by Dr. George J Georgiou
23 January 2011

from DocGeorge Website

This newsletter is being distributed to over 200,000 natural health practitioners around the world, to hundreds of natural medicine associations, to the European Union, to the patients of Cyprus, and will be linked to many websites around the world.

In addition, it will be made available to thousands of interested readers around the globe who care for natural medicine - we strongly appreciate your support for this.
 

UNETHICAL SPY TACTICS!

The Cyprus Medical Association is picking up the pace in overtly attacking all Natural Medicine practitioners on the island of Cyprus, which now is part of the 'European Union.'

The tactics they are using are highly unethical and unprofessional; basing their attack on the fact that all natural medicine practitioners are “unqualified charlatans” and people should not trust them with their health.

On Wednesday 19^th January, a program called “60-minutes” on one of the national channels “Sigma”, showed how paid stooges acting as patients would enter natural medicine practitioners clinics with hidden spy cameras and record the practitioner treating them. Excerpts from this were taken completely out of context and shown on this national TV channel.

The conclusion in all cases was that they were all “charlatans” and were not practicing proper medicine. Most of these practitioners are highly qualified and the most successful on the island.

Interestingly, of all the people that were on the program, including the presenter - Mr. Tsouroulis - no one brought up the case of how unethical it is to pay a stooge to act as a patient in order to collect film with a secret camera that is then used in vicious attacks against innocent, hard-working and caring natural medicine practitioners.
 

HOW ETHICAL IS THIS?

How ethical is this behavior that has been instigated by Dr Vasos Economou who is the President of the Ethical Committee for Medicine.

He feels that using spy cameras is quite acceptable and normal behavior and there is no ethical issue involved as it is for the protection of the people of Cyprus! This has become a “legal” past-time here in Cyprus, practiced by TV stations in collusion with the medical fraternity.

The true objective of this propaganda is to frighten potential patients to stop going to natural medicine practitioners who are apparently reducing the medics income. They do not want the natural medicine practitioners to "eat from the same pie." There is no thought to the benefits that patients can receive from natural medicine, only self-interests are at stake.

It looks like no authority in Cyprus is taking any measures against this “bullying” - neither the Ministry of Health or any other ministry or MP. This is quite typical here in Cyprus with the nepotism and "school-boy" networks that make the island tick.

Many patient groups that favor natural medicine are up in arms against Dr Economou for spearheading this shameless attack, as well as the media channels that are bending under the pressure of the Cyprus Medical Association, again spearheaded by Tsouroulis of Sigma TV - a very passionate hater of natural medicine as this is clearly seen in his programs as he viciously attacks natural medicine while pampering to the other side.

Needless to say we will be moving along legal channels against all those involved in this conspiracy - let's see if there is a true legal system here in Cyprus to see things objectively for what they are!
 

HEAD WITCH-HUNTER

Heading the witch-hunters is Dr. Vasos Economou, who seems to have a lot of time on his hands to “go get the baddies.”

This arch "witch-hunter" seems to think nothing of sending in stooges with spy cameras to film highly-qualified practitioners that are clinicians, researchers, university professors and authors - calling them all "charlatans" and accusing them publically of "exploiting" patients and openly encouraging patients avoid going to these charlatans - this is akin to a bullying mafia!

The implication of this bullying is that natural medicine practitioners do not know what they are doing and therefore are dangerous.

This implies that all the universities and their professors who teach natural medicine around the world are also charlatans out to exploit everyone, and teach dangerous diagnostic and treatment regimes to their practitioners.

I think Dr Economou will have a lot of enemies worldwide once this implication gets out as even the World Health Organization (WHO) has written a document about Traditional Medicine being practiced around the globe for centuries and encourages the integration of these gentle healing methods into more mainstream medicine.

It appears that Dr Economou has another agenda - to completely eradicate natural medicine from the island of Cyprus as it is financially affecting many medical doctors on the island, or so they think.

The fact is that there are 2,000 medical doctors against no more than 200 natural medicine practitioners of different disciplines. The pie is big enough for all!

