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Eli Lilly Drug Failure Highlights Fatal Flaw in Modern Medicine

by Heidi Stevenson

18 August 2010

Eli Lilly has stopped the trial of a drug intended for Alzheimer's patients because it made their condition worse, not to mention causing skin cancer. The question that needs to be asked is how and why Lilly pushed a drug through both first and second stage trials, only to find that it makes the targeted condition worse when tested on real human beings in a stage three trial. Obviously, something significant is being missed by modern medicine's approach.

Eli Lilly's Flawed Logic

The drug, semagacestat—also known as LY450139, but we'll call it Sema for simplicity—was based on the assumption that destroying the plaque found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients would improve their symptoms. The logic was:

But Alzheimer's patients got worse on taking Sema. What's wrong with the theory? The answer lies at the heart of modern medicine: a fatal flaw.

Modern Medicine's Flawed Equation

There is an assumption that symptoms equate with disease, and that treating symptoms is the same thing as treating the disease. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Symptoms are the body's response to disease, not the disease itself. In most cases, they are actually the body's attempts to heal. Removal of symptoms does not remove disease. Removal of symptoms may ease suffering, and sometimes that's an appropriate response—as long as it's understood that alleviation is the goal, rather than healing.

Sadly, modern medicine seems to believe that symptom alleviation is the goal. That's why it will treat fever as the disease. However, it isn't; it's a healing response to disease. Fever reduction interferes with healing, allowing the proliferation of harmful conditions, such as infections and tumors. Yet, fever reduction is often the primary goal of modern medicine's treatment.

The same is true of a disease like Alzheimer's. The protein plaques are a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. We do not know that the plaques cause symptoms, only that they exist when the symptoms of Alzheimer's develop. The presumption that removing these plaques would result in any benefit to the patient was based on nothing better than wishful thinking.

The "Disease" of High Blood Pressure

In atherosclerosis, the same sort of misunderstanding exists. Blood pressure tends to be high in heart attack victims—but it does not mean that lowering blood pressure prevents heart attacks. In fact, it doesn't in women, men who haven't suffered a heart attack, and only marginally in men who have already suffered a heart attack. Blood pressure is a marker; it rises in response to something that's wrong.

For example, it's well known that obesity leads to high blood pressure. Does it make sense to try to lower pressure in someone whose system must work harder to circulate blood through more tissues? Of course, it doesn't. Yet, that is precisely the assumption of modern medicine—that obesity leads to the "disease of hypertension". It's absurd when you think about it, but how many people are taking medications to lower their blood pressure because they're overweight? And just how much harm is being done by it?

The presumption that it's beneficial to prevent plaque from forming on the brains of Alzheimer's patients results from the same flawed logic. Plaque is not the disease; it's a marker of the disease. We don't know why it's there, but answering that question might lead us to a genuine solution for Alzheimer's. Instead, we're left with a test group of patients whose condition is worse because of this fatally flawed assumption.

The mad assumption that treating a symptom equates with treating a disease has led to decades of disastrous drugs. As a result, we have dangerous so-called side-effects, the misnamed adverse effects that are inherent in chemical compounds labeled as drugs—often little different from compounds used for their poisonous effects in pesticides.

A primary example of this is warfarin, which is, quite literally, rat poison. It kills rats by thinning their blood. Some researchers, much too clever for our good, reasoned that relatively low doses of rat poison would lower blood pressure by thinning the blood. Great logic—until you consider that thin blood cannot transport nutrition adequately, nor can it be effective at removing wastes. Again, modern medicine is treating a symptom, not the disease, when it tries to lower blood pressure.

How Sema Got Through the First Two Trial Phases

Eli Lilly's Sema performed quite well in its first two testing phases. It did exactly what it was expected to do: interfere with gamma secretase's ability to manufacture amyloid beta, the plaque found in the brains of Alzheimer's victims. It was, in fact, highly successful. The problem is that the first two trial phases focused on the wrong goal. As a result, in the final phase, Sema worsened patients' condition.

The symptom, breaking down protein to make amyloid beta, is not the cause of Alzheimer's. It's a symptom, and removing symptoms can, at best, alleviate the patient's suffering. As is obvious in the case of Sema, removal of the symptom can make the disease worse.

So, modern medicine has given us drugs that are poisons based on the mistaken assumption that symptoms are the disease. Is it any wonder that so many people are harmed by the medications they take? Or that a drug that does exactly what it was designed to do ends up making people worse? The fatal flaw at the heart of modern medicine must be addressed, or we will continue making drugs that address symptoms, rather than studying how to prevent and resolve disease.

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