Simon:  Most medical studies are false. Big Pharma influences and corrupts most medical studies. In this episode, you will learn more about the corruption going on in medical science. 

Discover why you trust the Food And Drug Administration for drug safety. Also, learn how Big Pharma corrupts science and why you can't trust many drug studies.  

Intro jingle: Welcome to the Cancer Wisdom podcast. This podcast teaches you how to treat cancer with natural remedies without using toxic treatments. Discover how to take charge of your health and not be a slave to Big Pharma medicine. Here's your host, Simon Persson.

Simon: I had a discussion with two of my friends where we talked about how drugs are tested. They believed that there was strong safety to prevent a drug from harming other people and that there were financial incentives for drug companies to do a good job. But they didn't know that the science behind drug approval is extremely corrupt.

So, in America, the Food and Drug Administration is supposed to make sure that drugs are safe. It's the oldest consumer protection agency in the US. It wasn't known by its present name until 1930.

In 1905, the American Medical Association created a system for controlling drugs. President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

It was the same year that the FDA's modern regulatory functions began. The aim of the FDA is to protect public health by ensuring that drugs are safe.

It also looks at the food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation. And they have to make sure that they are harmless.  

FDA also regulates the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution of tobacco products. Before drugs can go on the market, they need to pass through the FDA's three-step process.

One part of the FDA is the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). They have the responsibility for the drug evaluation.

There are three steps in this process: preclinical,  clinical, and New Drug Application, NDA. In the first preclinical step, the drug company discovers a new compound, and it starts the FDA approval process.

The preclinical phase is the drug maker's discovery and screening phase. In this stage, they test the drug on animals to determine the toxicity level. And they also have to find out how safe and effective the drug is.

Then, the drug company submits an Investigational New Drug Application (INDA) to the FDA. The INDA includes basic facts about the drug and its plan for human testing.  

The FDA then verifies the planned clinical trials and that they will not harm humans. Then, the drug moves to the next phase, which is the clinical study phase.  

It's when they test on human subjects. This step has three phases. In phase one, the drug company needs to find the most frequent side effects.  

There are usually 20 to 80 participants. In phase two, the drug company needs to find the drug's effectiveness. They need to gather data on how the drug works in people with a disease or condition. The drug company also needs to compare the drug against a placebo or another drug.

The FDA then studies the short-term side effects, and in this phase, a few hundred people take part in phase two studies. And in phase three, the drug company tests the safety and efficacy in more people.

So, the manufacturer can experiment with different doses in combination with a few drugs. In phase three, there are usually more than a thousand patients. The final phase in the FDA approval process is the New Drug Application, NDA review.  

So once the clinical trials finish, the drug company submits a New Drug Application. So, it contains data about animal and human testing. It also needs to have information about the drug manufacturing process.

The FDA has 60 days to review the NDA before filing it. After the FDA files the NDA, the organization reviews all the research submitted by the drug company. And they also look at the label.  

They need to make sure that healthcare professionals and consumers get the correct information. And finally the FDA inspects the drug manufacturing facility.

This process seems to be a great way to make sure that a drug is safe. But what not many people know about this process is that pharmaceutical companies do all clinical trials. The FDA only reads the studies and then decides to approve them or not. They don't actually do the testing.  

Drug producers only need to prove that a drug is somewhat better in two placebo trials. A placebo can be something like a sugar pill or a fake product that you compare with the drug.

You need to know if the healing effect has to do with the patient's own mind or the drug itself. The problem with drug companies doing these studies is that they can manipulate clinical trials.  

They can tinker with the statistics and do a lot of things to make the drug seem better than it actually is. Drug companies only need to create two studies that show that the drug is better than the placebo.  

So they can basically make 1000 studies, and there can be 998 failures. And if they found a way to make the drug seem better than it is in two trials, they can give only these two trials to the FDA. The FDA can then approve the drug.

The drug company can also manipulate studies. For example, they can say people who died in the study belonged to the placebo when they actually were first part of the drug group. Or they can remove certain patients from the drug trial that weren't beneficial for the drug.

There are some examples of how Big Pharma manipulated data to make a drug accepted by the FDA. One example is  Eli Lilly. The company conducted 20 studies to prove the safety of the anti-depressant Prozac.

The company only submitted three studies to the FDA for approval. But what they didn't give the FDA was 17 studies where they failed to show that the drug was safe.  

In the beginning, the FDA denied Lilly approval for Prozac, but then the company sent the third data submission to the FDA.  

