Medical Doctor Speaks on Big Pharma: “When Crime Pays, We Will See More Crime”

If you were born inside Plato’s allegorical cave, your only source of “knowledge” would come from shadows flickering on the cave’s walls. With no bearing in reality, the obscure shapes would become your truth. In time, everything outside the cave would be too much for you to grasp, thanks to your lifetime of limited perception.

You’d insist that the shadows of truth were real and that truth itself was a falsehood, almost diabolic. Your every action would be in response to shadows, and your demise would be inevitable.

When introduced to truth, Plato’s cave dwellers would attack it violently, and forever be confined to living in darkness.

Today, millions of people are trapped in the “cave” of healthcare. They have no idea that it’s really sickcare.  They chase cholesterol levels, vitamin D levels, and blood pressure numbers like sacred cows…to their downfall.

Every now and then, someone steps forward to illuminate the truth, showing people the way out of the cave.

Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, MD., is one of those truth tellers.

Dr.Gøtzsche is a Danish physician, professor, medical researcher, and leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. He co-founded and has written numerous reviews for the Cochrane Collaboration, which is internationally recognized as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare.

He’s the author of the book Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, which won first prize in the “Basis of Medicine” category of the British Medical Association’s annual book awards. He also wrote Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial, which reveals the dangers of psychiatric meds and how psychiatry overall has failed to deliver what patients actually want and need.

I had the honor and privilege of talking with Dr. Gøtzsche about Big Pharma extortion and how to combat it. One quote stands out: “The pharmaceutical industry has a huge interest in treating healthy people with meds.”

And that’s where we share the same passion. We both want people to ditch the meds.

In the following exclusive interview, Dr. Gøtzsche shows us how he came to learn that the pharmaceutical industry is NOT even remotely interested in helping people create true, lasting health — rather, the industry just wants to hook people on meds.

This is a “must-read” for anyone who is currently taking, or thinking about taking, any prescription med. It’s your ticket out of the pharmaceutical “cave!”

TPC #1: What made you so passionate about exposing Big Pharma’s corrupt business model?

Peter Gøtzsche: Prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Therefore, it is important to teach people not to take drugs unless they absolutely need them. In many cases, people who are killed by drugs did not need these drugs. It is a global tragedy to which we pay virtually no attention.

TPC #2: What initially got you interested in the field of biology and chemistry?

PG: When I was a child, I was an amateur photographer and was often out taking photos and spotting birds. It was therefore natural for me to start studying biology. Later, I also took a medical education.

TPC #3: What intrigues you about statistics and research methodology?

PG: What is so wonderful about mathematics is that if you do it correctly, there can be no further discussion. Healthcare is totally different. Even when the evidence is overwhelming, there are always people with vested interests who will argue otherwise. This is not only irritating but it is also harmful for our patients and our national economies.

TPC #4: As a specialist in internal medicine, do you think the drug industry is at all concerned about helping people create true, lasting HEALTH? Why or why not?

PG: Although there are good people in the drug industry who are interested in people’s health, the drug industry as a business model has no interest whatsoever in people’s health. It is all about money no matter what spokespersons may say. This is similar to the food industry, which has no interest in people’s health either, or in whether they increase the number of people with obesity.

TPC #5: You have called Big Pharma “organized crime.” What allows this corrupt business model to stay in place?

PG: When crime pays, we will see more crime.

This is what we have seen in relation to the drug industry. Top leaders are not being persecuted and convicted. Instead, we see settlements and fines, which do not have any effect on corporate behavior but are merely seen as a marketing expense. As long as no top executives go to prison, this lucrative crime industry will continue.

We are very afraid of calling a spade a spade because of this industry’s deep pockets and many lawyers. I might have been the first to use the term “organized crime,” which is part of the title of my book, Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare.

We also avoid calling fraud a fraud, for fear of litigation. But fraud is everywhere, as it means wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.

TPC #6: As a medical doctor, can you tell people how Big Pharma keeps people sick?

PG: The pharmaceutical industry has a huge interest in treating healthy people with drugs. Therefore, we have seen a lowering of the limits for what is considered normal. These limits have been pushed downwards by the drug industry and its paid lackeys among influential doctors.

The limits for what is “abnormal” and in need of drugs have been pushed so absurdly downwards over the years that, applying European guidelines for cardiovascular disease, researchers found that 86% of Norwegian males were at high risk of cardiovascular disease at age 40, although Norwegians are some of the most long-lived people in the world!

In another study, the researchers found that 50% of Norwegians had a cholesterol or blood pressure level above the recommended cut-off for treatment at age 24!

If the drug industry had been interested in curing people, they would have invested in developing new antibiotics and treatments for malaria, and they would have withdrawn their psychiatric drugs from the market because there is clear scientific evidence that these drugs — as currently used — do far more harm than good and not only make people sick but keep them in this role, because many patients become dependent on the drugs and cannot get off them again.

TPC #7: What is the root cause of Big Pharma’s corruption? (Where, when, and why did it all start?)

PG: There has always been corruption in the drug industry and most people have heard the expression “selling snake oil.” It is very easy to lure people into buying products that don’t help them or are harmful.

TPC #8: What would it take to bring this criminal down?

PG: We need a totally new system where there are no longer any patents on drugs and devices and where development and marketing of drugs become a public enterprise to which the drug industry can compete by offering services at the lowest possible cost, for example, animal experiments and formulation of substances into tablets. We have discussed this in a working group in the European Union and I have submitted a paper describing the principles for a completely different future where we would use far fewer drugs, save an enormous amount of money, and have healthier and more long-lived citizens.

TPC #9: What would it take to have truly safe, effective medication — minus the organized crime?

PG: Testing of drugs should not be left to the drug industry, which has all the interest in the world in exaggerating the benefits and concealing the harms.

In psychiatric drug trials, for example, half of the deaths and half of the suicides have been left out of the publications. There is a lot of fraud and bias in drug trials. I, therefore, see published drug trials, even in well-known journals like New England Journal of Medicine, as nothing else than an advertisement for the drug.

We need access to the clinical study reports in drug agencies in order to get closer to the truth. These reports can take up thousands of pages for just one trial and the harms are described in far more detail than in published trial reports. We have shown in several publications how important these data are.

For example, we recently showed that middle-aged women who get an SSRI (duloxetine) for urinary incontinence get adverse effects that increase the risk of suicide and violence 4-5 times compared with placebo. It would have been quite impossible to demonstrate how dangerous duloxetine is, if we had only had access to published research.

TPC #10: What has been your greatest challenge in educating people about the truth of our medical establishment?

PG: There has not been any challenge really. When I give public lectures, people immediately understand and accept how corrupt the whole system is and that our drugs are far more dangerous than they have been told. It has been shown that the public’s confidence in the drug industry is at a similar low level as their confidence in tobacco companies and automobile repair shops.