Another Reason to “Do Your Own Research”

Remember when the media told you during the Pandemic not to do your own research? They told you to ‘trust the experts’.

More and more the responses and discussions that happened during the Pandemic look unproductive to say the least.

It’s probably why we don’t hear much analysis of what governments, the medical industry and the media did right and wrong during those awful years. They don’t want to look bad.

Today I want to put another nail in all these organization’s coffins. Specifically I want to target the US Government’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The same FDA that gave us the horrible food pyramid from the 1970’s through the 1990’s.

One of the main jobs of the FDA is to thoroughly analyze new prescription medications to make sure they work. Drug companies pay millions of dollars and years of time, supposedly, to put their drugs through rigorous testing in order to pass FDA approval.

When the FDA gives its stamp of approval for a drug, it means that drug does what the company says it does without doing harm to the patient. It should be truly ‘safe and effective’.

Ehh..not so much. Now it appears the FDA approved many drugs without ANY evidence the drug actually works. Not only that. Many of the drugs they approved may be dangerous as well.

Many of the drugs are allowed to stay on the market despite evidence showing they cause harm. Yet the only legal way to obtain prescription drugs is to have an ‘expert’ give you permission to use them.

What was that about trusting the experts again?

A two-year investigation by the news organization the Lever and the McGraw Center for Business Journalism (second link above) found:

“From 2013 to 2022, 73% of drugs approved by the FDA didn’t meet the agency’s four foundational standards required to show the drugs work as expected. Fifty-five percent of the drugs met only one of those standards, and 39% met none of them.”

Furthermore:

“More than half the drug approvals were based on preliminary data, which meant the pharmaceutical companies did not submit evidence that patients had fewer symptoms, showed improvement or had their lives extended.”

Apparently this trend has accelerated over the last decade.

Gives you lots of confidence in the ‘experts’ doesn’t it? I’m constantly complaining to anyone who will listen about people in my assisted living homes. Many of them come to us with 20-30 medications. If they don’t change anything like their diet and sedentary lifestyle, they don’t improve.

Many medications do what they are designed to do:

• Lower your blood pressure

• Lower your cholesterol

• Control blood sugar

Those are the medications that ARE effective. They passed the FDA as intended. Yet they are not making people better. They are making people dependent on them.

If the only way you have to control your markers is pharmaceutical drugs, you will be a customer for life.

Lifestyle changes work the same way. A good diet and plenty of exercise require you to be dependent on them the rest of your life. The difference is they are so much more safe and effective.

They just don’t increase profits for the pharmaceutical industry. That’s why you have to do your own research.