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GlaxoSmithKline Chief: Our Drugs Do Not Work on Most Patients

  • April 04, 2018

Allen Roses, a senior executive at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), revealed that their expensive prescription drugs work less than half the time. Roses, the worldwide vice-president of genetics at GSK, merely confirmed one the industry’s worst kept secrets.
 
As reported by The Independent, this is one of the first times that a high ranking executive for a Big Pharma heavyweight has gone on record and conceded their products do not deliver as advertised. Roses told the attendees of a scientific conference at Duke University in North Carolina, "The vast majority of drugs — more than 90 per cent — only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people." 

As low as the drug efficacy rate he cited was, there is reason to believe that he overstated how well they work. For instance, it was claimed that SSRI depression drugs were effective in just 62 percent of cases. The actual performance is certainly far lower, no better than a placebo, and research also shows the use of antidepressants is associated with a 14 percent increased risk of a cardiovascular event, such as heart attack or stroke, and a 33 percent increased risk of premature death.
 
Antidepressants have been linked to child psychiatric disorders, birth defects and a veritable laundry list of adverse events. High on the list of concerns are the frequent reports of increased violent behavior, including homicides and suicides, among individuals taking antidepressant drugs.

In fact, the global trend of declining mental health and spikes in antidepressant drug use shows that the current mental health paradigm is broken and the prominent role antidepressant drugs play in this crisis needs to be seriously examined.  Over the past decade alone (2005 to 2015), rates of depression increased by 18 percent. In the U.S., more than 16 million people struggle with the condition, including 6 million seniors, and 11 percent of Americans over the age of 12 are on antidepressant drugs. Among women in their 40s and 50s, 1 in 4 is on antidepressants.

Part of the problem, I believe, is the fact that the go-to solution simply doesn't work, and the psychiatric field is slow to branch out into more effective yet less financially rewarding strategies. Antidepressants tend to be the first-line treatment, even though studies have proven they work no better than placebo.

Roses also told the audience that Alzheimer’s drugs only work 30 percent of the time; incontinence drugs 40 percent; and oncology drugs boast an efficacy rate of a mere 25 percent. These cellar dwelling numbers will not go over well in the U.K. During the same week when the National Health Service’s drug expenditures have climbed 50 percent in just three years, GSK announced they have more than 20 new drugs in the pipeline that each could earn the company $1 billion per year. 

It must be pointed out that Roses’ airing of Big Pharma’s dirty laundry at a scientific conference was not a Damascene conversion. He has not decided to champion safer and more effective natural remedies. He remains firmly in the corner his company’s profitable drugs and is a foremost proponent of “pharmacogenomics.” This field studies the role of the human genome in drug response and determining whether a patient would respond to a specific drug. 

The obvious benefit of this approach is that patients would not be subjected to dangerous drugs that have little chance of working. Taken at face value, this would appear to be superior to the current model: prescribing as many drugs as possible to as many people as possible. In practice, his brand of pharmacogenomics is firmly rooted in the failed reductionist approach that treats individual symptoms and underpins the flawed allopathic medical model. Chronic diseases will continue to surge in frequency until holistic strategies that treat the whole person and the underlying cause are adopted. 

Roses’ brand of pharmacogenomics also involves doubling down of the flawed genetic theory of cancer and a failure to incorporate the new science, which has found mitochondria dysfunction is evident in almost all cancers. In fact, the new era of "targeted immunotherapies" has been a dismal failure, and the probability of dying from these therapies is greater than the probability of living slightly longer. Yet we are spending billions on new and increasingly more expensive cancer drugs that have marginal efficacy at best. For information on alternative treatments, I recommend reading my feature about how cancer can be managed as a metabolic disease. 

Mitochondrial dysfunction is at the core of virtually all diseases — cancer especially — and your lifestyle has everything to do with this situation. Hence, strategies that support and optimize mitochondrial function, such as nutritional ketosis (achieved by a high-fat, low-net carb diet), intermittent fasting and high-intensity exercise are all part of the solution. Mitochondrial optimization is crucial to tackling not only the cancer epidemic, but many other disease epidemics as well. Ultimately, the really great news is that you have far greater control over your health, and your risk of cancer, than you might think.