Lilly Knew Zyprexa Causes Severe Diabetes and Lied to Hide it!

In case you still are under the delusion that you can trust some drug companies to put patient health and safety ahead of profits, read this:

Lilly under Scrutiny on Capitol Hill

From the article:

===QUOTE====

According to Mr Gottstein in a February 13, 2007, interview with the Anchorage Daily News, Lilly's hidden document showed the rate at which Zyprexa causes diabetes, massive weight gain and other metabolic problems and that Lilly trained sales staff to mislead doctors about the drug's association with diabetes and illegally promoted Zyprexa for off-label use with children and the elderly. [Emphasis mine]

Families of deceased Zyprexa victims want criminal prosecutions. "Lilly executives should go to prison for knowingly being responsible for people's deaths, shattered families; ruined and grieving families," says Ellen Liversridge, whose 39-year-old son gained nearly 100 pounds while taking Zyprexa before he lapsed into a coma and died 4 days later of profound hyperglycemia in October 2002.

"Thanks to the FDA," she says, "there was no warning on the label of Zyprexa even though two other countries had made Lilly place warnings about diabetes, hyperglycemia, and death."

For its part, the secret documents show that Lilly was not the least bit concerned that patients like Ellen's son were developing diabetes. The company's one and only worry was that sales would fall when the news about Zyprexa's link to diabetes became made public. A July 7, 2003, "Diabetes Update" memo discussed the company's strategy to counter the negative impact on doctor's prescribing habits when news of the FDA's decision to add a black box warning about the diabetes risk to the label of Zyprexa became public.

"We must embrace the fact that many physicians are curtailing their use of Zyprexa (particularly in the moderately-ill patient and in the maintenance phase)," the Update said, "solely on the basis of personal fear (of being sued)."

To ward off the drop in Zyprexa prescriptions because doctors were afraid of being sued, the Update said Lilly should offer to indemnify doctors, in other words, cover any lawsuits filed against doctors as a result of prescribing Zyprexa. "Indemnification represents the most meaningful demonstration of confidence in Zyprexa--both with our customers and with our employees," the Update stated.

This plan was apparently successful with doctors after the risks of Prozac became public when documents disclosed in litigation that were also kept hidden under a court order were revealed in a subsequent lawsuit. "Our experience with Prozac," the Lilly memo states, "confirms the impact and goodwill of such an initiative."

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What a great drug for Lilly! It costs more than $300 a month AND it grows the market for Lilly's expensive insulins by creating many thousands of new, permanent, diabetics. Gotta love it. And if a bunch of people have to die to increase profits, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Personally, I'd like to see the executives of these companies, the ones that knew that their drugs caused unnecessary deaths when prescribed off-label, and then put all their efforts into increasing off-label prescribing, hauled up on murder charges.

This is murder. The victims are as dead as if drug company goons had opened fire on them with a Glock. And there are thousands of these victims, far more than died at VTech. So why do the people who do this get away with only a wrist slap?

I'll finish with one last quote from the article linked above:
====QUOTE====
In the case of Zyprexa, Lilly has so far agreed to pay about $1.2 billion to settle cases out of court with roughly 28,000 victims. But here again, $1.2 billion for claims spanning a 10-year period amounts to petty cash for a drug with sales of $4.36 billion in 2006, and a 10% increase to $1.108 billion reported in the first quarter of 2007, over the first quarter of 2006.
===END OF QUOTE=====

KILLING PEOPLE SURE IS PROFITABLE!!!!!!

Digestive Tract Miseries with Regular Metformin

It's not worth it. Even though I was seeing a bit better blood sugar control at meal times while taking the regular metformin three times a day, the digestive effects were too much for me and though they got slightly better with time, they didn't get better enough.

So I'm back to using the ER (Extended Release) taking all 1500 mg at one time at 10:30 in the morning so that I get best coverage during Lunch and an early Dinner.

If you're having problems with diarrhea, nausea, etc, on regular Metformin, be sure to talk to your doctor about switching the the ER form. They cost the same amount. The Metformin ER is also available at Wal-Mart as a $4 prescription.

