough, the placebo effect will be ruined.
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Step 4 - Thrust your palm in the
direction of the placebo pills and shout, at the top of your
voice, "You are now placebo!" You may feel a shiver of
energy coursing through your body. That's the power of
placebo reaching out to the pills.
The process is now complete.
You may now
use these placebo pills in any clinical trial and expect full
approval of such use by your colleagues, famous medical journals and
FDA regulators. (This is not a joke. This is the state of the art
today in conventional medicine.)
Hope also has a huge role to place in all this. The more you hope
your placebos are really placebos, the better results you'll get.
In fact, in reporting on this whole
fiasco, the lead researcher of the study uncovering all this, Dr
Beatric Golomb, said,
"We can only hope that this hasn't
seriously systematically affected medical treatment."
But of course it has.
(And by the way, no disrespect toward Dr
Golomb. She deserves kudos for being willing to tackle this subject
which will no doubt make her very unpopular among the cult of
Scientism as practiced by conventional medical researchers today.)
How to improve
your clinical trial results
For improved results, try to use the most harmful placebo substances
you can. For example, in real clinical trials involving AIDS
patients - who tend to be lactose intolerant - researchers have
used pills made of, guess what? Lactose!
That's sort of like running a clinical trial on a cure for heroin
addiction and using heroin as the placebo, isn't it? Gee, somehow
our drug worked "better than placebo." Funny how that works, isn't
it?
And if you still don't get the results you want, just start
inventing your own data like other clinical trial researchers do.
Remember Dr Scott Reuben?
This highly-respected clinical trial
researcher
faked at least twenty-one clinical trials for
Big Pharma. His fraudulent clinical trials are still
being cited to sell prescription medications!
Heck, who needs placebo when you can just invent the data?
Come to think of it, who needs science when you can just use
anything you want and call it placebo in the first place?
Conventional medicine operates clinical trials in the same way that
banks and securities firms handle mortgage documents. They all just
sort of make things up as they go along, committing felony crimes on
a daily basis while hoping nobody notices.
On that note, check out this amazing
story by Greg Hunter called
The Perfect No-Prosecution Crime.
Where on the
skeptics when it comes to Big Pharma science fraud?
Seriously, you just have
to love the state of medical science today.
I've never watched a more hilarious
group of nincompoops reassure each other that they're all so
scientific while practicing the most quack-ridden chicanery
imaginable. The stuff being pulled off today in the name of Big
Pharma's clinical trials makes psychic detectives and tarot card
readers look downright scientifically gifted by comparison.
It really makes you wonder about so-called "skeptics," doesn't it?
If they're skeptical of homeopathy,
tarot cards, psychic mediums and people who claim they can levitate,
I can at least understand the urge to ask tough questions about all
these things. I ask tough questions, too, especially when people
tell me they've seen ghosts or spirits coming back from the dead or
other unexplained phenomena.
(And I've already publicly denounced
so-called "psychic surgery" which it quite obviously little more
than sleight-of-hand trickery combined with animal blood.)
But most conventional skeptics never step out of bounds of their
"safety zone" of popular topics for which skepticism may be safely
expressed. They won't dare ask skeptical questions about the quack
science backing the pharmaceutical industry, for example. Nor will
they ask tough questions about vaccines, or mammography, or
chemotherapy.
And you'd be hard pressed to find
anything more steeped in outright fraudulent quackery than the
pharmaceutical industry as operated today (and the cancer branch of
it in particular).
That's why I'm skeptical about the skeptics. If a skeptic doesn't
question the loosey goosey pseudoscience practiced by Big Pharma,
then they really have no credibility as a skeptic. You can't be
selectively skeptical about some things but then a fall-for-anything
fool on other scams just because they're backed by drug companies.
But getting back to this study in particular...
Abstract of
the study
Here's some of the text from the abstract of this study published in
the
Annals of Internal Medicine.
What's in Placebos: Who Knows? Analysis of
Randomized, Controlled Trials
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Beatrice A. Golomb, MD, PhD
-
Laura C. Erickson, BS
-
Sabrina Koperski, BS
-
Deanna Sack, BS
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Murray Enkin, MD
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Jeremy Howick, PhD
Background
No regulations govern placebo
composition. The composition of placebos can influence trial
outcomes and merits reporting.
Purpose
To assess how often investigators
specify the composition of placebos in randomized,
placebo-controlled trials.
Data Sources
4 English-language general and
internal medicine journals with high impact factors.
Study Selection
3 reviewers screened titles and
abstracts of the journals to identify randomized,
placebo-controlled trials published from January 2008 to
December 2009.
Data Extraction
Reviewers independently abstracted
data from the introduction and methods sections of identified
articles, recording treatment type (pill, injection, or other)
and whether placebo composition was stated. Discrepancies were
resolved by consensus.
Data Synthesis
Most studies did not disclose the
composition of the study placebo. Disclosure was less common for
pills than for injections and other treatments (8.2% vs. 26.7%;
P = 0.002).
Limitation: Journals with high impact factors may not be
representative.
Conclusion
Placebos were seldom described in
randomized, controlled trials of pills or capsules. Because the
nature of the placebo can influence trial outcomes, placebo
formulation should be disclosed in reports of placebo-controlled
trials.
Primary Funding Source
University of California Foundation
Fund 3929 - Medical Reasoning.
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