What do you get when you combine cholesterol medication, three different blood pressure drugs and aspirin into a single pharmaceutical pill? If you believe the drug company that funded its own study on this chemical cocktail, you get a wonder drug that has all the "benefits" of five different drugs with no more side effects than a single drug!

That's the story from Bangalore, India, anyway, where 2000 citizens of India were recruited into a clinical trial to test these drugs. The use of low-income citizens in developing nations as guinea pigs is now a common Big Pharma practice, by the way. It's cheaper than using Americans as guinea pigs, and the risk of lawsuits from harm or death is much lower in such countries.

According to the results of this study which was funded by the pharmaceutical company hoping to sell this drug, the study subjects taking the five medications in combination had no more side effects than those taking each medication individually.

And thus, it was declared that the more pharmaceuticals you take, the safer they become!

Is the MSM on drugs, too?

The Associated Press gushed all over this news, saying the Polypill has been "a dream for a decade," and that this company-funded clinical trial "proved the skeptics wrong."

The AP even quoted a doctor (Dr. Robert Harrington, spokesperson for the American College of Cardiology) as saying this Polypill should be part of President Obama's health care reform plan.

How do they know the Polypill actually improved health? They don't, really: They only know that it changed some numbers on laboratory reports: Blood pressure numbers and cholesterol numbers, namely. But did people actually live longer? Did they suffer fewer heart attacks? Did they experience improved circulation or bloodflow?

Of course not. Big Pharma almost never measures real-world effects in its studies -- it only measures "biomarkers" that greatly oversimplify the true causes of disease. High blood pressure, for example, is not a disease all by itself; it's merely a symptom of an imbalance that needs to be corrected on a fundamental level. Artificially lowering blood pressure does absolutely nothing to make a person healthier in the long run. In fact, it can cause greatly reduced circulation throughout the body.

Want more health? Take more drugs

That Big Pharma and the Mainstream Media (MSM) now think the answer to poor health is to combine multiple synthetic chemicals into one "medication cocktail" is a disturbing sign of the dangerous dissociation the industry has with the real world. And why stop at five drugs in combination? Why not combine twenty drugs? I can see the headlines now: "Twenty Drugs Proven as Safe as One Drug!"

Of course, we all know it's easy to prove anything -- no matter how ludicrous -- in the corrupt world of for-profit medicine. Yesterday, I wrote about how the Department of Health and Human Services approved a fictitious medical review panel led by a dead dog named "Truper Dawg." [Link]

If they can get a dead dog to head up a government-approved medical review board in the United States, I suppose it's not so amazing that an industry-funded clinical trial operated out of Bangalore, India would declare five drugs to be no more dangerous than any one of them alone.