If we live in a democracy, we also need to respect the patient’s free-will to visit any health professional of their choosing, whether it be a natural medicine practitioner, or a medical doctor. It is highly unethical to use scare-tactics with patients

It seems to be OK for medical practitioners to “dabble” in natural medicine without any training because they are medics.

However, highly qualified natural medicine practitioners with many years of university education, who may be scientific researchers, authors, clinicians and university professors, are all charlatans, along with the universities that awarded these degrees and diplomas.
 

DEFINITION OF CHARLATANISM

Perhaps Dr. Economou should first begin with the definition of Charlatanism - the main premise of charlatans is that they “swindle” or “cheat” their patients to satisfy their own interests.

Indeed, there are charlatans on both sides of the fence, both medical doctors and natural medicine practitioners - this is based on the practitioner’s personality, not their qualifications.

However, here in Cyprus, with the organized medical industry of over 2,000 medical practitioners, charlatanism has reached its peak amongst them. Most doctors that belong to the “clique” receive back-handers from medical laboratories for sending patients to them for blood analyses, from pharmaceutical companies for prescribing drugs, from medical centers for referring patients for scans, as well as from colleagues for referring a patient.

The patient gets trapped in this clique of medical professionals who certainly cannot be objective when there are so many monetary rewards for simply signing a piece of paper.

So, let’s go back to the definition of “charlatism” - who is the charlatan now?

The medical doctor who tries to bleed the patients finances for their self-interests, or the natural medicine practitioner who genuinely cares for his patients and wants them to do well, offering them only what they need for diagnosis and treatment.
 

“CHARLATANS" DO NOT KILL PATIENTS!

One thing that can certainly be said about natural medicine is that it certainly does not kill the patient, unlike many of the lethal side-effects of drugs used by modern medicine, not to mention the negative consequences of surgery and radiation.

It is incredible when we look at the statistics regarding ‘Iatrogenic Diseases’ - these are the diseases and symptoms that are actually caused by medical interventions, mostly drugs. In just the last five years there have been ten times more patients affected by iatrogenic diseases than the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War!

This is a statistic that comes straight from the Journal of the American Medical Association after a study of drug side-effects.
 

DEATH BY MEDICINE - THE STATISTICS!

Something is wrong when regulatory agencies pretend that vitamins are dangerous, yet ignore published statistics showing that government-sanctioned medicine is the real hazard.

Until now, no one had ever analyzed and combined ALL of the published literature dealing with injuries and deaths caused by government-protected medicine. That has now changed.

A group of researchers meticulously reviewed the statistical evidence and their findings are absolutely shocking.

These researchers have authored a paper titled Death by Medicine that presents compelling evidence that today’s system frequently causes more harm than good.

• This fully referenced report shows the number of people having in-hospital, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs to be 2.2 million per year.

• The number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections is 20 million per year.

• The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million per year.

• The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million per year.

• The most stunning statistic, however, is that the total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year.

It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US.

(By contrast, the number of deaths attributable to heart disease in 2001 was 699,697, while the number of deaths attributable to cancer was 553,251).
 

• Each year approximately 2.2 million US hospital patients experience adverse drug reactions (ADRs) to prescribed medications.

• In 1995, Dr. Richard Besser of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections to be 20 million

• In 2003, Dr. Besser spoke in terms of tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually

• Approximately 7.5 million unnecessary medical and surgical procedures are performed annually in the US, while approximately 8.9 million Americans are hospitalized unnecessarily

The estimated total number of iatrogenic deaths - that is, deaths induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures - in the US annually is 783,936.

It is evident that the American medical system is itself the leading cause of death and injury in the US. By comparison, approximately 699,697 Americans died of heart in 2001, while 553,251 died of cancer.

The Campaign for Truth who conducted a lot of this research (www.campaignfortruth.com) also estimated that over a 10-year period a total of 7.8 million iatrogenic deaths occurred which is more than all the casualties from all the wars fought by the US throughout its entire history.

Their projected figures for unnecessary medical events occurring over a 10-year period also are dramatic.

