Nearly Invisible: Drug Traffic Accidents

Editorial Note: Many years ago, Moyra Peralta lost her eldest son in a Road Traffic Accident. As she put it, she flipped out. She spent several years afterwards working with homeless people on the streets of London. Out of this she created an extraordinary “book”, Nearly Invisible – see Worldly Goods – covering lives lived on the street.

Nearly Invisible is about the Invisibility of homeless people. But in many ways it is we wandering past the homeless who are invisible. We who are the faceless crowd whereas they are the individuals. We who have stopped caring whereas as Moyra found they still care and provide community and support.

Those of us injured by drugs are another group of all too Visible Invisibles. Anyone with a good healthcare eye who stops to watch people pass by can spot them – especially those who have been put on antipsychotics, statins, or fluoroquinolones. There is the Agonized Invisibility of those with post-drug induced sexual dysfunction from SSRIs, Accutane or Finasteride (Propecia).

On top of the grief of losing a son, Moyra has now also lost her husband Roger in a Drug Trafficking Accident. Like many of us she has found that most doctors simply cannot see anyone with treatment induced problems in front of their eyes – and this is getting worse not better. This is what RxISK and RxISK reporting is all about – help us help you become Visible.

Too late to save my husband

As someone with a severe statin induced memory loss cannot attempt a RxISK report, I am taking the opportunity to state our family situation on this blog in lieu of a patient-report, though I am in a near state of exhaustion and don’t personally feel I can offer anything that would not be dismissed as emotional or anecdotal.

It is not myself but my husband who is the prescribed-drugs victim. My husband – a previously alert and healthy man – had his life and memory partially destroyed by a year’s force-feeding of Lipitor and Ezetrol/ezetimibe. Our lives changed horrendously for the worse. This was in 2007–8.

His cognitive deterioration was sudden, swift and progressive following Lipitor. We stopped the drug after our doctor attempted to switch him to Crestor.

Scaremongering

His cholesterol level was only 5. But despite feeling well, he was scare-mongered into believing that he would have a stroke and/or a heart attack if he did not take the drugs. And the GP said that even when his cholesterol reading fell she will NOT take him off the drug, “as it proves that it is working”! “Informed consent” did not seem part of her vocabulary. The scare-mongering continued, with several home phone calls, hectoring him to continue the drugs even after the spiraling effects of memory loss had been reported to her.

It took me six months of evidence gathering to persuade my husband that his seriously escalating memory-loss was a direct result of statin poisoning from the general practitioner that he apparently trusted, but by that time the damage was done, and sadly has not been reversed. Despite multiple recommended brain supplements (from those who sell them) I have lost my bright, healthy, intelligent partner as he now struggles with strategies to cope with a drastically reduced short-term memory span of (now) some 1 to 2 minutes, which affects absolutely everything on a day-to-day basis.

I am now virtually a carer for my partner as he, through no fault of his own, has suddenly lost large areas of his identity, personality, confidence and ability. Fortunately, for want of a better word, it is confined to memory loss only and not senility, or mental confusion. Fortunately, too, he is physically very well, though now has a slight stooped appearance which also came with the Lipitor.

As a family, we have been harmed beyond measure by the current medical model in which we were, at the time, ignorant enough to place our trust. My husband’s severe memory loss from Lipitor-damage, the GP’s refusal to lower the dose, her denial of reported ill effects from statins, her apparent unawareness of CO-Q10 depletion as an unwanted effect of statinisation, and a brainwashing insistence to “keep taking the pills” – a multiplicity of pills — has robbed us of any quality and happiness in our last decade together.

There is no way one can describe in words the pain and stress of watching one’s partner’s capabilities suddenly and unexpectedly disintegrate. To me it was a case of unethical force-feeding of a patient with a toxic substance.

Has medicine lost its soul?

Here in the UK doctors are rewarded financially for such prescribing, Government targets mean they get more pay as a result. This is a sheer conflict of interest in regard to placing concern for patients as a top priority. In my experience, few GPs will even admit the toxicity of statins, and those who do so are ridiculed by their colleagues. Many others, knowing the facts, still sit on the fence regarding the 100-plus destructive “side-effects” of statins.

In these hidden agendas, I doubt whether medicine will ever regain its humanity. Hardly a thought we can discuss with doctors who are, for diverse reasons, totally drug-oriented! Multiply this single case by the escalating thousands of destroyed lives from this NICE Guideline-controlled agenda — whose objective appears to be one in which the whole population is placed on obscenely-profitable and toxic drugs from cradle to grave. The elderly are especially put under constant pressure to take prescription drugs. To me this is tantamount to a state-legalised form of murder-for-profit. It is an unbelievably unethical practice to reward healthcare providers financially for all target prescriptions written, which provide a fair proportion of their income.

The psychological stresses of going anywhere near one’s GP nowadays are continuously mounting. I should add we are long enough in the tooth to remember the days when doctors prescribed drugs only as a last resort – and were not continually calling in patients for routine tests. The benefit from a somewhat ‘elderly’ perspective is that one has knowledge of the earlier existence of a much more wholesome and non-toxic medical framework.

Had we gone along the prevailing ‘doctor knows best’ route, while our GP was advocating the necessity of Lipitor for life, in all likelihood my husband would have been dead by now. We also refused a clinical investigation referral, for memory tests, to a hospital consultant who just also happened to be on the advisory board of GlaxoSmithKline. My very real fear was that a hospital ‘Assessment’ would inevitably result in even more drug-prescribing and that that would, literally, be the end of him. We now maintain our physical health by avoiding contact with general practitioners altogether.

Help outside the system

It goes without saying in this saga, that the existence of Dr Graveline’s SpaceDoc website (once found – see Lipitor from 1997), and writings of a handful of other concerned and honorable medics such as Ravnskov, Golomb, Langsjoen, Cohen, Kendrick, Briffa and others (anti-cholesterol viewpoints are scarce here in Britain!) have prevented my complete breakdown from anger and stress. I am continually reminded of Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s comment that the use of the statin drugs comes something very close to “a crime against humanity”. Citizens are dying in mind, body and spirit from our ‘healthcare’.

The situation is both unethical and wholly dispiriting. I speak as one who has had two members of my family destroyed by the actions of pharmaceuticals and those dispensing them. I have been particularly interested in deaths from prescription drugs… and the methods of marketing dangerous drugs… since my mother’s death from Opren. Lipitor and Crestor will surely in time be withdrawn like Vioxx & Baycol but far too late for those already dying slow deaths well before their time (see The Legacy Effects of Statins).

Since our own family life and happiness has been destroyed by quite unnecessarily prescribed medications from our dogmatic GP, I have amassed some 600 or so documents from four years’ research online concerning this devastation in supposed healthcare to unsuspecting and brainwashed patients. The RxISK website appears to be the latest beacon of hope for transparency in medicine.

Editorial Note: The preface to Nearly Invisible ends with:

“In our postmodern, dehumanising society, my photographs come from the heart. They have been generously given to me by those finding themselves on the street”.

This an almost perfect description of the “photographs” filed under the heading of RxISK stories.