When a co-founder of evidence-based medicine's standard-bearer, the Cochrane Collaboration, describes the pharmaceutical industry as akin to the mafia, it's time to sit up and take notice. That's precisely what Dr Peter C Gøtzsche, who is also head of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, has done with Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare. Read our exclusive interview with Dr Gøtzsche below to learn more about his findings.

Valuable opinions

Dr Gøtzsche's is the latest in a lengthening procession of books exposing the murky underbelly of the pharmaceutical industry. Most recently, we've had Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma, along with other notable examples by Marcia Angell and Richard Smith, former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the British Medical Journal (BMJ), respectively.

But this is the first time such a broadside has been launched by someone so intimately acquainted with the published medical literature. Dr Gøtzsche's current tally runs to forty meta-analyses and systematic reviews published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews alone: the fruits of many years' forensic examination of medical data. Dr Gøtzsche knows what he is talking about, and his opinions carry significant weight.

The journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) wants to withdraw the article by Professor Seralini on rats fed GM maize NK603, which was published in September 2012. The researcher counters: why not retract the article by Monsanto in 2004 on the same subject?

The Associate Editor of the FCT is now Richard E. Goodman, a former Monsanto scientist and an affiliate of the GMO industry-funded group, the International Life Sciences Institute.

ARM WRESTLING. He has mustered his scientific and political supporters ... A symbol. Surrounded notably by Paul Deheuvels, statistician of the Academy of Sciences and Corinne Lepage, Member of the European Parliament on November 28, at a press conference in Brussels, Professor Gilles Eric Séralini of the University Caen will defend his sensational article on GMOs, released last year, which is now threatened with retraction.

Florida is exceptional for countless reasons - sunshine, beaches, theme parks - but a new distinction is cause for growing concern among health experts and tourism officials alike: a rapid and unexplained increase in the number of cases of tick-borne diseases.

A problem for decades in the Northeast, Lyme disease cases in Florida are still relatively small by comparison - fewer than 100 per year. But the rate of growth of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases - as much as 150 percent in the last 10 years - has put Florida among the top 20 states for the number of cases reported annually.

Possible explanations range from the influx of infected people traveling to Florida from other areas, to problems with diagnosis, the Sunshine State's unique flora and fauna, climate change - or even newly emergent pathogenic microorganisms. However, the real answer remains elusive.

The mystery has experts scrambling.

Remember the Seralini study, with those gruesome images of GMO-fed rats that were engulfed by horrific tumors? Well, great news! You can grab yourself some GMO corn and chow down now because the journal that published the study has retracted it. Silly us, there was absolutely nothing to worry about!

The new editor over at the journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology, says so - you know, Richard E. Goodman, the editor that used to work in the hallowed halls of Monsanto.

Wait....what????????????????????

I guess it wasn't enough for Monsanto to infiltrate the government at every level - now they have to install staff to keep their GMO death crops from being negatively reviewed at respected scientific journals.

Rady Ananda, of Food Freedom News and Activist Post, reports:

Back in October, The Daily Sheeple reported that a court of appeals was going to force a 10-year-old Amish girl from Ohio to take chemotherapy treatments for her leukemia after her family opted to seek alternative treatments.

Now that family has taken the girl and fled the country.
The parents initially fought the treatments because they were making their little girl, Sarah Hershberger, severely ill, but the hospital decided to take the parents to court over their decision to look for natural cancer cures outside the Big Pharma model. Even though a juvenile judge twice ruled to uphold the parents' rights, Akron Children's Hospital took the case to an appeals court which overturned the previous rulings.

We are living in the age of disinformed consent. Parents assume their doctors and their public health authorities are providing them with all relevant vaccine information, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Obviously, if vaccines can kill and cause serious and debilitating lifelong damage - which they can, and do - the vaccine administrator must provide that information to the client, in unambiguous fashion, regardless of the estimated size of the risk. It's an ethical mandate that must be fulfilled, but it never is. There is a fundamental reason: medical schools don't teach the history and nature of vaccine damage and death; nor do nursing and pharmacy schools. Yet doctors, nurses, and, these days, pharmacists, are the very ones who administer vaccines, and upon whom we rely for full information. Somewhere there is made a conscious decision to exclude the reality of serious vaccine damage from the curricula.

Most of the many doctors who have witnessed vaccine damage - thankfully, not all - lack the professional integrity to follow up with curiosity, let alone research. This is the most troubling of the array of vaccine contradictions; trained to observe, they nevertheless appear blind to even the possibility of causal relation.