These figures show that an estimated 164 million people - more than half of the total US population - receive unneeded medical treatment over the course of a decade.
 

IS MEDICINE WORKING?

This is what they had to say to the question, ‘Is American Medicine Working?’ which could of course extrapolate to medicine practiced all over the globe:

US health care spending reached $1.6 trillion in 2003, representing 14% of the nation's gross national product. Considering this enormous expenditure, we should have the best medicine in the world. We should be preventing and reversing disease, and doing minimal harm.

Careful and objective review, however, shows we are doing the opposite. Because of the extraordinarily narrow, technologically driven context in which contemporary medicine examines the human condition, we are completely missing the larger picture.

Medicine is not taking into consideration the following critically important aspects of a healthy human organism:

1. stress and how it adversely affects the immune system and life processes

2. insufficient exercise

3. excessive caloric intake

4. highly processed and denatured foods grown in denatured and chemically damaged soil

5. exposure to tens of thousands of environmental toxins

Instead of minimizing these disease-causing factors, we cause more illness through medical technology, diagnostic testing, overuse of medical and surgical procedures, and overuse of pharmaceutical drugs.

The huge disservice of this therapeutic strategy is the result of little effort or money being spent on preventing disease.

They go on to conclude:

“We are fully aware of what stands in the way of change: powerful pharmaceutical and medical technology companies, along with other powerful groups with enormous vested interests in the business of medicine. They fund medical research, support medical schools and hospitals, and advertise in medical journals.

 

With deep pockets, they entice scientists and academics to support their efforts. Such funding can sway the balance of opinion from professional caution to uncritical acceptance of new therapies and drugs. You have only to look at the people who make up the hospital, medical, and government health advisory boards to see conflicts of interest.

 

The public is mostly unaware of these interlocking interests.”

For example, a 2003 study found that nearly half of medical school faculty who serve on institutional review boards (IRB) to advise on clinical trial research also serve as consultants to the pharmaceutical industry.

The study authors were concerned that such representation could cause potential conflicts of interest.

A news release by Dr. Erik Campbell, the lead author, said,

"Our previous research with faculty has shown us that ties to industry can affect scientific behavior, leading to such things as trade secrecy and delays in publishing research. It's possible that similar relationships with companies could affect IRB members' activities and attitudes.”

MEDICAL ERRORS - A GLOBAL ISSUE

A five-country survey published in the Journal of Health Affairs found that 18-28% of people who were recently ill had suffered from a medical or drug error in the previous two years.

The study surveyed 750 recently ill adults.

The breakdown by country showed the percentages of those suffering a medical or drug error were,

• 18% in Britain

• 23% in Australia and in New Zealand

• 25% in Canada

• 28% in the US.⁽¹¹³⁾

In 1995, a JAMA report noted,

"Over a million patients are injured in US hospitals each year, and approximately 280,000 die annually as a result of these injuries. Therefore, the iatrogenic death rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality rate of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined."⁽²³⁾

At a 1997 press conference, Leape released a nationwide poll on patient iatrogenesis conducted by the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF), which is sponsored by the American Medical Association (AMA).

Leape is a founding member of NPSF.

The survey found that more than 100 million Americans have been affected directly or indirectly by a medical mistake. Forty-two percent were affected directly and 84% personally knew of someone who had experienced a medical mistake.⁽¹⁴⁾
 

MORTALITY RATES DROP WHEN DOCTORS GO ON STRIKE!

It is interesting to see what happened in Israel in the year 2000 when Industrial action by public health doctors helped to reduce the death rates in most of the country.

A large number of doctors across the country went on strike for 127 days while funeral directors complained of less work. To find out whether the industrial action was affecting deaths in the country, the Jerusalem Post interviewed non-profit making Jewish burial societies, which perform funerals for the vast majority of Israelis.

Hananya Shahor, the veteran director of Jerusalems Kehilat Yerushalayim burial society said,

"The number of funerals we have performed has fallen drastically."

Meir Adler, manager of the Shamgar Funeral Parlour, which buries most other residents of Jerusalem, declared with much more certainty:

"There definitely is a connection between the doctors sanctions and fewer deaths. We saw the same thing in 1983 when the Israel Medical Association applied sanctions for four and a half months."

