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corruption of medical science
Very powerful information!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_Oc2xElvL4&feature=player_embedded
Posted By Dr.
Mercola | May 18 2010
Dr. Beatrice Golomb, Associate Professor
of Medicine at University of California, San Diego, masterfully exposes
the corruption that has metastasized like a tumor throughout the pharmaceutical
and medical industries, in the video above.
If you have any doubt about drug companies
being riddled with conflicts of interest, those doubts will be shattered
after seeing the evidence she presents.
The corruption has become so prolific
that it has literally debased medical science.
In the above linked Chicago Breaking
News article, Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist at the Children’s
Hospital of Philadelphia, is quoted as saying:
“Science is not a democracy where people's
votes decide what is right. Look at the data, look at science and make
a decision based on science that has been published."
What he is really advocating is for
you to blindly believe in “facts” that may have been produced in the midst
of MASSIVE conflicts of interest.
Before you assume the science in medical
journals is credible, let’s take a look at what is going on behind the
scenes of editing and publishing in medical science.
Bias #1: Unwanted
Results are Not Published
In order for scientific studies to
happen, someone has to pay for them.
The top funder for any drug trial is
the pharmaceutical company that makes it, since the manufacturer is most
invested in “proving” how spectacular its drug is. Dr. Golomb uses the
case of statins as an example, stating that all of the major statin studies
have been funded exclusively by the drug industry.
The second-highest funder of drug studies
is the National Institute of Health (NIH), which is not the group of neutral
government experts you may have assumed them to be. In fact, NIH accepts
a great deal of money from Big Pharma and is deeply enmeshed with the industry.
But drug companies publish only a fraction
of the studies they fund -- the ones that promote their drugs.
If a study does not have findings that
are favorable to its product, it is unlikely it will ever make it into
a journal for publication.
In contrast, studies that have favorable
findings almost always make the cut.
There are simply thousands of scientific
studies out there that have never been seen by you or your physician because
they have been screened out by editors and reviewers who are being paid
to uphold an industry agenda.
Published studies overwhelmingly favor
the funding company’s drug. Whichever drug is manufactured by the study
sponsor is the drug that comes out on top, 90 percent of the time!
Given this, how can medical journals
be considered unbiased?
Bias #2: Bad
Results are Submitted as Good
When a scientific study has findings
that cast doubt on the efficacy of a drug, oftentimes the negative findings
are morphed into positive ones.
For example, in 2008, FDA officials
analyzed a registry of 74 antidepressant trials, which included trials
that were published and those that were not. The FDA’s findings were then
written up in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine1.
This is what they found:
• 38 of the trials reported positive
results, and 37 of the 38 were published.
• 36 trials had negative or questionable
findings. Of the 36, 22 were not published at all, and 11 were published
in a way that conveyed the results as though they were positive.
So, if you just went to the published
literature, it would look like 94 percent of the studies were positive,
when in reality only about 50 percent were positive ... equivalent to a
coin toss.
For statins, the odds that the funding
company’s drug will come out on top are staggering1:
• The odds that the funding company’s
statin drug will come out looking better than anyone else’s statin in the
“results” section of the article are 20:1.
• The odds that the funding company’s
statin will come out on top in the “conclusions” part of the article are
35:1.
So, even if they can’t make the results
look good, they can often find a way to twist the conclusions so that their
drug appears favorable.
Selectively omitting negative trial
results can be devastating to your health, as Merck & Co. proved when
they concealed the fact that three patients suffered heart attacks from
Vioxx during clinical trials. They conveniently omitted this data (along
with other relevant findings) from the copy of the study they submitted
to the New England Journal of Medicine for publication.
The omissions were uncovered years
later during the 7,000 Vioxx lawsuit litigations.
Bias #3: A Favorable
Study is Submitted Multiple Times
When a study yields positive results,
it is often submitted multiple times in a way that the reader doesn’t realize
it’s the same study, obscured by different author lists and different details.
Analyzers have had to look very carefully to determine which studies are
actually duplicates because they are so cleverly disguised.
Not surprisingly, trials reporting
greater treatment efficacy were significantly more likely to be duplicated,
according to Dr. Golomb’s reporting.
In one analysis of the published reports
about ondansetron (an anti-nausea drug), the same study was published 5
times. This duplication of data led to a 23 percent overestimation of ondansetron’s
effectiveness when a meta-analysis was performed.2
Talk about good mileage!