Shame is a universal emotion that almost every person experiences at one or more points in life. It is often accompanied by physical sensations such as heat waves, nausea, or blushing. Shame, in itself, is not a mental health disorder, but research has shown that it hugely impacts mental health problems as well as social relationships and decision-making.

Shame has been found to be more prevalent in mental health clients than anger, grief, or anxiety. Many mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse or eating disorders, are influenced and exacerbated by shame. Also, mental health - the absence of severe emotional or behavioral problems - is almost impossible to fully achieve if a person has a high degree of shame.

Shame often surfaces when a person experiences rejection or ridicule. This triggers feelings of being exposed, deeply flawed, and completely alone. At the base of shame is often the strongly held belief that we are the only person with this problem, which, of course, makes it even harder to reach out and ask for help.

Shame and guilt are often used interchangeably but they are different things. Guilt is what people feel when they do something they think is wrong. Shame is what people feel when they are convinced something is wrong with them.

For example, a woman who tries to lose weight can feel guilty about indulging in greasy food but still feel OK about herself as a person. A woman who feels shame about her body will not feel good, even if she manages to stick to her diet. Guilt generally motivates a person to change things because he or she wants to feel better. Shame makes people focus on hiding who they are, instead of changing. Very rarely does shame lead a person to open up and seek help.

For women, shame in our society is generally centered on issues such as body image, weight, or being a good mother. For men, it is often more about success and virility, but it is also increasingly about body issues. Other common issues that may lead to feelings of shame for both genders are suicide, addiction, sexual abuse, sexuality and mental health. Problems with any of these topics interfere with feeling "normal" and make it more difficult to be accepted but easy to feel judged. People who experience shame around these issues feel disconnected from others because they are afraid to open up and instead try to hide what's "wrong" with them.

The less people are aware of their shame and shame triggers, the more it influences their lives. The fear of being seen as deeply flawed leads to defensive strategies such as blaming, lashing out, or judging.

Smokers trying to quit may run into huge drawbacks, including suicide, with the anti-smoking drug Chantix.

A total of 544 suicides and 1,869 attempted suicides have been reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as "adverse events" in connection with Chantix, according to documents obtained by Al Jazeera's America Tonight.

The widely popular drug was approved by the FDA in 2006 and is designed to curb the desire to smoke. But its users have reported adverse effects, which are side effects reported to the FDA by patients, doctors or health professionals.

"There were side effects that made it look like it was unsafe for pilots and people in critical occupation because there were seizures, blackouts, temporary blindness, blurry vision," Thomas J. Moore, senior researcher with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, who was testing new software to analyze adverse events, said.

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the whooping cough vaccines that have been in use since the 1990s - and not kids whose parents refuse the whooping cough vaccine - are actually behind the surge in whooping cough outbreaks across the U.S.

This news flies in the face of scads of articles that have come out in the past few years claiming unvaccinated children are behind whooping cough outbreaks. One such article is Time Magazine's, "Parents Not Vaccinating Kids Contributed to Whooping Cough Outbreaks" reported on back in September. Time cited research published in the Journal of Pediatrics - research that involved at least one author who disclosed financial ties to Big Pharma vaccine makers Sanofi Pasteur and GlaxoSmithKline - the two companies that just so happen to produce all the pertussis vaccines available in the U.S.

(Even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) admits that unvaccinated children are not responsible for whooping cough outbreaks, by the way.)

In previous installments, we've proven the following:

• A calorie is not a calorie when you eat it at a different time of day.
• A calorie is not a calorie when you eat it in a differently processed form.
• A calorie is not a calorie when you eat it as a wholly different food.
• A calorie is not a calorie when you eat it as protein, instead of carbohydrate or fat.
• A calorie is not a calorie when you change the type of fat, or when you substitute it for sugar.
• Controlled weight-loss studies do not produce results consistent with "calorie math".
• Even if all calories were equal (and we've proven they're not), the errors in estimating our true "calorie" intake exceed the changes calculated by the 3500-calorie rule ("calorie math") by approximately two orders of magnitude.

(This is a multi-part series. Return to Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, or Part VI.)

Empirical Evidence: A Calorie Is Not A Calorie When You Add Carbohydrate To A Zero-Carb Diet

There are many anecdotal reports of people finding it difficult or impossible to gain weight on a zero-carb diet, even with massive overfeeding. Yet there are controlled trials that seem to show high-fat diets having no such overfeeding advantage. Why not?