Peter C. Gøtzsche Quotes

“In 2004–05, the Health Committee in the British House of Commons examined the drug industry in detail and found that its influence was enormous and out of control.

They found an industry that buys influence over doctors, charities, patient groups, journalists and politicians, and whose regulation is sometimes weak or ambiguous.”

“In the United States and Europe drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.”

“My studies in this area lead me to a very uncomfortable conclusion: Our citizens would be far better off if we removed all the psychotropic drugs from the market, as doctors are unable to handle them. It is inescapable that their availability creates more harm than good.”

“The goal of the major players in this industry is to make their already huge profits even larger.
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“The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don't sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. This is what makes drugs so different from anything else in life.”

“The research literature on drugs is systematically distorted through trials with flawed designs and analyses, selective publication of trials and data, suppression of unwelcome results, and ghostwritten papers.”

“They have bought every type of person including Ministers of health in some countries. There is a huge amount of corruption.

In my country for example, Denmark, we are regarded as having very little corruption but yet we have thousands of doctors on industry payroll, although we are just 20,000 doctors, so this is effective kind of corruption.

The drug industry buys the Professors first, then chiefs of departments, then chief physicians, and so on. They don't buy junior doctors, so when several thousand are on industry payroll, it's really really bad.”

“Virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors. The reason patients trust their medicine is that they extrapolate the trust they have in their doctors into the medicines they prescribe.

The patients don't realise that, although their doctors may know a lot about diseases and human physiology and psychology, they know very, very little about drugs that hasn't been carefully concocted and dressed up by the drug industry.

If you don't think the system is out of control, then please email me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death.

If such a hugely lethal epidemic had been caused by a new bacterium or a virus, or even one hundredth of it, we would have done everything we could to get it under control.​”

“It is poor medical practice to make further diagnoses when a person is under the influence of a brain-active chemical, as the symptoms are most likely drug-induced.”

“Psychiatric drugs are so widely used that they incapacitate hundreds of millions of people around the globe. This iatrogenic psychological and physical disability is caused by the drugs.

In all countries where this relationship has been examined, the increase in disability pensions for mental health issues follows rather closely the increase in psychiatric drug consumption.”

“Psychiatry does not deliver what the customers want. And what it delivers kills so many customers that it might be the third leading cause of death.”

“Psychiatry must be the weirdest business on earth. If it had not been a monopoly, but an enterprise with true competitors, it would have gone bankrupt decades ago.”

“Some years ago, an old man of about 85 years of age was admitted to a British hospital. He kept on insisting that he didn’t have time to be hospitalised because his mother needed him.

The staff didn’t believe him. But he told the truth. His mother was one of the oldest people in Britain, and she was dependent on her son’s help. The story appeared in the BMJ as a warning about distrusting what people tell their doctors.”

“We need to realise that most placebo-controlled trials and head-to-head comparisons of two active drugs are heavily biased.

As an example, significantly more patients improved on fluoxetine when fluoxetine was the drug of interest than in trials where fluoxetine was the comparator drug.”

“Follow the money. When big money is involved, authors of articles that carry prestigious people’s names on the byline are often ghosts, particularly in reports of industry sponsored drug trials.

The same applies to other big industries. These papers are usually unreliable.”

“Fraud: Ghostwritten articles are cited by other ghostwritten articles. This creates a false impression that 'there is a growing body of evidence' that says this and that.

When I hear about a growing body, I think of a pregnant female or an overeating American.”

“How to lose weight in an evidence-based way: Count your calorie intake and expenditure, put it in a spreadsheet, and ensure there is a deficit every day. It works.”

“Mentally ill patients have fewer rights than criminals in Alaska.”

“Most breakthroughs come from publicly funded research. Nationalisation of big pharma can ensure that research is done to benefit patients and that we can afford to buy the drugs.

No amount of regulation will be able to achieve this, as drug companies trade in organised crime.”

“Most psychopharmacology textbooks have financial conflicts of interest. Psychiatric knowledge isn’t ‘education’, it’s pharmaceutically funded indoctrination.”

“Norway’s world famous medication free psychiatric hospitals have cured psychotic patients mainstream psychiatry had given up upon after first destroying them with psychiatric drugs for 10-15 years. Mainstream psychiatry tries to get the hospitals closed.”

“Psychiatry is a religion, not a science. This subverts critical thinking and scientific inquiry and results in oppressive intolerance for individuals who reject that religion.”

“Psychiatry is predicated on how the psychiatrist 'feels'” about the patient and not how the patient really feels. It is called opinion based 'medicine'.”

“Should I get chemotherapy for cancer? Probably not. Most patients accept chemotherapy, likely because they think that if it wasn’t worthwhile, it wouldn’t be offered.

This is a mistake. In over 90% of cases, the effect is marginal, which the harms aren’t.”

“Studies show a positive correlation between vaccine doses and infant mortality.”

“Sweden did exceptionally well during the COVID-19 pandemic avoiding lockdowns and face masks. Excess mortality was among the lowest in the world. The great pandemic should be abbreviated to the great panic.”

“When psychiatrists don’t lie about a chemical imbalance causing depression, they often say the cause is unknown. Wrong.

People get depressed because they have depressing lives. Job loss, relationship breakdown and physical illness are strong predictors.”

“Yes, stay in bed, then you won't die from corona (or influenza) as I told a customer who was rude towards me and shouted I had come too close! The world has gone mad.”