Potential Dangers of Diabetes Drugs on Your Health and Longevity

What if I told you that oral medications for type 2 diabetes actually do more harm than good? There are several potential dangers of diabetes drugs.

Judge for yourself

In February 2008, researchers in the USA conducted a large study called Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD). One arm of the study tested the widely held assumption that more aggressive lowering of blood sugar would provide greater protection against heart disease.

ACCORD researchers found the exact opposite of what they were looking for. i.e. Participants on the most intensive drug regimens aimed at driving blood sugar way down had a much higher cardiovascular death rate. “Intensive blood sugar lowering treatment” proved to be so harmful that the researchers halted this arm of the study 18 months early to prevent this aggressive drug use from killing even more people”.

Medical experts said they were “shocked,” “stunned,” and “startled” by this “unexpected” finding. This is utter nonsense. The fatal complications of diabetes drugs have been known since 1969 when results of a similar study called the University Group Diabetes Program were made public. The goal of this placebo-controlled study of patients with Type 2 diabetes was to see if either of two oral diabetes drugs lowered the incidence of heart attacks and other cardiovascular complications.

Incredibly, just like ACCORD, the study had to be stopped two years early because participants who were taking the drugs had a 250 to 300 percent higher death rate than those taking the placebo.

That’s right: People taking dummy pills did far better than those taking diabetes drugs!

Potential Dangers of Diabetes Drugs: The Main Culprits

One of the two drugs used in the older study, Phenformin, was shown to be so deadly that it was taken off the US market. Yet this drug’s close cousin, Metformin (Glucophage), which has a near-identical mechanism of action, is the most popular diabetes medication in the world and was the most frequently used drug in the ACCORD study.

The other drug used in the 1969 study, Orinase (tolbutamide), was ultimately ordered to carry a “black-box warning” stating that it dramatically increases the worst complication of diabetes: death from heart attack. Orinase belongs to a class of drugs known as sulfonylureas, which includes dozens of popular medications such as glimepiride (Amaryl) and glyburide (Daonil). The same black-box warning has appeared in the USA on all sulfonylureas since 1984 (long before the ACCORD trial began).

Another class of diabetes drugs and the second-most widely used type of medication by ACCORD participants was thiazolidinediones, the most notorious of which is Avandia. If you want to increase your risk of heart attack by 40 percent, heart failure by 60 percent, and death by more than 30 percent, Avandia is the drug for you. Mercifully the Indian Government ordered the Avandia drug trials to be shut down because it showed potential heart problems with the use of the drug.

With side effects like these, it’s no wonder that intensive drug use in the ACCORD study caused so many deaths. The only “shocking” thing is that physicians persist in using these dangerous drugs at all! Are we really going to let another three decades go by before we take these drugs off the market?

You Do Have Safe, Effective Options

In 1978, nine years after the University Group Diabetes Program study and 30 years before the ACCORD, Public Citizen, a noisy nonprofit consumer advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, said:

“Warning: Anti-diabetic Pills Are Dangerous to Your Health. Are you taking oral diabetes drugs? These pills could cost you your life. You must do three things: 1. Stop taking antidiabetic pills as soon as you can. 2. Go on a diet and lose weight 3. Stop seeing your present doctor unless he or she genuinely tries to help you lose weight and agrees to switch you to natural supplements or as a last resort, insulin if you still have diabetic symptoms at or below your ideal body weight. These steps could mean the difference between life and death.

Doctors who’ve read the research stop these drugs on sight. If the patients are on insulin and they’re overweight, they stop the insulin as well. Giving insulin to overweight type 2 diabetics is a recipe for further weight gain and does more harm than good.

Numerous scientific studies support a safe, natural approach with lifestyle changes instead of focusing on lowering blood sugar at any cost.

Obviously, lifestyle changes require work on the part of both physician and patient. Most doctors will never put in that much effort. It is not profitable. So the doc pulls out his prescription pad and prescribes a “magic pill,” which the patient readily accepts because he doesn’t have to do any work…just pop the pill. But adverse side effects are seldom discussed.

The pharmaceutical industry currently controls the bulk of the medical research, treatment guidelines, and physician “education.” As a result, not only is the effectiveness of drugs overstated and the risks minimized, but the emphasis on medication draws attention away from safe, natural therapies that truly improve the health and longevity of people with diabetes.

You Should Be Alarmed

The fallout from ACCORD has been predictable. In an effort to minimize concerns, study organizers say, “Patients with type 2 diabetes should not be alarmed by these findings of the ACCORD trial.”

Yes, they should be alarmed because the drugs themselves caused harm—a 250 to 300% increase in deaths from cardiovascular disease!

You may be thinking Diabetes is the number one cause of blindness, amputation, kidney failure and painful and debilitating peripheral neuropathy. Surely these drugs offer some protection.

According to Norton Hadler, MD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as quoted in BusinessWeek, “No oral diabetes drug has ever been shown to do anything really good for any patient. No leg, eye, kidney, heart, or brain has ever been spared.”

Conclusion

Taking medication that lowers your blood sugar may make you think you’re doing better, but these pills are clearly making you worse.

Recommendation

Knowing the potential dangers of diabetes drugs, talk to your physician about alternatives to oral diabetes drugs. If your doctor isn’t willing to work with you, find one who will.

Read more about how to treat type 2 diabetes with Ayurveda and Naturopathy