Health Canada slammed over drug secrecy – Toronto Star

Re: Ottawa keeps drug reviews under wraps, April 12

Ottawa keeps drug reviews under wraps, April 12

The Canadian public is once again being “stonewalled” by the Harper government. The reason that I am calling this the “Harper Government” is the fact that Stephen Harper runs this government like a dictatorship. His ministers are muzzled until Harper approves of what statements they are allowed to make to the media.

He arbitrarily releases information only when he feels like doing so, not when the public has a genuine need to know the details of situations, such as rail safety measures put in place after the disaster in Quebec, and now the federal drug reviews of 151 various medications.

According to Dr. David Juurlink from Sunnybrook Hospital, “These drugs harm people and in some instances they kill people. Frankly, shame on (Ottawa) for even contemplating not publishing them.” The doctor doesn’t realize that in Ottawa there is no shame, only secrecy.

Why all of this secrecy when Ottawa has supposedly made a commitment to being more transparent? This government is as “transparent” as the heavily tinted windows in a motor vehicle.

In 1947, there was a movie starring Danny Kaye, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. This movie was re-made in 2013 with Ben Stiller as the star. In Canada, it could have been made as The Secret Life of Stephen Harper, starring our Prime Minister.

Also, Harper would have been the perfect guest on the 1950s and 1960s TV show I’ve Got A Secret. He has so many secrets that the panel would never guess to which one he was referring.

Warren Dalton, Scarborough

Diana Zlomislic’s report is timely. Prescription drugs account for a large portion of health care costs, yet drug performance overall is dropping, even as prices rise. Some have doubled in six months.

A study conducted by Dr. Mark Olfson, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, and Steven C. Marcus, health scientist at Philadelphia’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center, uncovered data showing that the overall performance of prescription drugs has dropped 70 per cent in the last four decades.

In the 1970s, drugs tested achieved a primary effectiveness odds of 4.51 compared to a placebo set at 1. By the 1980s, this had dropped to 3.78 and by the 1990s it was further reduced to 2.02. By the 2000s it had reached 1.36.

Meanwhile alternative natural supplements and treatment methods are ignored by mainstream medicine.

My urologist was an expert and taught at University of Toronto medical school. He and I were both diagnosed with moderately aggressive prostate cancer in 2002. He pursued the remedial processes he taught and trusted, and we lost him in 2009.

I conducted my own alternative research, reported in a 280-page book which has saved many lives and today, at 85, I work 48 hours a week and am cancer free. My treatments cost around $ 2 per day. The average cost of a cancer to the healthcare system is several hundred thousand dollars. Surely it is time for a rethink.

Austen Barnes, Queensville

On the contrary, Health Canada is following in the steps of Germany, whose economy benefited from export of so-called “natural” health supplements, some of which were packaged by Big Pharma; they begin removing them from their shelves years ago. These items have no oversight in most cases: dosages fluctuate with the strength of the various herbals harvested.

There are no contra-indications by checking them against other ingested products from any source and, e.g. St. John’s Wort can be harmful if the customer is taking an anti-depressant. Ginger etc. can exacerbate Coumadin, to great harm. Don’t assume that arsenic, a naturally occurring substance, has never killed anyone either.

I feel somewhat safer with the disconnect between the prescriber and the person who rings up the sale. Our pharmacists can do a good job of screening for drug interactions and effects if all your prescriptions come from a single pharmacy. The monograph with unwanted effects is available and so is an open discussion.

Where does your statistic of 10,000 deaths come from? Is it misuse either in hospital or by the patient themselves? People react in different ways to medications; some SSRI and ADHD drugs can cause suicidal ideation and patients should be closely monitored.

Because of trials and tests prior to marketing, knowing many but not all of the pitfalls can help to make an informed decision.

Drugs that have been developed under the sole funding of the private sector may, indeed, legitimize claims to exclusive rights to such information. Where the public has funded the research and development of pharmaceuticals, however, the public has a right to the results of such research.

Canadian taxpayers have contributed billions of dollars, under a multitude of programs, to the development of pharmaceuticals. We seem to have forgotten Harper’s Economic Action Plan and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, which funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars to the research and development of pharmaceuticals in the year 2009 alone. If you follow the money, you’ll discover that the public has just as many proprietary rights to the much-guarded research.

Those who wish to have exclusive rights to research results, data, analyses, outcomes or reports should also ensure their exclusive funding of such research activity rather than looking to the public purse for support. Until then, we have a right to know exactly what our money has produced.

Stella Kargiannakis, Toronto

Health Canada’s murky and ambiguous criteria for assessing drugs need some critical thinking applied. In the article, referring to Champix, “Health Canada ruled last year that the drug’s benefits continue to outweigh its risks.”

The risks and benefits of drugs as they are assessed by Health Canada amount to a cognitive distortion. The “risks,” which are for the end user, are minimized and the “benefits,” which are primarily financial for the manufacturer of the drug in question, are maximized. And those risks and benefits are never truly weighed in an intellectually honest fashion, as in apples to apples. The risks and benefits for the users of the drugs.

Turn that argument around on to e-liquids for electronic cigarettes. The nicotine containing e-liquids have been banned by Health Canada, unilaterally, but most likely under the direction of Revenue Canada. Clearly the benefits of e-liquids outweigh the risks compared with smoking tobacco. In this instance the benefit to the user is minimized and the risk to Revenue Canada, the lost revenue of tobacco taxes, is maximized and left unspoken.

