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 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].