Aspirin - IS the wonder drug

[dieseltaylor]

Amusing to think how it was good , then not so good, and now vindicated. If you have feelings about organic food, and who does not, one of the defences for plants against attack is to generate more salcylic acid. Now of course if you spray crops with insecticides they have no nedd to generate the useful to animals salcylic acid. So now take your mini-daily dose!

Of course aspirin was out of patent and the replacements well ...

It has only been six years since the COX-2 specific inhibitor Vioxx was billed as a super aspirin that didn’t have aspirin’s “risks” by Merck. Widely advertised and pitched by Olympians Dorothy Hamill and Bruce Jenner, Vioxx turned out to double the risk of heart attack and was withdrawn from the market in 2004.

27,785 patients suffered heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths on Vioxx, according to the FDA. Merck was also accused of concealing “critical data on an array of adverse cardiovascular events,” by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Bextra, a COX-2 specific inhibitor similar to Vioxx, was also withdrawn for similar reasons in 2005. In fact, patients taking Bextra after heart surgery were 2.19 times more likely to suffer a stroke or heart attack according to American Heart Association information. And last year Pfizer agreed to pay $2.3 billion for fraudulent marketing of Bextra and three other drugs. Not million, billion.

So it does cross my mind who might have had an interest in dissing aspirin. And you know how misconstrued reports can be....

This week the medical press also trumpeted the news of a possible new indication for Celebrex, a third COX-2 specific inhibitor that was not withdrawn from the market. Celebrex is widely promoted as a pain reliever regardless of the risks belonging to the class of drugs and the fact that 21 of Celebrex’ original pain studies relied on fraudulent data fabricated by Dr. Scott S. Reuben, former chief of acute pain at Baystate Medical Center and a paid Pfizer spokesman.

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/12/11/now-praised-aspirin-was-vilified-by-vioxx-marketing/