Byetta, Januvia and Insulin

Since I posted my blog entries on Januvia, and the associated page on my site, "What They Don't Tell You About Diabetes" I've received a lot of email from people who would prefer to take Januvia rather than Byetta and want to know my opinion about which is best.

My suspicion is that if you have found that you respond strongly to a relatively low dose of a sulfonylurea drug such as Amaryl or glipizide (the sulfonylurea drug found in Glucovance) you may respond strongly to Byetta and possibly Januvia, though everything I'm hearing suggests that far fewer people respond to Januvia than Byetta.

If you have no response to these drugs, it may indicate that you've gone past the point where stimulating your beta cells with any drug is going to produce insulin because you no longer have enough functioning beta cells left to respond to beta cell stimulation.

Januvia, if its safety concerns are addressed, may turn out to be the drug of choice for people with prediabetes or forms of diabetes in which fasting blood sugar is still fairly well controlled and loss of post-meal blood sugar control is the main problem.

However, what disturbs me is that I hear from far too many people who are walking around with dangerously high blood sugars who inquire about Januvia because they hope they can add another pill to their regimen in order to avoid going on insulin. This is a tragically misguided approach.

Insulin always works. For everyone. These newer drugs work only for some people and many times they do not lower blood sugars anywhere near a healthy level. I am disturbed by the number of doctors who, based on postings on the Byetta blog, are putting patients on Byetta who have blood sugars well over 250 mg/dl after meals. This is a level known to cause blindness, kidney failure, amputation and heart attack death. Most of the time, after taking Byetta for several months, these patients still do not have blood sugars that are anywhere near the complication-avoiding level of under 140 mg/dl at 2 hours which is recommended by the endocrinologists who make up the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.

In the old days, doctors defended not putting their patients on insulin saying the patients wouldn't take shots. Well, taking Byetta involves taking two shots a day and unlike insulin, Byetta shots can sting and often puff up into insect-like weals. Two shots a day of insulin, properly dosed could bring the blood sugar of these people down to a safe level. Byetta, which costs more than twice as much, does not.

So if you are already on a lot of oral medication and are still going over 250 mg/dl after meals, you probably should start out with insulin, get your blood sugars down to a safer, more manageable level to save whatever functioning beta cells you still have left, and then see if Byetta or Januvia can improve matters for you.

Neither of these drugs will help if your beta cells are dead, and the research we cite on our Organ Damage page makes it clear that prolonged exposure to blood sugars over 150 mg/dl kills beta cells dead. Only insulin, dosed properly, is 100% guaranteed to lower blood sugar.

Even scarier are the patients who report they are on insulin but are still getting extremely high blood sugars especially after meals. Clearly they are on a "one size fits all" insulin regimen that does not take into account their carbohydrate intake or their personal level of insulin resistance.

These regimens (many involving 70/30 insulin mixes) should be totally discredited by now, because they don't give good enough blood sugar control, but they are still used by many family doctors who were trained a decade ago or longer and are not well educated in how to use modern insulin. Some of these people,too, are on Basal insulin alone when they need meal-time insulin to control their dangerously high post-meal blood sugar spikes.

If you are on insulin and still getting very high blood sugars, you need to do two things. One is to read "Jennifer's Advice to Newbies" and try out Jennifer's advice for a month.

If that doesn't help, you must find a doctor who will work with you to find an insulin regimen that does control your blood sugar. When you've got your blood sugars under pretty good control, then you can start fooling around with new and experimental drugs. But the time to do that is when you aren't going into the over 200 mg/dl red zone after every meal!

Pet Food Poisons and Your Vitamins

In case you need more things to worry about, take a look at this article from the Washington Post:
It's Not Just Pet Food

Here's what stuck out to me, "Currently, most of the world's vitamins are manufactured in China. Unable to compete, the last U.S. plant making vitamin C closed a year ago. One of Europe's largest citric acid plants shut last winter, and only one vitamin C manufacturer operates in the West."

