BIG PHARMA means BIG MONEY means BAD MEDICINE

Is the pharmaceutical industry a dangerous and crooked business that federal and state authorities need to bring to heel? Should those who develop, market or prescribe drugs hang their heads in shame when faced with the stark reality of what they do to earn a living? Is Big Pharma in fact the moral equivalent of the tobacco industry? One could well come away from Marcia Angell's The Truth about the Drug Companies or Jerome Kassirer's On the Take thinking so. In both books, the sort of moral opprobrium once directed against Big Tobacco is aimed squarely at the pharmaceutical industry, along with its legions of lobbyists, the politicians awash in its campaign contributions and the doctors it has bought, free meal by free meal, junket by junket, free sample by free sample and trinket by trinket.



It's not hard to see why demonization of the pharmaceutical industry has become such a popular sport. As Avorn points out, drug companies are now so obsessed with profits that they are no longer willing to pay for the innovative research that they claim justifies the high cost of their products. He and Angell each demonstrate that the numbers do not support the contention that without high prices there would be no money for the next generation of miracle drugs. Avorn notes that data from financial reports submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission by nine of the largest U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies show the hollowness of this rationale for exorbitant prices. He cites a 2002 report by Families, USA, which indicated that these companies spent the greatest proportion of their revenues (27 percent) on marketing, advertising and administration. Next came profits at 18 percent—a rate of return that almost no other industry expects or can match. Money spent on research and development ran a distant third, at 11 percent of revenues. No matter how hard drug companies spin these numbers, they reveal priorities that serve neither patients nor the general public.



Dip anywhere at random into The Truth about the Drug Companies or On the Take and you will find disturbing passages such as this one (from Angell's book):

Suppose you are a big pharmaceutical company. You make a drug that is approved for a very limited use. . . . How could you turn it into a blockbuster? . . .
. . . You could simply market the drug for unapproved ("off-label") uses—despite the fact that doing so is illegal. You do that by carrying out "research" that falls way below the standard required for FDA approval, then "educating" doctors about any favorable results. That way, you could circumvent the law. You could say you were not marketing for unapproved uses; you were merely disseminating the results of research to doctors—who can legally prescribe a drug for any use. But it would be bogus education about bogus research. It would really be marketing.




Kassirer is no slouch at condemning ethical shenanigans:

Big business and physicians alike are involved in a massive charade. Representatives of the drug companies claim repeatedly that marketing serves an essential function in the health-care delivery system by helping to educate doctors so they can prescribe drugs more appropriately. At the same time, they press their drug salesmen to push the newest (and usually the most expensive) products, and their surrogate intermediaries, the medical education companies, are advertising their services as "persuasive" education.



http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/39097

Looks like another book to add to my reading list.

The Food and Drug Administration, for reasons similar to those of the medical journals, routinely allows researchers with ties to the industry to sit on drug approval advisory committees. In many cases, half the panelists on such committees have a financial stake in the outcome, through links to the drug manufacturer or to a competitor.



Increasingly, the industry has converted academic research centers into subsidiaries of the companies. The billions of dollars of academic government funding essentially pays to flush out negative results, while private industry gets to profit from any successful result. Industry now provides 7 percent of university research funding, but they are manipulating the system to gain a far more substantial benefit. At the University of California at Berkeley, Novartis agreed to pay $25 million to the campus in exchange for the first right to patent a range of basic plant research produced by the university.



Where once university research was oriented to producing independent knowledge that any other researcher could access and improve upon, university research is increasingly being locked up in patents. What's more, scientists at universities are often allowed to have stock options in companies benefiting from the research they are conducting. As Dr. Marcia Angell, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, noted in the Baltimore Sun, "What would be considered a grotesque conflict of interest if a politician or judge did it is somehow not in a physician."

And the results are expensive and sometimes tragic for the public. Experimental clinical drug trials are hazardous to participants and, more broadly, critical to those with life threatening conditions who need to know which treatments are fruitless to pursue. Yet researchers on industry payrolls end up pressured to suppress negative results.

more here:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020805/newman20020725

for decades.

IG Farben was possibly the most dangerous corporation that ever existed in the history of humankind. This is the company that manufactured Zyklon-B to gas the Jews in the concentration camps. All of this is well documented.

Also well documented is the fact that after the war IG Farben was broken down and parceled off to other companies. Many of the same people who controlled IG Farben -- went on to control and work at these other chem/pharm companies such as Bayer, H Hoechst, Agfa and BASF.. The criminal corporate culture survived as they have proven repeatedly that they will willfully harm human health for profit.

Here's a BBC story on how IG Farben was parceled to other companies, and how its stock continued to trade even after it was "closed".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1549092.stm


Here is a partial list of the criminal activities of the Chem/ Pharm industry. Every pharma company I've researched also manufactures, or has subsidiaries that manufacture, highly toxic chemicals.

I searched the titles to give the URL links to most of them. The titles of the un-linked articles and reports are highly searchable by title and can be found in major medical / science journals, the Wall St. Journal, Alliance for Human Research Protection, The Lancet, and others:

Conflict of Interest: Profits vs Safety Congressional Investigations -- http://www.ahrp.org/ethical/CongInvestigat...

US Senators Pharmaceutical industry holdings, 2004: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/...