And the FDA then had two studies that showed an improvement over a placebo and then approved the drug. The third study Eli Lilly submitted used statistical manipulation and repackaging of existing data.  

Manipulating study data is common among drug studies. So, there are many ways pharmaceutical companies can use legal ways to manipulate FDA rules. They often hire a team of writers, statisticians, and editors to repackage trial results.

The drug company can also hide serious harm in mountains of documentation that drug agencies will never find. So, the problem with this system is that the drug company is the judge. Only an unbiased third party should do the testing.  

We cannot trust drug companies because they have shown before that they manipulate data.

Drug companies might not submit trials or conduct them in countries with little public oversight. It's, therefore, impossible to know if these trials ever existed.  

Another problem is that the main focus of drug companies is to make a profit. It's very naive to expect that the drug industry will perform honest research on its products.

It's like grading your exam. If you knew that you had to pass an exam and were able to grade it, wouldn't you give yourself a good grade?

Another problem is that bias is often introduced early in the design of the trial. Investigators have little or no input into the trial design.

Organizations such as the FDA have no access to the raw data. Only company employees have seen the actual data. What the FDA receives is a glamorized version of it. Another problem is that most trials are industry-sponsored in the EU and the United States.   

They are mainly private companies called Contract Research Organizations(CROS). The main focus is to work with marketing and advertising.  

So the workers there are, in reality, salespersons with no sense of science or medicine. And they have taken control of clinical research. So that means that science has turned into marketing and professors as promoters.  

The sad reality is that it's no longer possible to be much of the clinical research published today. Most prestigious journals have a severe conflict of interest.  

Their income often comes from reprints and is a huge chunk of the top journals' income. Scientists may lose large incomes from sales of reprints if they are too critical of the industry.

Medical journals have become an extension of the marketing arm of Big Pharma. Drug companies often order reprints if the journal publishes a positive study.

If the journal doesn't do as told, it may lose 100,000 dollars in profit. And that can make it hard for them to meet the end-of-the-year budget.  

The biggest problem is that the drug industry more or less controls itself. Politicians have weakened their regulatory demands over the years.

They think more about money and profit than the safety of patients. The main reason why we can't trust the FDA is because drug companies control the FDA.   

Drug companies have people on the FDA's board of directors, and that means that they can affect what happens during these meetings.  

FDA regulators also have financial conflicts of interest with the drug they test. One example is Lester Crawford. He approved Vioxx, a Merck drug.

After he resigned from the FDA, he became senior counsel for Merck's PR firm, Policy Directions Inc.

He later received a fine of $19,000. So, he was charged for falsely reporting he had stock in companies regulated by the FDA. Another example is in the late 1950s when Henry Welch was chief of the FDA's Antibiotics Division.  

Henry collected more than a quarter of a million dollars in private fees from drug companies. He certified the efficacy and safety of their antibiotics. Henry also edited a journal and shared papers in print with drug companies.

People who get money from the pharmaceutical industry shouldn't advocate for their patients because if they get a financial incentive to approve the drugs, how can we know that these drugs work?  

When FDA scientists find serious harm, they often get intimidated by their superiors. The FDA has accepted safety data it knew was fraudulent. For example, the data might show that the drug was unsafe. But the organization still allowed it.

Another big problem is that the FDA receives money from the drug industry. In 1992, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act changed all that. Before, it took quite a long time for drug companies to get their drugs approved by the FDA.

Pharmaceutical companies have patents for drugs. And the countdown of the patent starts during the clinical trials. If they don't get their drug on the market immediately, they might lose some years of their patent.  

Therefore, they wanted to make the whole drug approval process much quicker. And with the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, they were able to give money to the FDA so that they could approve the drug much quicker.

The act allowed drug companies to pay the FDA for its services and ensured that the FDA could hire more medical scientists to deal with the drug application load.  

And at the moment the FDA receives the majority of its drug review funding from Big Pharma. So, it's the same industry that it should regulate.

Drug companies pay a substantial amount of the FDA's operating costs. So that's a huge conflict of interest. Taxpayers provide the agency with one-third of its funding, and the rest of the review budget comes from pharmaceutical companies.  

And because of this act, there's a decline in drug regulation. In 1988, the FDA only approved about  4% of the drugs. And ten years later, it was 66%. By the 1990s, the FDA approved over 80% of the industry's applications.

There's also a problem with the way the clinical trials are run. Trials often have short time frames that can determine the safety of the drug.

