Serving Ecology, Health, Peace and Justice since 1982
DRUG BUST Alan Cassels How do you calculate your net worth, the value of your company or your chequing account balance? You don’t have to be an accountant to understand that these amounts are determined by looking at both columns in the ledger – your assets and liabilities and your credit and debit. In Double-Entry … Read more…
DRUG BUST – The people’s briefing note on perscription drugs by Alan Cassels. A few years ago, I was invited to be the guest on an Ottawa radio talk show, the topic being something I was well familiar with, a book I co-wrote called Selling Sickness. The book explores how the pharmaceutical industry influences regulators, physicians and patients in order…
The alleged benefits of lowering our cholesterol have never materialized and we have wasted tens of billions of dollars over the last two decades, deluded by a myth. It’s time to drop that myth. Billions wasted on cholesterol myth by Alan Cassels Though it may appear to my readers that I have cried wolf far … Read more…
The looming epidemic of overdiagnosis. Where are the leaders in eliminating waste in health system spending? by Alan Cassels Lately, I’ve got overdiagnosis on my mind. Currently, we’re living through a perceived doctor shortage in BC, a crisis affecting as many as 600,000 British Columbians. In 2010, the governing BC Liberals promised that, within five … Read more…
Healthcare must engage in a wider discussion about preventive medicine by Alan Cassels • “Preventive medicine displays all three elements of arrogance…Aggressively assertive…Presumptuous…Overbearing.” Dr. David Sackett wrote those words over a decade ago in a neat little column in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. He was, in this case, talking about hormone replacement therapy, after … Read more…
Drugs to lower blood sugars don’t do much for your health DRUG BUST by Alan Cassels • In the last five years in British Columbia, taxpayers – that would be you and I – spent over $100 million on drugs and insulins for type-2 diabetes through our Pharmacare program. In addition, people in BC … Read more…
Common Ground magazine and I have been friends for 34 years! I was present at its 1982 birth and launch party in a Vancouver back yard. I like long-term friendships and this has been a good one. The articles throughout the magazine are lively and thought provoking. Common Ground has long been a leader … Read more…
Doctors need to “show more spine” DRUG BUST by Alan Cassels • The disease-creation machine continues to creep forward, threatening to consume even more of us healthy people. Consider these recent news items: – Americans, we are told, are facing an epidemic of heart disease. New cholesterol guidelines suggest that virtually the entire elderly … Read more…
BC Liberals can’t afford a real war against Pharma so they’ll fake one DRUG BUST by Alan Cassels • In the 1997 political satire film Wag the Dog, Anne Heche, playing an advisor to the US president, turns to Robert De Niro, another presidential aide and whispers, “We can’t afford a war.” De Niro … Read more…
by Bruce Mason • Christy Clark is in perpetual campaign mode, preferring photo-ops to real time in government. Too often, the filter between the endlessly chattering mouth and mind of the former talk-show radio host seems faulty. What comes out in public is, at best, inappropriate for a provincial leader. Like the time when she … Read more…