Study used to push dangerous drug on arthritis sufferers

Don’t be fooled into becoming a victim of this dangerous med

It’s a spin-off from one of the most deceptively presented studies to come along in quite a while.

And if you suffer from the pain of arthritis, you’re at risk of being directed to start popping an extremely risky pill — all in the name of keeping your blood pressure down.

But before you follow any advice to start taking Celebrex, you need to know the whole story.

It’s about how this dangerous med managed to be presented as some kind of benign substance — despite being a kissing cousin to a compound involved in the most tragic drug scandal ever seen in the U.S.

A bad ‘family history’
The trouble with a lot of misinformation is that there’s often a grain of truth to it.

And it’s not easy to pick it apart and figure out what’s real and what isn’t.

That’s exactly what’s going on with a “new” study telling how NSAID drugs can raise your blood pressure if you have arthritis.

The bottom line is; they can, and they do.

But here’s where things start to go off the rails.

Somehow, this research got presented as an “easy pass” for the Rx med Celebrex — a drug found to slightly drop blood-pressure readings, as opposed to another NSAID, ibuprofen, which raised them.

That last development generated maddening headlines such as this one: “Ibuprofen health warning: Cheap painkiller raises the risk of heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure in arthritis sufferers.”

And what was the proposed solution to that? Why, of course to ditch your “cheap” OTC NSAID pain meds in favor of a more pricy prescription
one — none other than Celebrex!

This study on blood pressure and NSAIDs, however, is really nothing more than round two for Pfizer in its attempt to clean up the image of Celebrex.

Last year, we told you about the big Pfizer-sponsored study on Celebrex called PRECISION, which was conducted over a decade to prove the safety of the med in the aftermath of the Vioxx disaster.

Celebrex, you see, is the only “COX-2 inhibitor” left on the market. The other two, Vioxx and Bextra, were stripped off the pharmacy shelves after being linked to tens of thousands of heart attacks and strokes in people taking them.

So, the FDA required that Pfizer complete a long-term study to see if Celebrex was as dangerous as those related meds. That big trial finished up at the end of last year, and, as expected, it “proved” the safety of Celebrex according to the news reports.

Only — it really didn’t!

By the end of the study period, not only had close to 70 percent of the people in this trial dropped out, but the Pfizer-paid docs running it also lost track of another 7,000 participants.

Seriously, how do you run a trial like this and misplace that many people? It makes no sense whatsoever!

But that little detail wasn’t lost on everyone. Many experts, in fact, came forward and said it “calls into question” the conclusions coming out of PRECISION. Others pointed out that this research effort didn’t really answer any safety questions about the med.

Now, another piece of that PRECISION study has been released, this one to specifically review NSAIDs (which include aspirin, Motrin, Advil, and ibuprofen) in order to find out if they raise the blood pressure of arthritis sufferers. And the conclusion was… yes, they can… unless you’re taking Celebrex.

What a surprise!

Despite the purported clean bill of health this Pfizer study seems to have bestowed on it, there’s no getting around the fact that this is a very dangerous drug we’re talking about — so dangerous that two other studies done on it had to be stopped in their tracks when it was found to double the risk of serious heart problems.

The real conclusion here is that Celebrex (along with all other NSAIDs) is a very risky way to treat chronic pain.

And the truth is that your health and longevity would stand a much better chance of lasting a lot longer if you took as few of these drugs as possible.

That’s why if you’re suffering from arthritis, it makes good sense to try a number of alternative treatments that have proven effective for many patients, such as acupuncture, yoga, and tai chi, as well as using arnica and capsaicin creams.

And while OTC and Rx drugs may do a great job of stopping pain quickly, that kind of relief can come at a very big price.

“Ibuprofen associated with blood pressure rise in arthritis patients at cardiovascular risk” European Society of Cardiology, August 28, 2017, ScienceDaily, sciencedaily.com