Bias #4: Follow-Up
Reviews Done by Biased Experts
The editorials that follow from a study,
submitted by so-called unbiased experts and then published in reputable
journals, are often done by non-neutral parties who have a financial tie
to the drug maker.
Dr. Golomb uses the case of calcium
channel blockers (a type of heart medication) as an example. The connection
between authors declaring their support for calcium channel blockers and
those not in support of them was highly statistically tied to their affiliation
with the drug manufacturer -- in fact, the odds that their opinion was
NOT due to their affiliation was more than 1,000:1.
Bias #5: Ghostwriting
Many of the articles that appear in
medical journals purportedly written by well-known academics are actually
written by unacknowledged ghostwriters on Big Pharma payroll.
Consider the example of Parke-Davis
and their drug Neurontin.
Parke-Davis contracted with a “medical
education communication company,” or MECC, which is a company paid almost
exclusively by pharmaceutical companies to write articles, reviews, and
letters to editors of medical journals to cast their products in a favorable
light.
In this case, MECC was paid $13,000
to $18,000 per article. In turn, MECC paid $1,000 each to friendly physicians
and pharmacists to sign off as authors of the articles, making the material
appear independent.
This was also done by Pfizer as a strategy
for marketing Zoloft. A document was written that included 81 different
articles promoting Zoloft’s usefulness for everything from panic disorder
to pedophilia.
The only problem was, for some articles,
the name of the author was listed as "to be determined," even though the
article was listed as already completed. They weren't helping out an existing
team of scientists who happened to be talentless at writing -- Pfizer wrote
the article, and then shopped around for scientists willing to claim authorship,
to give it a veneer of credibility.
Wyeth-Ayerst employed a similar ghostwriting
tactic to promote its “fen-phen” diet drug, Redux.
Bias #6: Journal
Bias
Medical journals are generally considered
by medical practitioners to be a source of reliable information. But medical
journals are also businesses.
Three editors, who agreed to discuss
finances only if they remained anonymous, said a few journals that previously
measured annual profits in the tens of thousands of dollars now make millions
annually.
The truth is that Big Pharma has become
quite adept at manipulating and brainwashing practitioners of conventional
medicine. They influence the very heart and center of the most respected
medical journals, creating dogma and beliefs that support the drug paradigm
because it is blessed by the pinnacle of scientific integrity: the prestigious
peer-reviewed medical journal.
Peer-reviewed medical journals contain
advertisements that are almost exclusively for drugs, amidst articles that
are biased toward promoting those drugs. If you have looked through a medical
journal lately, you’ll see full-page Pharma glossies, cover to cover.
Pharmaceutical companies spend almost
twice as much on marketing as they spend on research!
In 2003, drug companies spent $448
million dollars on advertising in medical journals2. It has been calculated
that the return on investment on medical journal ads is between $2.22 and
$6.86 for every dollar spent, with larger and older brands at the higher
end.
Long-term returns may be even higher
when you consider that one ad viewed by a physician could result in hundreds
or even thousands of drug purchases, based on the prescriptions he or she
writes.
The term “peer-review” has come to
imply scientific credibility. But the fact is that many of the peer-reviewers
are on the drug company’s payroll, and those who are not are unlikely to
detect flawed research or outright fraud.
Medical journals are the number one
source of medical information for physicians. In fact, nearly 80 percent
of physicians use medical journals for their education, which exceeds information
from any other source3.
Do you really want to blindly take
the advise of a physician whose only source of medical information is a
medical journal engaged in such profound conflicts of interest?
Advertisements for drugs focus the
“latest and greatest” drugs to hit the market, drugs which may not be superior
to existing, less expensive alternatives. So physicians are seduced into
prescribing the newest, most expensive drugs, which drives up your healthcare
costs.
An excellent article in PLoS Medicine
regarding drug advertising in medical journals concludes4:
“The scholarly nature of journals confers
credibility on both articles and advertisements within their pages. By
exclusively featuring advertisements for drugs and devices, medical journals
implicitly endorse corporate promotion of the most profitable products.
Advertisements and other financial arrangements with pharmaceutical companies
compromise the objectivity of journals.
