I love Dr. Mercola’s articles. Here is one everyone should read. It just amazes me how people simply go along with the herd. Don’t you want to KNOW? Don’t you want to be told the honest truth about what is being touted as “good for you”? The information is available, but you have to look for it. It is foolish to just accept everything the Drug companies tell you to do. They have an agenda and it is NOT your health they are concerned with, but the sale of their drugs. If a few people die, so be it. If many are experiencing symptoms or distress that is just “too bad”. They are not interested in the few, but the many. But to each of you, your own health and that of your children is paramount.

So protect yourselves. Read everything you can find about any drug or substance added to your food or water. Dr. Mercola has made a life’s work out of bringing you the truth. He understands that in most cases you are solely responsible for your own health. You have the power to stay or become healthy. It takes personal responsibility on your part. It takes effort and commitment and time. But, aren’t you worth it?

Here is the information:
By Dr. Mercola

New research has revealed just how misleading and questionable the results of medication studies cited in top medical journals actually are — adding to an already sizeable mountain of data on mainstream medical manipulation.

Pharmaceutical and vaccine makers are continually found to be sponsoring the very institution performing the study on the effectiveness of their product.

Such is the case with a recent inquiry that examined the trustworthiness of top drug trials.

Investigators from UCLA and Harvard recently analyzed the randomized drug trials from six prestigious journals, reaching a conclusion that brings into question the overall credibility of many top medication studies and those who perform them.

The investigative team found that many of these pharmaceutical studies were sponsored by the drug manufacturers; sponsors who the report states “may promote the use of outcomes that are most likely to indicate favorable results for their products.”

In fact many of these studies have been found to utilize different statistical techniques in order to establish the supposed safety of many medications that may actually be harmful to you.

The investigation found that data presented in the following misleading manner:

“It’s one thing to say a medication lowers your risk of heart attacks from two-in-a-million to one-in-a-million, and something completely different to say a medication lowers your risk of heart attacks by 50 percent. Both ways of presenting the data are technically correct, but the second way, using relative numbers, could be misleading.”

It is important to remember that the investigation analyzed not one, but six prominent medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal and the Archives of Internal Medicine. All of these journals were found to contain misleading data.

In addition to using imprecise numbers, many study authors have also been found to use deceptive outcome measures such as:

Surrogate outcomes: which is used to measure a heart medication’s ability to lower blood pressure. This form of outcome measurement is not a good indicator of the medication’s impact on more important clinical outcomes such as heart attacks.
Composite outcomes: a statistic that lumps together individual outcomes of unequal importance, like hospitalizations and death, into a single category. This makes it extremely difficult to ascertain the medication?s true effects.
Disease-specific mortality: a measurement that measures death from a specific cause. This can be especially misleading because even if a given medication reduces your chances of death from one disease, it may also increase your risk of death from another cause. The increased chance of death may even be significantly greater.

Flu Shot Ineffectiveness Exposes Medical Manipulation

Unfortunately, this is far from the first documented incident of study results being manipulated by outside financial interests. “Checkbook science,” as it is called, is rampant throughout the biomedical research and publishing industries. Basically, drug and chemical companies write the checks and the research institutions, whether private or public, manufacture the science needed to promote their financier’s products.

In fact, conflicts of interest like these are so widespread that in the past 15 months alone, 63 peer-reviewed articles discuss drug industry bias, according to PubMed.

With pharmaceutical drugs continually being linked to deadly diseases — despite FDA approval and the recommendation of government health officials — it is quite easy to see past the pharma bias that has corrupted the scientific process. In fact, if you have been following the flu vaccine, which is now being pushed harder than ever by the CDC and other mainstream health organizations, then you already know this.

The shocking lack of evidence supporting the seasonal flu vaccine, which now also contains the dangerous swine-origin H1N1 vaccine, reveals how media manipulation and drug bias can lead to incorrect public perception over the effects of the flu shot.

Why are “Gold Standard” Reviews Ignored?

It is a well-kept secret of the medical establishment — particularly the CDC ? that the Cochrane Database Review, which is the gold standard within the evidence-based medical model for assessing the effectiveness of common medical interventions, does not lend clear scientific support to the heavily toted concept that flu vaccines are safe and effective.

To the contrary, the Cochrane Database Review reveals that there is a stunning lack of evidence to support the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine in healthy adults, the elderly, and healthcare workers who care for the elderly. Disturbingly, most of these aforementioned groups compromise the demographic to which the CDC aggressively recommends the seasonal flu shot.

Even more concerning is the fact that the flu vaccine may be most detrimental to the health of your children. According to the Cochrane Database Review, only one unbiased safety study on inactivated flu vaccines has ever been performed in children under two — the very population that is most susceptible to adverse reactions.

And this study did not prove with any certainty that they are safe.

Despite the lack of evidence showing the safety of the vaccine on this age group, the current guidelines in United States and Canada recommend the vaccination of healthy children from as young as six months old. As if incessant government coercion were not enough, the PBS Kids cartoon series — Sid the Science Kid — is being used as propaganda to circumvent parental authority and directly brainwash kids into getting the flu vaccine.

What is perhaps most disturbing of all is that receiving the H1N1-loaded seasonal flu shot can actually increase your risk of developing H1N1 flu. The finding surfaced after the global pandemic declared by the World Health Organization in 2009, proving the ineffectiveness of the flu vaccine at preventing the flu. Researchers found that after receiving the seasonal flu vaccine, Canadian participants actually had an increased risk of developing H1N1. As it turns out, vaccines may actually decrease your resistance to viral infection through suppressing and/or imbalancing your immune system.

Ineffective, Dangerous, Yet Still Pushed by Health Officials

Not only is there a shocking lack of evidence supporting the use of the flu vaccine, but a number of studies have actually confirmed the danger and ineffectiveness of the shots.

One major study determined that the best the flu vaccine could do during a season where, in the rare case, the vaccine actually matched the wild-type strains in circulation, was to reduce the risk of influenza infection by a paltry one percent relative to unvaccinated controls. This means that despite receiving the shot ? riddled, as it is, with side effects such as the debilitating and potentially deadly nerve disease Guillain-Barre Syndrome — there is still an overwhelming likelihood that you will not be protected from the flu as a result of receiving the vaccine.

Read the rest of the article here:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/12/03/medical-studies-misleading-readers.aspx?e_cid=20111203_DNL_art_3