Interesting!
 

MEDICAL BRAINWASHING

When one discusses issues with medical practitioners there is definitely a ‘brainwashing’ that does not correlate with the scientific literature or even their own personal experiences working with their patients.

They literally believe that if everyone in the world only had enough drugs in their bodies, we'd all be super healthy!

If we just had enough vaccines with Thimerosal, (a preservative used which contain 50% mercury to give to babies and has increased the autism rate), and enough cholesterol drugs for all the senior citizens, and enough antidepressants for all the middle-aged people, we'd all be healthier, they claim.

And the way to get more people healthier is,

• to push more drug ads

• to mandate more vaccinations

• to require more "mental health screening" of schoolchildren, just in case they might need ADHD (attention deficit) drugs such as Ritalin

PROFIT - MONEY AND MORE MONEY!

Yes, it is insane but it is also the reality that we are living today.

Modern medicine is run by big pharmaceutical companies whose interest is in making money from patenting expensive drugs - there is no primary interest in curing people of difficult health problems.

The problem is that they also brain-wash medical doctors to believing that these “magic drugs” can solve all the health problems of the world. Wrong again!

If this was the case, then why are the rates of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and many other health problems increasing? Surely, if drugs could solve all these degenerative diseases, then they would have been eradicated by now!

Dr. Guylaine Lanctot, M.D. who wrote The Medical Mafia has this to say:

"The medical establishment works closely with the drug multinationals whose main objective is profits, and whose worst nightmare would be an epidemic of good health. Lots of drugs MUST be sold. In order to achieve this, anything goes: lies, fraud, and kickbacks.

 

Doctors are the principal salespeople of the drug companies. They are rewarded with research grants, gifts, and lavish perks. The principal buyers are the public - from infants to the elderly - who MUST be thoroughly medicated and vaccinated...at any cost!

Why do the authorities forbid alternative medicine?

 

Because they are serving the industry, and the industry cannot make money with herbs, vitamins, and homeopathy. They cannot patent natural remedies. That is why they push synthetics. They control medicine, and that is why they are able to tell medical schools what they can and cannot teach. They have their own sets of laws, and they force people into them. That is a mafia.

 

This sensational expose' also uncovers the truth behind vaccines, AIDS, cancer, the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, and more."

But we all know that modern medicine practices “symptom suppression” by using drugs, with few exceptions. If you have arthritis, your arthritis is not cured by a medical doctor, it is simply treated using an anti-inflammatory and a pain killer, but it never goes away.

When you have diabetes, the doctor does not cure the problem, but simply manages it with drugs which you have to take for the rest of your life - or so that is the message that you get when the doctor prescribes.
 

MEDICAL DOCTORS IN THE DARK!

One of the things that medical doctors do not really examine is the myriad of causative factors that are playing a role on the patient’s life.

They seem to feel that people are not affected from the food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe, the large number of chemicals that are placed in the body from cosmetics, preservatives, E-factors, colorings and much more.

Not to mention the mercury that is placed in a person’s mouth when placing amalgam fillings.

Stress from work, family issues, relationships and shock also do not seem to be part of the health equation. Not to mention the various nutritional deficiencies that most people have these days - how is it possible for the body to produce enzymes, hormones, remove toxins etc. when they are deficient in the raw materials required to make these substances.

All this is “quackery” to most physicians - but this is what natural medicine practitioners practice - they try to identify and remove these factors, while using natural substances to help the body regenerate and rebuild. There is a lot of science to support what they are doing and why and how natural remedies work effectively.

In fact, there are universities all over the world, as well as Associations that not only accept natural medicine but also award degrees (even doctorates) in the fields of nutritional and herbal medicine, homeopathy, environmental sciences and toxicology, psychosomatic medicine, psycho-neuroimmunology - there are hundreds of thousands of scientific publications available on all these topics.

So who is practicing ‘quackery’ now!
 

WHY ARE DOCTORS IN THE DARK?

