Monthly Archives: May 2013

BIG PHARMA

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Lack of transparency to the public about drugs is definitely the most significant reason why many prescription drugs turn out to become ‘diseases’ or are leading to death in patients. Who is to blame ? Governments working in conjunction with the pharmaceutical industries, the big corporations.

Governments: In many countries Governments ensure that clinical studies on new drugs in particular and by the pharmaceutical industry are made public. In order to approve pharmaceutical products, these studies are relied upon. This process is obligatory in most of the industrialized countries. These studies also permit independent researchers to offer their input into any new drugs. Often this is not done. The Big Pharma industries have become too powerful.

On the other end of this scale, the question is: how can patients protect themselves against adverse effects by prescription medications ? From my personal perspective, I can only say that, in all those years that I am in this particular city, in this particular country, I have discarded most prescriptions for questionable medications that were given to me by doctors. And with our current Medical Health Insurance system, most prescription drugs must be paid by the patients anyways, unless they are cheap and ineffective drugs. So, I might as well spend some time researching medical drugs data bases and reports on any drugs prescribed to me to ensure it is safe. And believe you me, no drug is safe. Prescription drugs mostly contain chemicals harmful to the body. To say the least, in the long run a patient may suffer from at least kidney failure, if not worse. Some interesting links follow:

Big Pharma

Author(s)

 Jacky Law

Country

 UK

Subject(s)

 Pharmaceutical industry

Genre(s)

 Science writing, medicine, investigative journalism

Publisher

 Constable (UK), Carroll & Graf (US)

Publication date

 16 January 2006

Pages

 256

ISBN

 ISBN 978-1845291396

Big Pharma: How the World’s Biggest Drug Companies Control Illness is a 2006 book by British journalist Jacky Law. The book examines how major pharmaceutical companies determine which health care problems are publicised and researched.[1]

Outlining the history of the pharmaceutical industry, Law identifies the failure of a regulatory framework that assumes pharmaceutical companies always produce worthwhile products that society will want.[1]

Law has written about health care for 25 years, seven of them as associate editor of Scrip Magazine, a monthly magazine for the drugs industry.[2]

Big Pharma industries relying on the fact that transparency = disclosure of relevant information to the public and ultimately the patients is not enforced by governments as it should be. Resulting in massive fines for inadequately tested drugs with wide-ranging side effects. [http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/bigpharma].

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INVESTMENT STRATEGIES

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[update & extension of my previous post – a link to a website article, precisely the way I think about this issue of FINANCIAL ADVICE: http://recessionista.com/work/3-typical-pieces-of-financial-expert-advice-debunked/?utm_source=taboola ]

“Stay away from Financial Advisers, do your own research, use your own experience, learn from your own experiences, and be careful with where you put your heard-earned money”. Two ways of loosing money in a Bank: (1) The Bank gets broke and has not enough capital to pay out all of its customers (remember world-wide banking crisis, or entire governments fail), once the big run for it starts. (2) You buy an investment and receive a little bit of interest. And it adds to your overall income and bumps you up into a higher tax rate, and erodes due to inflation. Meaning, money just sits there and does nothing for yourself.

Here in Canada we have another type of instrument – that is the Tax Free Savings Account TFSA. Depending on your Bank, the interest rates paid to you are typically low. If many are taking advantage of this TFSA, then the Government has some money to work with. In fact, it helps the Government more than it helps you because the interest paid is negligible. Other investments are usually more subject to losses, such as Mutual Funds, Trust Funds. Or, be careful, buying any IPO’s – Initial Public Offerings. Wait a little until their value drops.

I did my homework. Had some money in one of those Mutual Funds, a big fund, which in fact is a ‘Fund of Funds’. Dangerous stuff, because one cannot easily find out what type of companies, sectors or financial institutions this fund invests in. I spent one day to get to the bottom of it and found: Several obscure banks – of unknown origin and country – that did not even exist. Now I knew why I lost so much in this FUND OF FUNDS (which by the way had been solicited). Got rid of all my mutual funds. Mutual Funds (like Condominium ownership) work on the principle: We are all in the same boat, the boat goes down, everybody in it does. And my advice to investment advisers: Try not to sell mutual funds to clients who are into their 70s, because those funds are for the long haul.

MAY 8, 1945 VE DAY – WWII ENDED

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Big celebrations – the day the war ended officially. And do I remember May 1945 when the armies marched in, I was 7 years old. The defeated Fascist factions in all European countries who stood beside each other helping to exterminate hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and the soldiers who killed millions of unarmed civilians. Big cause for celebrations, ring the bells, march, march, march and celebrate. And celebrate all the big heroes of war, including those who were guilty, changed their shirts and threw away their uniforms. They ran, like the rats leaving the sinking ship. You meet them again here in North America, in Central America and especially in South America. Still spreading their fascist propaganda, and instructing their children and their grand children in the heroic things their SS Officer fathers did over in Austria, or Germany, or Hungary, or elsewhere. Having lived abroad and in North America for the past 40 years, I do know these people are still everywhere. In fact they celebrate big time all sort of war remembrances in their Royal Legions. Ain’t that the truth !

Now, how is that for the other – still alive victims – you think they celebrate, for having lost their homelands ? Not so. I have no homeland, it got destroyed totally, and is now home to thousands of immigrants from all over the world. Carved up so to speak, by all sorts of incoming peoples. Including war criminals, who camouflage now as war veterans. Who on earth would like to live there ? Well, not me. On the other hand, the country I am now a citizen of, is neither my homeland. However, the moment North America will actively finally search and ‘destroy’ all those war criminals hiding out there, maybe then my new country can become my homeland.