There are usually several hundred to a few thousand patients that are part of the drug test that the FDA approves. But they only last for several weeks or months.  
Because the time frame is quite small, the FDA can only detect the most common types of severe drug effects.  

Most trials also use healthy participants to show that the drug works. Therefore, it can't be a good representation of its use in sick patients. And it's also impossible to find all bad reactions. Some severe side effects can occur after several years.  

Each year, more than two million Americans suffer from adverse reactions to FDA-approved drugs. These side effects lead to about 100,000 deaths per year.

Doctors can also prescribe the drug for off-label uses. It's when they use the drug for conditions not approved by the FDA. And not everyone reports all these adverse events because they are only voluntary.

So, the actual number of people dying from drugs or having side effects can be even larger. The most disturbing thing is that drugs approved by the FDA have caused serious side effects. In a 2012 study, they found that the FDA's recall system isn't enough to warn healthcare providers or patients.  

The study found that the FDA only issued notices for about half of Class One recalls from 2004 to 2011. Class one recalls are the most serious, and they usually cause death or severe injury. So, the FDA may suggest or request a recall, but it has no legal authority to enforce it.  

Therefore, manufacturers are responsible for pulling dangerous drugs from the market. The FDA may request post-marketing studies to follow up on safety concerns. But many drug makers don't do them.   

On average, the US pulls about 4500 drugs and devices from shelves every year. And all these recalled products have FDA approval.

The recalls from the FDA can range from packaging issues to life-threatening injuries. Through the years, the FDA has made some huge blunders and ended up with irreparable damage and even death.

One example is Quaaludes. They were used as a sleeping aid between 1962  and 1985. So, people who took the drug became manic, had convulsions, vomited, and some even died. And now, this drug is considered a Schedule 1 drug like heroin or LSD.

By the 1970s, Quaalude became a popular street drug. If you have looked at the Hollywood movie The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio, there was a scene where he and his assistant used Quaaludes. They started to hallucinate and had problems talking and moving their bodies.

In 1982 alone, there were about 2,764 reported emergency room visits as a result of Quaalude use. Another drug accepted by the FDA that later caused a lot of problems was Cylert. Cylert went on the market in 1975.

This drug treated ADHD and ADD by stimulating the central nervous system. But the problem was that this drug caused liver toxicity.  

So, there were 13 cases of acute liver failure reported to the FDA. Eleven of these cases resulted in death or liver transplants.

Another dangerous drug approved by the FDA was Darvon or Darvocet, which was on the market for 55 years as an opioid pain reliever. This drug caused heart issues and killed about 2,110 patients between 1981 and 1999 alone. But the FDA refused to recall it from the market until 2010.

Another dangerous drug that the FDA approved was DES. About five to ten million mothers and female fetuses got exposed to it. The drug company that created this drug claimed it prevented spontaneous abortion, miscarriage, and premature labor.

But it was later found the drug caused cervical and vaginal cancer. The drug also increased the risk of breast cancer and cancer in children. And women also started to have more infertility and pregnancy issues. Some women experienced early menopause.

Vioxx was another mistake by the FDA. So, it was an anti-inflammatory medication intended to treat arthritis. So, it was one of the most extensive recalls in history.

Clinical trials showed no increase in the risk of heart attack or stroke. But it was only years later that the side effects showed. Females can treat their breast cancer with Tamoxifen, which the FDA approved.  

So, this drug blocks estrogen, a female hormone. Certain types of breast cancer use estrogen to grow. According to the World Health Organization, Tamoxifen is a human carcinogen, which means that it may cause cancer.  

So how can the FDA approve a drug that's supposed to stop breast cancer but, in reality, causes more of it? Tamoxifen has caused over two dozen health-destroying side effects. Hospitals still use it as a first-line treatment for certain types of breast cancer.

I have mainly talked about the FDA and why the drug approval process is corrupt and is not working. And now, I'm going to talk about other ways drug companies or other organizations manipulate science. There are several ways that drug companies can manipulate studies.  

One trick is to use ghostwriters. A ghostwriter is a person with a PhD who writes a fake study. This person hypes the benefits of the drug while hiding adverse side effects.   

When this ghostwriter has written his paper, the drug companies then find a prominent doctor or scientist to make them attach their name to the study.   

Now, it seems that this prominent doctor or scientist was the one who wrote the study. So when this prominent name is on the study, it can raise eyebrows and make doctors or other scientists read it.

Medical journals then publish these studies, which attract attention from the scientific community. Medical writing agencies do everything to disguise their ghostwritten studies.

