Alarming News You Can’t Believe
Here are some recent misleading headlines: Glucosamine-chondroitin doesn’t work. Saw palmetto doesn’t work. Vitamin E doesn’t work and may kill you. Many vitamins harm you more than they help you.
Attacks on vitamins are increasing . What’s behind it? Who might profit most by discouraging you from taking vitamins and other supplements? Is Big Pharma’s huge advertising budget strangling objective science reporting in medical journals and the popular media?
Do some researchers with pharmaceutical ties and bias, “rig” studies to make supplements fail? Does the press silence favorable facts about supplements to avoid offending drug advertisers?
Here’s what Ray Sahelian, MD, a respected author and expert on supplements, writes in his March newsletter: “More doctors are realizing how billions of dollars spent by the pharmaceutical industry does influence opinions.” He says he increasingly distrusts information from “the government and the medical establishment.”
“I’m starting to suspect that the New England Journal of Medicine has a strong bias against supplements…due either to a purely philosophical viewpoint or …to money reasons,” Dr. Sahelian says, noting that the journal repeatedly publishes studies discrediting supplements, and rarely does articles supporting them.
A recent example from NEJM: Researchers said saw palmetto doesn’t work, because low doses did not alleviate moderate-to-severe symptoms of enlarged prostate. Yet, dozens of tests find it effective against mild to moderate symptoms. Experts never advocated it for severe cases.
It’s a trick to discredit a supplement: Test it in ways it’s not been claimed to work and when it fails, as expected, declare it ”worthless.” This tactic has been used to discredit Ginkgo, St. John’s wort, and glucosamine-chondroitin. And if a supplement succeeds, press releases sometimes twist the findings to hide or downplay that fact.
“Is it a conspiracy? Are some medical journals just a marketing tool for the drug companies?” asks Dr. Sahelian. ”Is the same true for financially distressed newspapers that increasingly seek pharmaceutical dollars to survive?” I ask as a journalist.
To what extent it is true is unknown. But there is enough reasonable suspicion to make you wonder when you see so many blatantly anti-supplement reports. And they are likely to increase, along with the flood of pharmaceutical dollars that go to prop up and corrupt our main sources of medical and health information.
