Anastrozole – Here we go again giving experimental drugs to perfectly healthy women

From Dr Vernon Coleman via expose-news.com

The NHS has said around 289,000 women could be offered anastrozole. It comes after UK medicine regulators approved the drug on Monday under Britain’s Medicines Repurposing Programme, a new approvals process that repurposes old drugs for new uses – in this case, cancer prevention rather than treatment.

As with all prescription drugs there are risks and side effects. Dr. Vernon Coleman questions why they would want to give such a powerful drug to healthy women.

By Dr. Vernon Coleman

Over a couple of decades ago there was a plan to give a drug called tamoxifen to every adult woman in Britain. The idea was that the drug would stop women developing breast cancer.

Now, tamoxifen can be a very useful drug.

If a woman has a hormone-responsive cancer, tamoxifen is a powerful treatment. (My wife has breast cancer and takes tamoxifen every day. You can rest assured that before she started taking it we weighed up the pros and cons very carefully. For the record, we decided that anastrozole was rather too risky. And Antoinette has breast cancer and would have taken the drug as a treatment.)

But, as with all prescription drugs, there are risks and tamoxifen has a number of side effects. It can actually cause other types of cancer. And when the plan to give tamoxifen to millions of women was first publicised, I fought a very successful single-handed campaign to stop the mass medication of women. (In those days I was writing five weekly columns, including one in The Sun newspaper, and regularly making TV and radio programmes.)

Here’s how I summarised my thoughts in my book ‘How to stop your doctor killing you’ (which was first published in 1996):

I was astonished and horrified when drug companies and doctors conspired to persuade completely healthy women to take a drug (tamoxifen) in order to try to prevent breast cancer despite the fact that it is known that the drug can cause cancer of the uterus.

Now, there is a plan to give a drug called anastrozole to hundreds of thousands of women “to stop them getting breast cancer”.

The mainstream media has been endlessly enthusiastic.

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