the evidence is mounting...

...that pharmaceutical companies appear not to be here for our benefit.

this post has become huge (but readable, I hope) I was going to break it into two but I believe that all sections have a bearing on the others.

"Avandia (GSK) (rosiglitazone) is the poster child for the dangers of diabetes drug treatment. A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine5 linked Avandia to a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack, and a 64 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death, compared to patients treated with other methods."

"Dangerous type II diabetes drugs are again brought into the spotlight by a whistleblower who reports that Takeda Pharmaceuticals concealed and downplayed adverse events reports for its diabetes drug Actos, including hundreds of reports of heart failure; the drug has been banned in Germany and France and is the subject of hundreds of lawsuits, but continues to be sold in the U.S.

Dr Mercola and his articles can be a little scaremongery but I think his heart's in the right place. He is your nagging wife/mother/partner/doctor/significant other/whatever that you know is speaking some good but, well none of us like being told to put down the sweets/pint/pie and start moving.

There was a programme on BBC1 at the beginning of the week about the role of one individual 'pitted against' the Goliath of collective pharmaceutical companies - the battle ground was cancer care and potential treatments. 

When I was little I seem to remember Panorama was a very serious show that talked about grown up things in a fair way although I may not have been aware at the time that programmes could have 'slants'. 
I've watched episodes of Panorama since those halcyon days where all I had to worry about was getting my homework in on time or at least inventing a very good excuse as to why it wasn't. Unlike many of my blogging colleagues who speak from some position further up the medical pecking order than I this programme/person was considered to be hopeless in a variety of ways. From my position very far down the medical pecking order (even an auxiliary nurse is higher up the pecking order than a patient) I saw the programme as delicately fair.

"Unfortunately, every time I think that Panorama is going in for the kill, the reporter (Richard Bilton) seems to back off. Perhaps it’s the editing. From reports that I’ve had, the producers seemed to “get it,” but one wonders if something got watered down in the final edit." 
(wouldn't there normally be a question mark at the end of that quoted sentence? I only ask as I wonder if its non-existence in this instance points toward why I believe the writer and I 'read' the show differently?)

...a thirty minute show, it went on to say, wasn't long enough to go into the 35 year history Dr Burzynski has of trying to treat cancer...

"That left [panorama] asking the question at the beginning of how Burzynski has gotten away with this for so long but not really even trying to give an answer at the end."

I believe the surgeon David Gorski/Orac has missed the point: the pharmaceutical companies have been trying to treat cancer for 40 years and seem arguably no further along the cure road than DrB. If there were any worthwhile treatment available then the parents of cancered kids would snatch it, whatever its source.
But in the majority of cases it seems there isn't. 
We've been poorly served by the pharmacos. Fantastically successful marketing has led us to believe that if we get ill of course we'll get better - there'll be a pill for it.

"Unless Burzynski openly admits during the show that he knows it’s all a bit of a scam, that he’s deliberately not released trail data to the peer review process, that he charges massive amounts for a treatment that he knows there’s no good evidence for, that he admits that he’s exploited loopholes in FDA procedures to keep it all going as long as he has, that he openly lies to patients about potential success and how treatments are progressing, then not a lot is going to change. Well not immediately, anyway." 
excerpted from

Predictions and hopes about Panorama on Burzynski from the skeptical blog.  

I'm very much in favour of science even when it would seem that science isn't very in favour of me. How else can we explain research into the condition  labelled MS of over 150 years and yet still be no closer to finding a pharmaceutical solution to what's going on? It could be viewed as quite demoralising to have a condition about which no one would seem to care enough to look sufficiently to see anything. The alternative view where I, as a patient, am not demoralised but angry as hell is that researchers have known since looking at postmortem brains in the 19th century that a vein is involved in every piece of damage and if we'd been using the imaging technology available to us since the last century we'd have had a very lucrative disease licked by now. 

It's hard not to be a cynic in these situations. 

What I believe both bloggers have missed, commenting from the positions of health as I imagine and hope that they do is that the role of hope in dis-ease is vital and shouldn't be ignored. When a man says he can cure your dying child or, at least, doesn't say your child is going to die the parents receive a lift which in turn contributes to a boost for the child (as I think was reported in the show) the child shows a benefit at the beginning of the drug regime change but then slips back to the pre-Burzynski level of illness.

Instead of rubbishing the non existant/unscientific results of a doctor it's hard to find anything to agree with let's investigate the, albeit fleeting, benefits that were reported. I'll say it again, if mainstream medicine were able to offer a viable alternative then there just wouldn't be space for the Dr Burzynskis of this world. But while it provides no alternative don't be a dog in the manger by stopping patients from looking elsewhere.

the power of placebo in drug trials is often stronger than the treatments its there to function as a control for.