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Thursday 22 May 2014

Diabetes Drugs. So you think these are helping you?

Diabetes is reaching epidemic proportions. One of the main reasons for this is that diabetes is a direct 'side-effect' of many conventional drugs and treatments. Yet, far from having done enough damage, the conventional medical establishment gives us more drugs to treat the disease.

So what are these drugs like? What 'side-effects', or more accurately, what diseases, do diabetes drugs cause?

The dangers of the diabetes Avandia were so serious the drug was eventually banned in the UK and Europe in 2010. I have written about Avandia in previous blogs, and if you want to know the dangers of this drug, click the links here:

Avandia. Still on sale! (July 2010).

Avandia is banned (September 2010).

Avandia. Still on sale! (April 2011).

Another diabetes drug, Actos, has more recently been banned in India, German and France - because it is known to cause bladder cancer, congestive heart failure and death. It is, to the best of my knowledge, still on sale in the rest of the world! Indeed, Actos has been one of the world's most widely prescribed drugs for Type 2 diabetes. But it increases the risk of bladder cancer, the manufacturer knew this, and were fined $9bn by the USA courts for withholding the information!

And it is not just Avandia and Actos. In this blog, "Diabetes Drugs. The cost to our health", in May 2013) I described the harm caused by drugs called Victoza, Byetta, Nesina and Januvia.

The Agora Health website said this about the diabetes drug, Victoza, which was found to cause a rare kind of thyroid cancer, and pancreatitis, and could therefore be deadly.

“Victoza proved to be so dangerous that, in 2012, the FDA received a petition asking that the agency remove it from the market immediately. Even though Victoza "puts patients at higher risk of thyroid cancer, pancreatitis (and) serious allergic reactions", the FDA denied this request... as expected! 

And in July 2013, I wrote this blog, "Diabetes. Are patients better off with, or without these conventional drugs".

So perhaps we might expect that our drug regulators might be expected to be more cautious when approving new Big Pharma drugs! Not a bit of it!

Recently, the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved yet another diabetes drug that is riddled with serious and harmful ‘side effects’ - that is the drug causes disease!

Another Avandia? Another Actos? Probably. And the drug, called Tanzeum, will probably kill as many people as its predecessors before any action will be taken to protect patients. Tanzeum, a drug that has to be injected into the bloodstream, is designed to mimic a hormone that causes the pancreas to release insulin.

Drug Regulators, like the FDA in the USA, and MHRC in the UK, are aware of the dangers, but they take no action. 

Agora Health warned (in April 2014) about another diabetes drug, Invokana, and described it as a drug to be avoided, and outlined the futile efforts to ban it

“In typical FDA fashion, it's allowing GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the maker of Tanzeum, to conduct a 15-year study for a rare kind of cancer called medullary thyroid carcinoma that could be linked to Tanzeum. You read that right - 15 years! 

So GSK will also report back to the FDA about the heart risks of Tanzeum, but not, of course, until the drug has been causing disease, and killing people, for a very long time!


So are there any diabetes drug not mentioned in this list? There probably are lots more. But would you want to take the chance that these are any safer? It is not the wise option. We all need to learn from experience. Conventional medical drugs do not just cause 'side-effects', they cause disease and death!