Dr Peter Christian Gøtzsche is a Danish physician, medical researcher, and former leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration and has written numerous reviews for the organization. His membership in Cochrane was terminated by its Governing Board of Trustees on 25 September 2018. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was criticised for spreading 'disinformation' about COVID-19 vaccines.
Drugs are the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer: In a video interview, Dr Peter Christian Gøtzsche, Director of the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen and a Professor of Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen declares-"Two years ago I found out that our prescription drugs are the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Our drugs kill around two hundred thousand people in America every year and half of these people die while they do what their doctors told them...
...People die because of the side effects: So, they die because of the side effects, the other half die because of errors and it's often the doctors that make the errors because any drug may come with twenty, thirty or forty warnings, contraindications precautions and so on. No doctor in the world knows about all this. So, they give patients drugs that they should not have given them, that interact dangerously with other drugs or food items and so on and then the patients die, that's the other half".
The drug industry behaves like the mafia does: Dr Peter Christian Gøtzsche recalls-"So, the other thing I found out two years ago was that much of what the drug industry does fulfils the criteria for organized crime in US law and they behave in many ways like the mafia does. They corrupt everyone they can corrupt, they have bought every type of person even including ministers of health...
...Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: In some countries, there is a huge amount of corruption. In my country, for example, Denmark we are regarded as having very little corruption. But yet we have thousands of doctors on industry payroll although we are just twenty thousand doctors. So, this is an effective kind of corruption. The drug industry buys the Professors first, then the chiefs of the department, then other chief physicians and so on; they don't buy junior doctors. So, when several thousand are on the industry payroll it's really really bad and that's why I wrote my book Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime and how big Pharma has corrupted healthcare"...
...Drugs are not that helpful and they kill very many of us: "I hope to convince patients not to take so many drugs because so many die from the drugs they take. In my country, people take so many drugs that every single citizen can be in treatment with one and a half drugs from when they are born till they die. This is incredible and drugs are not that helpful and they kill very many of us. We know that' why drugs are the third major killer after heart disease and cancer...
...Take far fewer drugs: So what we need in the coming years is to take far fewer drugs than what we do currently. If we did that and were careful, then we could live longer and better lives because drugs have many side effects and patients often don't realize that when they become worse it could be a side effect of the drug which they continue taking because that's what their doctors tell them", says Dr Peter Christian Gøtzsche.
They fall and when they break a hip a quarter of them die: He claims-"So, when I was a specialist in Internal medicine what I very often did was that I stopped a lot of drugs, particularly in elderly people. It's quite revealing to see a bedridden elderly person come into your ward and when you stop the drugs I mean that person becomes many years younger. And, many of these drugs affect the brain and old people tolerate them very very badly. They fall and when they break a hip a quarter of them die...
...This is a huge death rate: For example, antidepressant drugs are used by more than ten per cent of our elderly and they seem to kill three per cent of them every year. I mean if one hundred old people take an antidepressant for one year three per cent of them will die because they fall and break their hip. This is a huge death rate".
We do a lot of harm that we don't even recognize: Dr Peter Christian Gøtzsche opines-"So a lot of other drugs and antidepressants also make people fall and kill them. And, they may affect your cognition, your memory and all these things and then they interact in ways that we know almost nothing about very many elderly, they take more than five drugs a day and we actually don't know how these drugs interact with each other. What we do know is that all drugs have many effects on the body and some of them interact also in their metabolism so you can get a too-high concentration of a drug if you take other drugs simultaneously. So we do a lot of harm that we don't even recognize...
...why do you always look up controversy: I have a pretty colourful collection of things people have called me during all these years and sometimes journalists have asked me why you always look up controversy and my reply is I don't. Controversy looks me up because it's not popular to tell the truth in healthcare. You will get many enemies because many people make money on false premises, doctors and industry alike. Our drug regulations and our politicians are on board on this wagon. So very few people are independent of money in healthcare and of course, I have attacked a lot of holy cows during my career and people have screamed loudly".
A statistical masturbist: He adds-"In a French journal, I was called a statistical masturbist because I showed with statistics that demography screening didn't work and things like that and I was even accused of scientific misconduct by the Association of the Danish Pharmaceutical Industry which was completely ludicrous. It was harassment from beginning to end. They came with vague arguments that we cannot recognize the conclusions in your study and they could have come up with numbers and said these numbers are wrong. They didn't do anything and it was only harassment; it lasted eighteen months".
That's how capitalism works: "I think the whole thing and then when we were acquitted I made sure that this nasty behaviour was described in the British Medical Journal. So after that, they haven't come so much after me in the Danish Drug Industry and when my book about organized crime came out they just lied about it as they always do. They argued that my examples were old; they went back ninety years and so on. But you know where I demonstrate that what the ten biggest companies do is organized crime. These examples, were from the last ten to fifteen years and not old examples and the crimes have increased because when crime pays you have more crime, that's how capitalism works", signed off Dr Peter Christian Gøtzsche.
-Manohar Yadavatti
Informative and enlightening
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