This post is primarily addressed to our younger folks who have not created the vicious cycle. We the older generations are the ones who have done it or been brainwashed to believe in drugs and accept them. Hence, we are of not much help to be in charge of breaking the vicious cycle for you, as it’d be like leaving the fox to guard the henhouse.
Is the vicious cycle of toxic drugs anyone’s fault?
I believe it was negligence in the beginning. We have been treating our body as a visually single entity after the modern drug era began over a century ago. Then, since the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in 1994, we have been treating (testing) herbal supplements/medicines using the wrong scientific technologies well established for chemical drugs, but not suitable for herbs. Consequently, over the past several decades, the above two actions have skewed most, if not all, of the results of scientific research involving herbs, such as the identity and quality of herbal products. These have led the mainstream drug scientists to declare traditional herbal therapy is anecdotal and unscientific, but modern drug therapy is ‘evidence-based’ and scientific. However, both are not scientific. These are already discussed and documented in my publications (print and online), especially those of the last three years. If you have followed my newsletter or blog, you would probably realize I didn’t really piece together the connection between the identity and quality of herbal products, our body, and how the drug vicious cycle began to evolve when synthetic drugs entered our complex body to cause havoc, until about 16 years ago. Therefore, I think the vicious cycle may not be anybody’s fault. Unless the drug makers had already known about it decades earlier and kept it quiet until I happened to discover it. This interaction of drugs and our complex body causing major disturbances in it is described recently in the article “A Disruptive Concept in Drug Therapy” which you can find in its entirety on the April 2, 2019 post.
However, after the first new drug, Valbenazine (Ingrezza), was approved on April 11, 2017, for treating the first drug-caused disease called Tardive Dyskinesia (involuntary body movements), I see it simply as a gift from our government, that means you and me, giving pharmaceutical companies a free hand to continue making toxic drugs with official sanction of their vicious cycle. The drug scientists might not even have thought of it and how it came about, but on April 11, 2017, an amazing business opportunity fell on their lap, after decades of their priming of consumers and government health officials that we needed their ‘scientific’ drug therapy. Yet no drugs, whether old or new, have ever been seriously held accountable, because no one honestly knew what was going to happen once these new drugs entered our body. Our body does what it does since antiquity and we simply can’t control it. Otherwise we would have all kinds of human health problems under control. Instead, after decades of sophisticated scientific drug research, we have this vicious cycle and no idea what our body would do to a brand-new drug. Do you think our scientists really have control of our drug-therapy process? We produce one drug for some illness, but we never know what it finally does, all depending on what our body makes it do, or not do, after it enters it. For example, the drug Thalidomide was developed as a sedative and hypnotic but was found to be good also for respiratory infections as well as morning sickness. After pregnant women using it and gave birth to babies with missing limps, hands, and other deformities (“Thalidomide babies”) in the 1960’s, it was removed from the market. Then, only in recent years, it has been resurrected as a treatment for leprosy and cancer (multiple myeloma). This strengthens my observation that modern drug therapy is not scientific. It is just a trial-and-error process like the practice of traditional herbal medicine, except that all the impurities in herbs have been with us since human life began, while those in synthetic drugs are brand new. With these brand-new chemicals, our real experience with them starts only after their 10-20 years of clinical trial, when they are approved for use in humans. Incidentally, Thalidomde was supposed to be an immunomodulating drug. A lot of Chinese tonic herbs have immunomodulating properties, such as astragalus and lycium (goji). Could it be that Thalidomide was resurrected for treating multiple myeloma because of its immunomodulating properties exhibited in lab tests but never been shown in humans as with Chinese tonics?
Regardless, now we have a situation. For millennia, we have needed and used herbs for our illnesses, and they have kept us alive and well. Then, only in the short period of 200 years after the modern-drug era began, many of these herbal medicines have been discarded and rapidly replaced by modern synthetic chemicals. The herbs (like foods) have been with us since human life began. We know what is safe and what can kill from our long human-use experience. We don’t need to start testing them as with brand-new synthetic chemicals. However, we have been artificially producing such chemicals from petrochemicals that we seldom, if ever, try to eat or drink, because they are most likely toxic to begin with. The chemical/drug thus produced is always accompanied by other chemicals, such as reagents, intermediates, and byproducts from the synthetic process. Even after purification trying to get rid of these, some of which still persist in small amounts as impurities in the ‘pure’ drug to cause trouble (see the previous post, 4th Post). Could Thalidomide’s toxic effects be due to its hidden impurities that caused the birth defects?