One may ask why do all these medical doctors not read all this material and practice at least some aspects of this science to help their patients heal better.

Even if they spent a little time balancing their patients nutritional habits, and getting them to drink water - about 60% of the Cypriot population suffer from the symptoms of chronic dehydration, then the patient would thank them for it.

Instead, a health practitioner such as myself who thinks ‘outside the box’ gets chastised, criticized, threatened and generally ‘blacklisted’ and called a charlatan and a quack. Yet I have probably helped more people heal with headaches, migraines, arthritis, high blood pressure, diabetes and a myriad of other symptoms simply by fixing their dehydration and balancing their diet and teaching them the art of detoxification to help their body heal.

Doctors are not kept in the dark because there are differences over medical theory, i.e. that one side believes in the "germ theory" of disease and the other side believes in the "nutritional theory" of disease. Or perhaps you think that orthodox medicine is interested in treating "symptoms," while alternative medicine is interested in treating "causes."

While there are theoretical differences, the war is not caused by differences in medical theory.

The war is all about profits.

"We are not dealing with a scientific problem. We are dealing with a political issue."
Dr Samuel Epstein, M.D.

The fact of the matter is that this war is a political war.

Like all other wars in world history, it is all about money, power and the glory of the world. Most of all it is a war about orthodox medicine maintaining the power they have had since the 1920s.

Our government agencies and the corporations that control them have done everything in their power to make sure you do not know the truth about alternative medicine, and especially alternative treatments for cancer and alternative prevention measures for heart disease. And the television stations and other media are not about to say anything negative about one of their biggest advertisers - the pharmaceutical industry.

So called "investigative journalists" are never going to investigate the friends of their employer.

"Why does a particular story not receive the coverage it deserves in the media? While a variety of reasons may be at cause, foremost among them... seems to be conflict of interest issues involving the financial concerns of major media advertisers."
Peter Phillips, in his book, Censored 1997

Before saying more about this war, it is instructive to go back to the beginning, to see why this war started in the first place.
 

THE MEDICAL INDUSTRY

The stagnation of progress in treating chronic diseases continues today because the enormously profitable procedures of surgery, drugs and radiation make many, many billions of dollars every year for,

• the pharmaceutical industry

• the chemical industry

• the petroleum industry

• medical doctors

• hospitals

• medical equipment makers

• T.V. stations (through the advertising of the pharmaceutical companies)

• radio stations (ditto)

• major magazines (ditto),

...etc. etc.

"Drug therapy is an incredibly lucrative business for doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies… The medical establishment wants everyone to follow the same exact protocol.

 

They don’t want to see the drug industry go under, and that’s the number one obstacle to any progress in oncology (or treating other degenerative diseases)."

Dr Warner, M.D.

In other words, the medical community has gone along with the idea that chemotherapy, radiation and surgery are so profitable, that there will never be any progress in the "war against degenerative diseases."

The leaders have intentionally, willingly, knowingly and pro-actively suppressed every possible advance in treating chronic diseases for over 80 years, dating back to the 1920s.
 

WHERE’S THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE?

I hear many doctors talking about how ‘their’ science is evidence-based, while natural medicine is not.

"Where's the evidence that nutrition has any value?" they ask, as if drug companies would suddenly fund randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled studies on vitamins and minerals that can't be patented.

Yet, when one examines a lot of the ‘scientific’ publications of the medical profession, of which about 90% are pharmacological in nature (yes, you guessed correctly, they are financed by Big Pharma).

You will find most of these studies being weak methodologically as well as being based on fraudulent science, designed specifically to achieve a statistical "success" using any means necessary: fudging the numbers, removing samples that don't fit the desired curve, burying trials that showed negative results, confusing correlation with causation and a hundred other devious tricks.

The medical journals themselves, in turn, are financially supported by drug company ads, and they continue to publish studies secretly authored by the drug companies themselves (while utterly failing to disclose blatant conflicts of interest).

Of course, the quack defenders of conventional medicine, like Dr Economou, strongly disagree with this - and that's all part of their pretending, of course. It's their role to disagree with anything that challenges the status quo. Their jobs and egos depend on it!