The primary obligation of industry
is to make money for its stockholders. The primary obligation of journals
should be to physicians and their patients, who depend on the accuracy
of information within these publications. Medical journals should not accept
advertisements from pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies,
or other industries ‘relevant to medicine.’"
In 2004, Dr. Richard Horton, editor
of the Lancet, wrote, “Journals have devolved into information-laundering
operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”5
Bias #7: Drug
Companies Masquerading as Educators
The education of medical students and
residents also comes through the filter of the drug industry, which seeks
to groom them before they even finish medical school.
According to Dr. Golomb’s data, Big
Pharma now spends $18.5 billion per year promoting their drugs to physicians.
That amounts to $30,000 per year for every physician in the U. S.!
And drug companies are allowed to develop
their own education curriculum for medical students and residents, lavishing
them with gifts, indirectly paying them to attend meetings and events where
they promote the company’s products.
Why is the Accrediting
Commission for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) so permissive with
industry involvement?
Almost half of the members are representatives
of Big Pharma or are consultants for businesses that work directly with
it to prepare these educational programs. Only a few represent academic
CME institutions.
Any discussion of physician “seduction”
would be incomplete without the mentioning of the 100,000 drug reps, who
are groomed and trained to wine and dine and otherwise shower physicians
in sweetness until they are handing out prescriptions like candy.
Reps are even taught tactics for manipulating
doctors for industry benefit, as a standard part of their training.6
Hell Hath No
Fury
What happens if a physician or other
person speaks up about these conflicts of interest? What happens to the
proverbial whistle-blower?
Intimidating phone calls and direct
threats, for starters.
In one case, Dr. Buse, an endocrinologist
who is the incoming president of the American Diabetes Association, presented
data in 1999 about his concerns about the risks of Avandia. Dr. Buse was
intimidated with multiple phone calls by drug company officials. They suggested
he could be financially liable to the company for $4 billion in lost revenues
due to his “unscrupulous remarks.”
Other truth-tellers have had their
reputations trashed or job offers rescinded for speaking the truths that
Big Pharma works so hard to keep under wraps.
“Too Big to Nail”
An individual truth-teller might be
vulnerable to the wrath of an angry drug company, but drug companies are
unlikely to suffer much of a consequence for their crimes.
A CNN report from April 2, 2010 reveals
the truth about how shielded these huge drug companies really are.
Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical
company, engaged in illegally promoting their drug Bextra for off-label
use, despite their knowledge that it was associated with an increased risk
of stroke and heart attack.
Bextra was pulled from the market in
2005, but not before many people were damaged by its use. When Federal
prosecutors realized that convicting Pfizer would likely be a corporate
death sentence (as any company convicted of major health care fraud is
excluded from Medicare and Medicaid), they cut Pfizer a deal. Just as the
big banks on Wall Street were deemed “too big to fail,” Pfizer was deemed
“too big to nail.”
Why?
Prosecutors claimed to be concerned
about the loss of jobs by Pfizer employees and financial losses to Pfizer
shareholders as a result of being excluded from the Medicaid/Medicare programs.
So the prosecutors charged a Pfizer
subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co., instead. In fact, this particular
subsidiary company was created specifically for this purpose, as a sacrificial
lamb, having been incorporated the very same day its lawyers filed a “guilty”
plea in another case involving kick-backs, leaving Pfizer with the penalty
equivalent of being sent to bed without supper.
In the end, all Pfizer lost was about
three month’s profit, but all contracts, including those with Medicaid
and Medicare, were spared.
This is just one more example of your
federal government failing to protect you, and opting to protect big business’
interests instead.
The bottom line is, the drug companies
aren’t going to protect you.
The government won’t protect you.
The AMA won’t protect you.7
And it is unlikely that your physician
can protect you either -- even a well-meaning one -- when he or she is
operating within a system that has become RIGGED for Big Pharma profit.
Only you can protect yourself.
So, until real systemic change takes
place, your best health strategy is quite simply to employ and maintain
a naturally healthy lifestyle that will optimize your body’s innate healing
abilities and minimize your need for the drug companies’ latest concoctions.
Sources:
Chicago Breaking News
Center April 8, 2010
Related Links:
Fraud, Corruption and
Exaggeration: A Darkly Humorous Look at the Science of Medical Journals
Medical Control, Medical
Corruption
How Drug Companies Deceive
Medical Journals
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