They can use the term medical writers to disguise the use of ghostwriters. Ghostwriters can receive up to $20 000 per report, and they can also get the travel paid or receive other benefits.

A ghostwriter is not illegal in medical science, but when they attach a real scientist to the study, they are deceiving the public.

What's disturbing is that a third of academic professors have financial ties to drug makers. Doctors often rely on peer-reviewed medical journals to learn about prescription drugs. And thanks to ghostwriting, you can't trust scientific journals.

Most peer-reviewed studies don't even get access to the raw data. They can't really know if the one who created the study manipulated the data.

They can only do that if they can scrutinize the data. Another problem with scientific studies is industry-sponsored studies.  

So many companies give grants to researchers to paint their product in a positive light. Industry-sponsored studies often show a positive correlation with the things they study. Producers of animal products often use deceitful studies to make their products seem better than they actually are.  

You can see if a study is sponsored by a company at the bottom of the study. Everyone who creates a study needs to tell everyone if they have some financial ties to some organizations. If you can see that the study got funding from an egg company or an organization, then you shouldn't trust these studies.  

It's also easy to fake a study. The easiest trick is to use a short trial period, which doesn't last for more than two weeks. You also need to have few participants and no real control group.  

A control group is participants who don't receive the product. Companies can also use statistics to make their products seem better than the placebo. For example, let's say that their drug had a two percent success rate, and the placebo had a 1 percent success rate.

Both these groups had poor results. But if you divide 2 percent by 1, you get 200 percent. Now, they can say that the drug was 200 percent more effective than the placebo. But if you look closely, both of them had poor results.  

It's true that the drug was 200 percent more effective than the placebo if you divide the percentage. But that doesn't mean that the drug was better.

Other ways drug companies can manipulate science is by ignoring studies. Doctors and drug companies often ignore the signs that point to the disease's solution. For example, heart disease is the number one cause of death in the world.

A plant-based diet is the only thing shown to reverse heart disease. Both Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn reversed heart disease by telling their participants to eat a plant-based diet. Dr. Esselstyn's diet was extremely strict.  

The participant could only eat plant foods and fruits that didn't have a lot of fat. They couldn't consume oils, nuts, or other things like avocados with a lot of fat. And he had great results. Less than 1% of the participants who followed his diet had another heart attack.

But these studies are ignored by the medical system. When a patient has heart problems, the doctor only gives them cholesterol-lowering drugs or blood thinners to treat their conditions. Why are they not telling them to eat a plant-based diet so that they don't need to use a drug?

The problem is that hospitals are controlled by Big Pharma. Drug companies earn more money by people paying a subscription to their drugs than reversing their diseases.

They need to make sure that doctors ignore how to stop heart disease and instead tell them to use drugs to treat their patients.

Another example is chemotherapy, which has never been shown to heal cancer. The most famous chemotherapy study from Australia showed that chemo was, on average, only 2.3% effective in healing cancer.

If you survive from cancer, chemo only plays a tiny part. But since the Big Pharma cartel runs hospitals, we still use it despite its poor results.

If we were all about science, we would have banned chemotherapy or radiotherapy a long time ago.   Another way drug companies can manipulate science is by making things up.  

Drug companies want everyone to believe that our genes are behind our diseases when it's not. Instead, they want us to ignore that stress, diet, pollution, or our bad habits make us sick and can cause cancer.

They also endorse the germ theory despite poor evidence. The germ theory is the belief that viruses or bacteria are behind diseases such as COVID-19.

We are also told that medical disorders are chemical imbalances in the brain. This theory began in a tuberculosis ward in New York in 1952.  

Without any proof, some person said that chemical imbalances causes conditions such as depression or anxiety. But no brain or blood test proves the existence of mental illnesses. Real physical illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, or heart disease have biological markers that you can use,  

Mental disorders don't have any test. Instead, psychotherapists have invented mental disorders without using any scientific proof. They just create a name of a mental disease, generate a list of symptoms, and then diagnose it.

They haven't done any studies to prove their theory. I'm not saying that depression, anxiety, or negative emotions are illusions or that people fake them. What I mean is that they are caused by trauma or other reasons and not by a medical imbalance in the brain.

More kids than ever get an ADHD diagnosis. So people expect kids to behave like adults, and when they don't, they're deemed ADHD cases and drugged.

