The FDA's War Against Sleep - by A Midwestern Doctor

"•In 1964, a sleeping medication hit the market that was remarkably effective for a variety of conditions (including insomnia) and hence profoundly improved the health of its recipients. Because it threatened so many different drug markets, once it reached America in 1990, the FDA in collusion with the media launched a ten-year take down of it, which in many regards was almost identical to what they did to ivermectin. It was successful, and very few people are even aware that this drug exists or that the many of sleeping disorders we face are easily treatable

That drug, originally developed in 1874, is gamma-hydroxybutyrate.
•It produced remarkable results in the treatment of a variety of addictions, particularly opioids (e.g., see this study), alcohol (e.g., see the results of this study), and benzodiazepines, along with helping mitigate the withdrawals from each of these substances. Conversely, GHB was not addictive.

Because of the immense problems our society faces from sleeping issues, a massive “treatment” market exists. Unfortunately, like many things in modern medicine, the more money we put into the problem, the worse it becomes. To illustrate:

Despite a nearly $65 billion a year (and growing) sleep aid market, 50-70 million American’s suffer from sleep disorders and many more experience the physical and mental toll lack of sleep can have on the body and brain on any given day. Globally, the “sleep economy,” which includes everything from beds and pillows to medical devices, rings in at a whopping $432 billion a year. In 2020 alone more than half of Americans say their sleep worsened due to the pandemic, and 76% of American’s admitted to purchasing a sleep aid to help them fall asleep, stay asleep or improve the quality of sleep had at night.

The entire scam comes down to the fact most sleeping pills are sedatives, not sleep aids. What this means is that once you take them, you are no longer conscious, but since this is done through sedating the brain, its ability to initiate restorative sleep functions is greatly impaired. As a result, people who take sleeping pills effectively have greatly reduced sleep, and in turn, are both tired throughout the day (because they did not have a restorative night of sleep) and are at high risk of developing a wide range of health issues associated with poor sleep.

For example, one study found people who used sleeping pills were twice as likely to die as those who did not (and three times more likely if they were daily users). Worse still, another study that compared 10,529 sleeping pill users to 23,676 controls, found that over the course of 2.5 years, the sleeping pill users (depending on how many pills they took) were 3.6-5.4 times more likely to die, and for those who took at least 18 pills a year, they had a 7-99% increased risk of dying from cancer. This in turn, led the authors to conclude that in 2010, prenoscription sleeping pills “may have been associated with 320,000-507,000 excess deaths within the USA alone.”

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/why-isnt-there-a-cure-for-insomnia

📱 ROBINMG