Natural health is a huge threat to conventional medicine.

If the Cypriot, American and global public learned the truth about,

• nutrition

• herbs

• homeopathy

• sunlight

• acupuncture

• superfoods,

and other naturopathic modalities, they would drop their drugs in a minute and pursue the safe, natural and non-patented therapies from the world of natural health.

And that's precisely what Big Pharma are paranoid about - they simply cannot allow this to happen!

So drug companies continue their campaigns of influence, corruption, buying off the mainstream media and controlling the curricula at medical schools. The future of health is in prevention - not in drug therapies or unjustified surgical procedures with all their iatrogenic effects.

There is much that people can learn about how to prevent,

• cancer

• diabetes

• heart disease

• depression

• kidney stones

• osteoporosis,

...and thousands of other health conditions to which conventional medicine has no cure.

Disease prevention or sustainable wellness is the new paradigm shift that the world has to embrace in order to really optimize health, remove iatrogenic diseases but at the same time dissipate the large medical industry fuelled by the pharmaceutical giants.

Preventing disease is the fastest way to bankrupt Big Pharma!
 

REFERENCES

• Lazarou J, Pomeranz BH, Corey PN. Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies. JAMA . 1998 Apr 15;279(15):1200-5.

   

• Rabin R. Caution about overuse of antibiotics. Newsday . September 18, 2003.
  2a. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC antimicrobial resistance and antibiotic resistance - general information. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/community . Accessed December 13, 2003 .
   

• For calculations detail, see “Unnecessary Surgery.” Sources: HCUPnet, Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville , MD. Available at: http://www.ahrq.gov/data/hcup/hcupnet.htm. Accessed December 18, 2003. US Congressional House Subcommittee Oversight Investigation. Cost and Quality of Health Care: Unnecessary Surgery . Washington , DC : Government Printing Office;1976. Cited in: McClelland GB, Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research. Testimony to the Department of Veterans Affairs' Chiropractic Advisory Committee. March 25, 2003 .
   

• For calculations detail, see “Unnecessary Hospitalization.” Sources: HCUPnet, Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville , MD. Available at: http://www.ahrq.gov/data/hcup/hcupnet.htm . Accessed December 18, 2003 . Siu AL, Sonnenberg FA, Manning WG, et al. Inappropriate use of hospitals in a randomized trial of health insurance plans. N Engl J Med . 1986 Nov 13;315(20):1259-66. Siu AL, Manning WG, Benjamin B. Patient, provider and hospital characteristics associated with inappropriate hospitalization. Am J Public Health . 1990 Oct;80(10):1253-6. Eriksen BO, Kristiansen IS, Nord E, et al. The cost of inappropriate admissions: a study of health benefits and resource utilization in a department of internal medicine. J Intern Med . 1999 Oct;246(4):379-87.
   

• U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics Report, vol. 51, no. 5, March 14, 2003 .
   

• Nationwide poll on patient safety: 100 million Americans see medical mistakes directly touching them [press release]. McLean , VA : National Patient Safety Foundation; October 9, 1997 .
   

• The Society of Actuaries Health Benefit Systems Practice Advancement Committee. The Troubled Healthcare System in the US . September 13, 2003 . Available at: http://www.soa.org/sections/troubled_healthcare.pdf . Accessed December 18, 2003.
   

• Leape LL. Error in medicine. JAMA . 1994 Dec 21;272(23):1851-7.
   

• Campbell EG, Weissman JS, Clarridge B, Yucel R, Causino N, Blumenthal D. Characteristics of medical school faculty members serving on institutional review boards: results of a national survey. Acad Med . 2003 Aug;78(8):831-6.
   

• Possible conflict of interest within medical profession. HealthDayNews. August 15, 2003
   

• Angell M. Is academic medicine for sale? N Engl J Med . 2000 May 18;342(20):1516-8.
   

• McKenzie J. Conflict of interest? Medical journal changes policy of finding independent doctors [transcript]. ABC News. June 12, 2002 .
   