While the vicious cycle appears to be nobody’s fault, the pharmaceutical companies certainly did not hide their greed after the first drug, Valbenazine (Ingrezza), was approved. Its first owner wastes no time to take advantage of this official vicious cycle by charging each patient (ultimately our healthcare system) $200/day or $73,000/year. Considering this new drug-caused disease occurring in more than 500,000 people in the US, imagine how much money this company will quietly take from us U.S. taxpayers yearly, with our implicit permission – tens of billion dollars! This is just the beginning and only the first drug! I don’t think the other drug makers will be less greedy, because after the vicious drug cycle was firmly established, it already has us trapped in it. Our government, after so many decades of manipulation by the drug industry, does not know how to deal with it. The politicians continue to pay lip service and bicker among themselves. They may not even know that this vicious cycle exists and expect future drugs to be better and not more toxic in intensity and in number. The other politicians may simply think that businesses are entitled to decent profits, totally unaware that this is not a regular business. We now have an industry that has a license to make and sell any drugs and charge us any prices they want with absolute impunity, whether or not these products work. When some patient dies, they blame the death on anything but themselves and their drugs, and they can get away with it. With any other products (cars, planes, home appliances, etc.) that have so many defects, resulting in hurting or killing people, or simply annoying them, they would be shunned by consumers and their manufacturers would be bankrupt in no time. Yet, because of the complexity of drug development and therapy, involving common sense and different kinds of sciences, few if anyone in government have the training and experience to dare question the drug industry’s practice, especially when it deals with our health. My generation and the one that follows have been bombarded by drug ads for 4 decades. Many of us have been brain-washed by these ads to believe in drugs or at least find them not objectionable, especially when you consider our scientific advances in other medical areas, such as hip replacement, tooth implants, ‘bionic’ limbs, and other types of surgery that save lives, with dramatic and visible results.
Few of us have the upbringing, training, and experience in diverse fields to recognize what is wrong with our drug-therapy system. I have been in this field for over 55 years, yet I didn’t see anything wrong with drugs myself until only about 16 years ago. I believe you, our younger folks, should know about this so that I can help you break this vicious cycle before it will be too late.
I have a young granddaughter. I want her and other young people to grow up to have a true natural alternative to this vicious cycle of only toxic drugs which gives the drug industry absolutely no incentive to produce safer, cheaper and better drugs. The two things that I most worry for you, which you will inherit from us, are: (1) our ruined (or about to be ruined) environment; and (2) the toxic vicious drug cycle. Neither is due to any fault of yours. Both are caused by the greed of a minute percentage of our older generations. Because of our current dysfunctional, and sometimes downright corrupt political system, I don’t trust my own generation, or the next, to solve either problem for you. Since I am no expert in environmental matters, I hope someone else would help you with our environment. But I’ll try my best to break the toxic vicious cycle for you so that you won’t be stuck forever with only toxic drug therapy.
I am a private person. Seldom, if ever, have I engaged in self-promotion. This is the first time I openly ask you to at least lend moral support to my project, even though it is really for the benefit of your generations, including the grandchildren of my generation and theirs. I plan on using 75% of the gross profits from the sales of my 2 latest books, and one more on its way, to start a nonprofit to work towards breaking the vicious cycle and to afford true natural alternatives to the current toxic drugs. I am an herbal scientist, experienced in the quality and manufacture of herbal products, among other things. So, I’m not just talking. I am simply asking you to spread the word on my books, buy one of them if you can, and tell others about them
Also, I especially need the help of you millennial folks (teens to 40’s), for your savviness in social media to spread the word. You are the ones who will inherit this earth from us, hopefully still not totally ruined. This vicious cycle is time-sensitive. As time goes on, it continues to remove from you what limited potential alternatives that are still left, simultaneously adding more toxic drugs that continue to cause new diseases. In another 20 years, you would have no alternatives but toxic drug therapy at whatever prices demanded by a few ‘gazillionaires’ who would perpetuate and control this vicious cycle that to them, is a self-generating money machine that we have unwittingly gifted them.
This fight will be yours. But I have faith in you after seeing a sample of your strength and intelligence following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. Hang in there! I believe your generation can do it!
In my next post, the 6th on this same series, I’ll describe how we can save traditional herbal medicines as alternatives and/or complementary medicines to toxic drugs and how the vicious cycle can be broken. Also, natural drugs can stay natural as some of them can be produced by biotechnology, not via chemical synthesis of unknown chemicals never before existed on our planet.