The rest of the article explains that there is no oversight of the food ingredients and vitamins coming into this country from China at the level where you'd detect poisons like lead, pesticides, and other toxic chemicals. We know that these are a huge issue with Chinese products destined for human consumption because there's a long history of Chinese people being poisoned by the products of the same manufacturers who are now selling their products to the rest of the world.

The Chinese have been pursuing what has turned out to be a very successful strategy whose goal--almost attained--has been to shut down competing factories all over the world by offering products at extremely low prices that factories elsewhere can't match. This is made possible by the Chinese government's manipulating the value of their country's currency so that the $.30 an hour they pay a worker has a buying power, in China many times that of $.30 in the U.S. or for that matter any other developed nation.

When there are no more factories left, of course, the Chinese manufacturers will be able to raise their prices, because it will take decades for other countries to rebuild their manufacturing infrastructures. And you don't even want to think about the military implications of the fact that the U.S. has lost most of its machine shops, steel mills, hard goods factories, etc. and that most "American" manufacturers are getting their "American" products manufactured in cheap Chinese factories because our laws (thanks to Republican friends of big business) allow a company to slap a "Made in America" label on imported item as long as one or two steps in the manufacturing process are done in the U.S..

But to get back to Diabetes. We all know what happened with the poisoned pet food. But that problem came to light because kidney failure in younger pets is not common, so when veterinarians started seeing a lot of kidney failure in younger pets, they raised the alarm.

The problem is that doctors expect to see kidney failure in people with diabetes of all ages. People with diabetes take a lot of vitamins and supplements--far more than the usual patient--but because of this expectation, if there was a toxic chemical in their pills--which is very likely and which, has, in fact, already occurred with some supplements made in China--doctors would be very slow to pick up on it.

It only took a handful of pet deaths to turn up toxic pet food. How many deaths of humans will it take until we notice the toxins caused by cheap Chinese-imported food and vitamin ingredients in human food? And how many of them are already occurring and being attributed to "diabetes" and "obesity"?

I've stopped taking vitamin supplements My original motivation was the large research study that showed that ingesting chemical antioxidants seemed to increase, rather than decrease mortality. With the latest news in view, one has to ask whether this may have had something to do with undetected toxins in the antioxidants used in the study, which probably came from China, given that as the article above states, they have driven all other countries out of the vitamin business.

I suggest you take a long hard look at the handfuls of supplements you're chugging, too, since they, too, probably come from China, and may have been processed with water laced with lead and industrial waste, to say nothing of doctored with ingredients not listed on the label, some of which are dangerous (but very cheap) prescription drugs.

I am also cutting way back on processed foods that might contain the questionable imported food additives. I already avoid hydrolyzed vegetable protein (MSG/soy product) because of its known unhealthy effect on appetite, but I'm adding gluten, guar gum, and a few other ingredients which were cited in the article above to my list of things to avoid. I don't eat a lot of processed food as it is, but it looks like I'm going to be eating a whole lot less.

Even so, it isn't possible to avoid everything dangerous. The irony with the pet food poisoning was that the supposedly "organic" pet foods turned out to be more toxic to pets than the cheap stuff I buy my kitty at Stop & Shop. That should be a warning to those of you who think that paying top dollar at Whole Foods protects you. A scan of the ingredients of most boxed and bottled "health food" products reveals that, besides the truckloads of sugar and starch that make them far from "healthy" for people with diabetes, they also contain lots of possibly imported ingredients like guar gum and gluten. As long as food manufacturers can buy an ingredient from China for one tenth of what it costs elsewhere, that isn't going to change.

More Thoughts on Januvia

UPDATE (April 2, 2013): Before you take Byetta, Victoza, Onglyza, or Januvia please read about the new research that shows that they, and probably all incretin drugs, cause severely abnormal cell growth in the pancreas and precancerous tumors. You'll find that information HERE.

Original Post:

I posted some more information about Januvia in a comment on my original post questioning some possible side effects. Here's the link. Scroll down to the bottom of the comments see the new information:

Januvia Side Effects Post