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French doctors: half of drugs ‘are useless’

A new book written by two doctors claims over half of the medicines are available in France are ineffective, and 5 percent of them are even dangerous.

Authors of “The Guide to 4,000 Useful, Useless or Dangerous Medicines”, doctors Bernard Debré, also a an MP for the centre-right UMP, and Philippe Even, director of the Necker Institute, studied the most common medicines and their effects on patients.

They found 50 percent of the medicines were useless, 20 percent were “badly tolerated”, and 5 percent have adverse effects.

Among the dangerous 5 percent were cardiovascular, anti-inflammatory and contraceptive pills. Daily paper Le Nouvel Observateur, which takes extracts from the book in today’s edition, has compiled an all-inclusive “blacklist”.

In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Dr Even claimed statins, drugs taken to lower cholesterol, were just one of the many drugs found to be “completely useless”.

“[Statins] are taken by three to five million French people, which costs France €2 million per year,” he said.

Dr Even and Dr Debré claim in the book that “useless” medicines cost the French government €10 billion per year.

On the pharmaceutical industry, Dr Even said it is “the most lucrative, most cynical and least ethical of all the industries”, and to rebalance the deficit in the health department in France “one simply has to take the dangerous, useless and ineffective medicines off the market.”

The Professional Federation of Medical Industrialists, Leem, have criticised the book as “confused”, saying it “serves to needlessly alarm the ill and could lead them to stop their course of treatments specially adapted to the illnesses they suffer”.

A 2011 study revealed France was one of the top consumers of medicines, with the average French person having 47 boxes of pills in their cupboard.

In a more recent survey, taken in July this year, 84% of the French said they had faith in medicine.

Dr Even and Dr Debré were commissioned by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2011 to investigate the Mediator Affaire, in which drugs given to diabetics were thought to have killed up to 2,000 people before they were taken off the market.

Their report concluded that although it seemed to be an isolated incident, the medical system desperately needed a reform.

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DOCTOR

Syrian doctor in Germany accused of war crimes

A Syrian doctor living in Germany is being investigated on suspicion of carrying out crimes against humanity at a military hospital in the war-torn country.

Syrian doctor in Germany accused of war crimes
A police wagon in front of the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe. Photo: DPA

Federal prosecutors suspect the man of beating and torturing men arrested by the Syrian regime while working as a doctor in the hospital in the city of Homs, a report in Spiegel magazine Friday said.

The federal prosecutor's office in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe declined to comment when approached by AFP. 

The man, identified only as Hafiz A., reportedly moved to Germany in 2015 and now lives and works as a doctor in the state of Hesse.

READ: Germany plans to deport 'dangerous' Syrian criminals 

Two witnesses told investigators that the man and a colleague withheld medication from an epileptic patient and then forced him to take a pill that caused his condition to rapidly deteriorate.

The doctor and other men finally beat the patient to death, the witnesses have alleged. His family is said to have found his body the next day with bloody wounds on his face and holes in his skull.

Two further witnesses, former doctors at the military hospital, said the man had also intentionally operated on an opponent of the regime without anaesthetic.

He is also alleged to have poured alcohol onto another man's genitals and then set him on fire.

The accused has informed his lawyer that he denies all the accusations, the report said.

According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, at least 60,000 people have been killed under torture or as a result of terrible conditions in detention centres since the start of the uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in March 2011.

In April, the first court case worldwide over state-sponsored torture by the Assad regime opened in Germany.

The two defendants are being tried on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows a foreign country to prosecute crimes against humanity.

Germany has taken in more than 700,000 Syrian refugees since the start of the conflict.

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