Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…
Yet Another Drug Deemed Ineffective, Only Side-Effective
Interferon gamma-1b is a deadly drug with a deadly side effect: death.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: A drug’s been taken off the market because it’s been found ineffective.
I know, I know, you’ve heard it before, but humor me.
The latest ineffective drug is called interferon gamma-1b. This drug – with a rather appropriate name given its “interfering” side effects – was believed to help treat people with a deadly lung disease. As it turns out, though, the only thing this drug does is “interfere” with the body’s internal processes, churning up a veritable smorgasbord of side effects like those found in people who get the flu (fever, chills, fatigue, etc.).
The deadly lung disease the drug was supposed to treat is called Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis.
IPF is a condition that afflicts approximately 200,000 Americans – usually those between the ages of 50 and 75 – and is diagnosed among people whose breathing patterns are severely altered due to the scarring of lung tissue. This scarring of lung tissue severely restricts normal oxygen flow, thus adversely affecting the brain and all of the body’s internal processes that rely on oxygen (which is pretty much everything in the body).
Because of this, the prognosis for IPF sufferers isn’t good. People with it usually die within five years of diagnosis. What’s worse, there’s no known cure.
The best way to avoid it is through preventive measures, like keeping your blood pressure low, not smoking, and exercise (three conditions believed to cause IPF include hypertension, lung cancer and heart failure).
These preventive measures take on additional importance after a study that involved injecting 826 people with either a dose of interferon gamma-1b or a placebo. What they found was that more people died after being injected with the interferon – the very drug that was supposed to treat the IPF – than people who were injected with the placebo (15 percent to 13 percent).
And among those that didn’t die, those injected with the interferon were more likely to suffer from flu-like symptoms.
The study was 64 weeks long and participants were injected with the ineffective dosage three times a week, 200 micrograms per dose.
The study’s full details are published in the online version of the world renowned British medical journal The Lancet.
I think this study speaks for itself. It also speaks to the cause that natural health advocates like me have devoted our lives to: Pharmaceuticals are ineffective – they’re only side-effective.
Diseases like this, unfortunately, aren’t treatable through natural methods; preventive measures need to be taken to avoid it.
This study demonstrates just how important preventive measures are in maintaining natural health – because pharmaceuticals won’t be your saving grace. If more people came to this realization, I have no doubt we’d see less disease, for people would start living a life where diseases rarely lurk.
Source:
health.msn.com
nhlbi.nih.gov
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Posted: July 13th, 2009 under Prescription Drugs.
Tags: heart failure, hypertension, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, interferon gamma-1b, ipf, lung cancer