Hence, Health Canada’s warnings about e-liquid say nothing about health risks, rather the Health Canada website simply states what they don’t know about e-liquids and not what they do know.

Marijuana is another perfect example of this abusive logic. The benefits of marijuana use clearly and obviously outweigh the health risks. Marijuana would clearly and unequivocally beat alcohol on this scale of measure. When the government states that “marijuana is harmful” and rhymes off a laundry list of urban legend, old wives-tales and polluted prohibitionist science they really mean it is harmful to them and their shopping cart full of bad drugs, alcohol being at the top of that list.

On the benefit side of the equation the government employs a whopper of a cognitive distortion. The benefit, they claim, which the user enjoys, is in fact a harm. That’s the government telling me that the way I feel is harmful and that that feeling is worthy of prison time. Tell me, O’ Big Brother, how do I feel?

Health Canada is a joke from the front door to the loading dock. Corporate suck-ups as per the Harper doctrine.

You are not supposed to get your medical advice from the Internet. My aha moment with statins came when a massage therapist said, “what happened to your muscle on your left arm – I saw it last month, and now it has disappeared.”

For the first time I made a connection to a statin I had just starting taking for about five weeks. Sure enough, there were a lot of anecdotal statin/arm stories online. My doctor, who was working with incomplete information from the pharmaceutical industry, dismissed my concerns.

I went with the Internet’s advice stopping the medication and it took a couple of months to recover. A year later I was talked into going with a much larger dose of the same statin by a different doctor. The same thing happened to my arm again over a month. This time it was worse in accordance with the increased dosage. This new doctor also reading from big pharma’s playbook denied the connection. I stopped anyway and my recovery time took five months.

This is a relatively harmless story. But if Ottawa is keeping drug reviews under wraps where it is a matter of life and death, no doctor should be able to tell their patients that listening to the internet on medications is dangerous. I know there are a lot of charlatans online. But, if there is protection for drugs with dangerous side effects by a government body keeping secrets – how else are we going to make informed decisions.

Russell Pangborn, Keswick

Apart from the powerful and obviously influential pharmaceutical companies, who exactly benefits from this information being kept secret? Isn’t the supposedly transparent and accountable Harper government supposed to be protecting us?

The reason Ottawa keeps drug reviews under wraps is the same reason Transport Canada keeps under wraps the movement of toxic materials through highly populated areas. The “conservative corporate party” in Ottawa is not about to bite the hand that feeds it. Ask yourself: who is damaged by disclosure?

Nicholas Kostiak, Tottenham

Medicines save lives and adherence to treatment is one of the first principles of safe and appropriate use of medicines. The Star may have done more harm than good by alarming Canadians who rely on medication to manage their daily health and well-being.

Sharing of safety information is essential. It must be presented with context and in a way that does not create needless worry for patients and their families. The list published itemizes medicines reviewed for safety last year, when Health Canada either concluded that there was no cause for concern or, if issues were identified, the company was notified and changes were made.

Canadians can feel confident about the safety of their medicines and should seek the advice of their physician if they have any questions.

Russell Williams, President, Canada’s Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (Rx&D), Ottawa

Nowhere is confidence and transparency more important than in the decisions made that affect the health and safety of Canadians — and Health Canada is delivering.

The launch of the Regulatory Transparency and Openness Framework demonstrates Health Canada’s commitment to transparency. It makes Canada a world leader in the posting of practical drug safety review summaries, ahead of both the U.S. and the EU.

Indeed, the very first summary safety review – for acne drug Diane-35 – is the first of many summary safety reviews that will be published in the coming months. Summaries of safety reviews of high interest will be posted first, followed by routine posting of summaries of all new drug safety reviews.

These accessible, and plain-language summary drug safety reviews will provide both doctors and patients with information to help them make health-related decisions. Full-length technical reviews, with minor redactions only for legal purposes, will also be made available upon request.

Health Canada didn’t form this approach all on its own: patient groups and others were asked how best to share this type of information with the public, and our approach matches their expectations.

Canadians will now have access to more drug safety information than ever before. But publishing the findings of safety reviews is only the beginning, and we recognize that there is always room for improvement. That is why, now featured on our website, we have invited Canadians to let us know how we are doing and how we can do better.

We’ll continue to work to make sure that we can be more open and transparent with Canadians each and every year going forward.

Dr. Supriya Sharma, Senior Medical Advisor, Health Canada

I used to suspect but now believe that Health Canada is a partner of Big Pharma, the transnational drug companies and should be charged with conflict-of-interest. That’s one major reason for their continuing and inexcusable secrecy, including their refusal to publish many adverse, health-threatening reactions or “side effects” of various drugs, especially brain-damaging neuroleptics (“antipsychotics”) like Seroquel, which can cause stroke or death, particularly in elderly patients.

As the Canadian government’s health regulatory agency, Health Canada is supposed to educate, warn and protect us about alleged risks of drugs and “medical devices” such as electroshock/ECT machines. Instead, Health Canada issues weak warnings (“advisories”) about serious drug risks, and flatly refuses to release results of clinical trials of new, experimental or “controversial” drugs.

It’s time people realized that Health Canada is not independent, transparent and accountable as it and Health Minister Rona Ambrose claim. A non-governmental scientific organization should conduct a full and independent investigation into Health Canada including conflict of interest — it’s long overdue.