• Crossen C. Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America . New York , NY : Simon & Schuster; 1994.
   

• Bates DW, Cullen DJ, Laird N, et al. Incidence of adverse drug events and potential adverse drug events. Implications for prevention. ADE Prevention Study Group. JAMA . 1995 Jul 5;274(1):29-34.
   

• Vincent C, Stanhope N, Crowley-Murphy M. Reasons for not reporting adverse incidents: an empirical study. J Eval Clin Pract . 1999 Feb;5(1):13-21.
   

• Bates DW. Drugs and adverse drug reactions: how worried should we be? JAMA . 1998 Apr 15;279(15):1216-7.
   

• Dickinson, JG. FDA seeks to double effort on confusing drug names. Dickinson 's FDA Review . 2000 Mar;7(3):13-4.
   

• Cohen JS. Overdose: The Case Against the Drug Companies . New York , NY : Tarcher-Putnum; 2001.
   

• Stenson J. Few residents report medical errors, survey finds. Reuters Health. February 21, 2003 .
   

• Survey by Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard School of Public Health. Methodology: Fieldwork conducted by ICR - International Communications Research, April 11- June 11, 2002
   

• Bond CA, Raehl CL, Franke T. Clinical pharmacy services, hospital pharmacy staffing, and medication errors in United States hospitals. Pharmacotherapy . 2002 Feb;22(2):134-47.
   

• Barker KN, Flynn EA, Pepper GA, Bates DW, Mikeal RL. Medication errors observed in 36 health care facilities. Arch Intern Med . 2002 Sep 9;162(16):1897-903.
   

• LaPointe NM , Jollis JG. Medication errors in hospitalized cardiovascular patients. Arch Intern Med . 2003 Jun 23;163(12):1461-6.
  Forster AJ, Murff HJ, Peterson JF, Gandhi TK, Bates DW. The incidence and severity of adverse events affecting patients after discharge from the hospital. Ann Intern Med 2003 Feb 4;138(3):161-7.
   

• Gandhi TK, Weingart SN, Borus J, et al. Adverse drug events in ambulatory care. N Engl J Med . 2003 Apr 17;348(16):1556-64.
   

• Medication side effects strike 1 in 4. Reuters. April 17, 2003 .
   

• Vastag B. Pay attention: ritalin acts much like cocaine. JAMA . 2001 Aug 22-29;286(8):905-6.
   

• Rosenthal MB, Berndt ER, Donohue JM, Frank RG, Epstein AM. Promotion of prescription drugs to consumers. N Engl J Med . 2002 Feb 14;346(7):498-505.
   

• Wolfe SM. Direct-to-consumer advertising - education or emotion promotion? N Engl J Med . 2002 Feb 14;346(7):524-6.
   

• Ibid.
   

• US General Accounting Office. Report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations, Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives: FDA Drug Review Postapproval Risks 1976-85 . Washington , DC : US General Accounting Office; 1990:3.
   

• Drug giant accused of false claims. MSNBC News. July 11, 2003 . Available at: http://msnbc.com/news/937302.asp?0sl=-42&cp1=1 . Accessed December 17,2003 .
   

• Suh DC , Woodall BS, Shin SK , Hermes-De Santis ER. Clinical and economic impact of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients. Ann Pharmacother . 2000 Dec;34(12):1373-9.
   

• California reaches $100 million multi-state settlement with drug giant Mylan over alleged price-fixing scheme [press release]. Sacramento , CA : Office of the Attorney General, Department of Justice, State of California ; July 12, 2000 .
   

• Attorney general reaches settlement with drug giant. WRAL News. March 7, 2003 . Available at: . http://www.wral.com/money/2026364/detail.html. Accessed December 16, 2003 .
   

• Blowing the final whistle. The Observer. November 25, 2001 . Available at: http://education.guardian.co.uk/businessofresearch/comment/0,9976,606260,00.html. Accessed December 16, 2003 .
   

• AARP. Are food supplements for me? Available at: http://www.aarp.org/Articles/a2003-03-07-supplements.html . Accessed December 16,2003 .