You could have fixed their behavior by working with the children or changing their diet. For example, some kids may eat too much white sugar, and when you stop giving them a lot of sugar, they may calm down. Or the kid might love to run and be active, and when he's stuck in a classroom, he might get bored and restless.  

Or he can be really smart, and the pace is too slow for him, and he can finish before his classmates, and therefore he might lose interest or focus.

If you gave him more challenging tasks and looked at why he was so restless, you could have solved the issue. Instead, he is deemed as a mental case that needs a drug to fix his issue.  

Today, it's really easy to diagnose depression. You only have to show that you have 5 out of 9 symptoms almost every day. Before when you got a diagnosis, you had to show signs of depression for six months.

But then the psychotherapist cut that down to three months, then one month, and now you only need to show these symptoms for two weeks.

And what's interesting is that in earlier versions of the, diagnostic book, they had a grief exception. So this exception said that it was okay to feel depressed if you grieved a loved one. But in later editions, that exception disappeared.

The psychotherapists acknowledged that trauma from the loss of a loved one could cause depression. But now they say that it's just a chemical imbalance, and it has nothing to do with trauma or other things.  

Another way companies can manipulate science is by stopping it. So many influential people and organizations stop studies from revealing the deceit going on. '

One example is GMOs, which stands for Genetically Modified Organisms. Monsanto was the number one biotech company before being bought by Bayer.  

They always made sure that no one really studied GMO foods. Therefore, there are no good human GMO feeding studies. Monsanto has a long history of fraud and deceit. Their toxic herbicide, Roundup, caused cancer in people.

But they are still allowed to sell their product. According to U.S. law, GMO ingredients are considered food additives. And additives must undergo extensive safety studies. 

If approved, the label of food products must contain the additive on the list of ingredients. But there's an exception if their products get deemed Generally Recognized As Safe, or GRAS.

But, the additive must go through peer-reviewed published studies to get a GRAS stamp. Or there must be a consensus among the scientific community that the product is safe. But GMO foods have not been through either of them.

The FDA declared that GMO foods are GRAS as long as their producers say they are. So, that means the biotech company can say this product is safe without any studies.

What's interesting is that you can't patent natural substances like vegetables. But, biotech companies can patent GMO foods. If that's true, GMOs can't be ordinary vegetables.  

Biotech companies have stopped many scientists from revealing the truth. And when scientists try to reveal the truth, they often lose their jobs or reputation. One example is Dr. Pustai.  

Years ago, he was a respected scientific name. He got a 1.6 million pound grant from the UK government. His task was to sign a rigorous safety assessment protocol for testing GMO foods. Two years into his research, he reviewed several confidential industry GMO studies, and what he saw shocked him.  

He publicly expressed his concerns about GMOs and became a hero at his institute. Pustai found problems with GMOs and claimed that they were unsafe. But then, only two phone calls from the UK's prime minister's office changed everything.

Dr. Pustai lost his job at the institute after working there for 35 years, his research team was dissolved, and the government stopped the long-term testing protocol. He also got threats of lawsuits if he revealed the truth.  

It's the same with vaccines. Every time you criticize vaccines, you get into trouble. You are not allowed to criticize vaccines on YouTube or other mainstream media.   

So, there are ways that we can solve the issue with fake studies. Every scientific journal should have strict guidelines to forbid ghostwriters. If someone slips through, then the study should be retracted.  

The drug company and the scientists behind the study should be banned from the journal or other journals. And the FDA also needs to become an independent organization with no financial ties to Big Pharma. They should make all the clinical studies themselves and stop the drug if they see it's dangerous.

The FDA should also have rigorous approval standards, and any scientist in the FDA shouldn't have any financial ties to a company. And if this person is found out, he should lose his job immediately.   The FDA should also allow natural remedies to be tested.  

I also think that hospitals and drug companies should be non-profit organizations. So that can prevent them from having a financial intent to sell drugs.

Hospitals should also teach patients more about prevention, such as eating a plant-based diet,  how to deal with stress, or how you can live a more healthy life.

They should tell patients how to prevent heart disease, diabetes, and cancer by using simple things that they can change in their lives. So pharmaceutical companies and Western medicine are not trustworthy.  

So the best way to become healthy is by taking responsibility for your health. By changing your bad habits, you can lower your risk of getting cancer. You can download our free guide to learn nine ways to prevent cancer by using natural remedies.

By following these steps, you can lower your risk of getting cancer in the first place instead of just taking drugs when it's too late. I will provide a link to this guide in the description box below. Thank you for listening to this episode, and I'll see you in the next one.