Oct 12: How Did the Vioxx Debacle Happen? USA Today / Lancet -- http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/10/12.php

Oct 4: Op Ed: Psychiatry on the Ropes--WP / Evidence-based Psychiatry -- http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/10/04.php

Oct 3: BBC PANORAMA TONIGHT - Taken on Trust - 13 years-Medical Deception -- http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/10/03.php

Sep 30: GSK Sales Reps told NOT to Divulge Paxil Data / Merck Withdraws Vioxx -- http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/09/30.php

Sep 28: SEC Focusing on Drug Makers Disclosure_ Continuing Medical Ed Changes http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/09/28.php

Sep 16: Black Box Warnings for Antidepressants - What's Next? http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/09/16.php

Sep 16: Tell the Truth About Antidepressants On Drug Labels & in Medical Journals http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/09/16a.php

Sep 14: AHRP Press Briefing Re: Antidepressant Drug Risks http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/09/12.php

Sep 8: FDA Forced Wyeth to REMOVE Suicide Warning from Effexor Label http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/09/08.php

Sep 2: Antipsychotic Drug Use Doubled since 1996 in Tennessee Children - Why? http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/09/02.php

Aug 13: Time for a Drug Test Registry_Marcia Angell_Why NIH is Not Up to the Task http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/08/13.php

Aug 13: Bradshaw cancels appearance after SSRI-Citizen Press Release Announced Protest http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/08/13a.php

Aug 5: Spitzer Expands drug Probe: Johnson & Johnson / New FDA analysis Confirms SSRI Risks to Kids - WSJ http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/08/05a.php

Aug 4: FDA Approves Lilly's Cymbalta for Depression Despite Risk of Suicide http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/08/04.php

Aug 3: Drug safety Hearings-Sept-Congress/ FDA - Lilly Plans to Disclose Data http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/08/03.php

Jul 27: Bill Moyers: the Real Show...Congressional hearing was abruptly cancelled http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/27a.php

Jul 26: Mosholder Suppressed Report Posted/ Bush Moves to Block Medical Suits - NYT -- http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/26.php

Jul 22: Concealed Drug Trial Results Mislead Doctors & Put Children's Lives at Risk - NYT http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/22.php

Jul 21: Cong Greenwood's version http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/21a.php

Jul 21: Hearing on Antidepressants Canceled - Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...

Jul 20: Corruption of Cong by Pharma: Greenwood offered job / drops Pharma hearing http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/20.php

Jul 19: Clinical Trials Controversy Spotlights Flawed System - Psychiatric News http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content...

Jul 14: Statin-Cholesterol Guidelines--Industry influenced? http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/14.php

Jul 9: FDA Squelches an Article Raising Doubts on Safety Of Device to Repair Artery - WSJ http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/09.php

Jul 9: Paxil for Children: Safety, Efficacy Aren't Established - Letter WSJ http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/09a.php

July 7: Pharma Influence: Penn Psychiatrist Files Whistleblower Lawsuit - Investigtion Confirms Medicare Chief Lied to Congress

http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/07.php

Jul 6: FDA Failed to Enforce Law Requiring Drugmakers to Disclose Test Data - WashPost http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/06.php

June 30,2004: NYS AG Expands Pharmaceutical probe - Forest Labs http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/06/30.php

June 30, 2004: Response to Washington Post Editorial "Missing Drug Data" http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/06/30a.php

Jun 28. 2004: Scientists Decode Secret of Getting NIH Grants - WSJ http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/06/28.php

Jun 27, 04: NIH Under Fire: Longtime Favorite of Congress - Wash Post / WSJ http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/06/27.php

Jun 26: Forest Labs Admits Concealment of data - Congressional Probe Expands http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/06/26.php

Jun 23: AHRP: Published NIMH Funded Prozac Trial Report Concealed Suicide Attempts by Teens http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/blogcatego... /

Jun 21: Antidepressants - USA Today Editorial / AHRP OpEd/ WSJ Editorial Bashes Spitzer

Jun 20: HMO physician applauds Spitzer's focus on information bias / NYT blind spot

Jun 7: Paxil induced suicides in US quantified - Glaxo Faces criminal action in UK over "suicide"
pills - Times

Jun 6, 2004: NY Times Editorial Gets it Right: When Drug Companies Hide Data

Jun 5: "Black Hole" of medical research--Negative Results Don't get Published - JAMA, WSJ

Jun 2, 2004: NYS Attorney General files suit against GlaxoSmithKline

Jun 2: NY Times Does it Again - Drug Advertisers Get Front Page Coverage to Boost SSRI Market

May 25, 2004: FDA role in suppressing damaging data - WSJ

May 24, 2004: More than 100 top regulatory officials represented industry as lobbyists, lawyers - Denver Post

May 18, 2004: Lawmakers accused leaders of the NIH of encouraging "the option of corruption."

May 17, 2004: Paxil Sales Plummet in UK (372K PDF)

May 16: Pfizer Admits Guilt in Promotion of Neurontin--Agrees to Pay $430 Million

May 7, 2004: NIH Panel Recommendations Fail to Resolve Conflicts of Interest

May 6, 2004: Interview with Shannon Brownlee (NPR)

Apr 13: Doctors Without Borders: Why you can't trust medical journals anymore

Mar 25: Antidepressant Controversy: Media Conflicts of Interest - New York Times

Mar 2, 2004: Ethics Policy Announced for NIH Officials - LAT

Jan 29, 2004: Antidepressant Makers Withhold Data on Children - Washington Post

Jan 25, 2004: ACNP Summary Report Criticized as "Junk Science"

Jan 21: ACNP - a pharmaceutical industry funded association of psychiatrists - claims SSRI Antidepressants don't increase suicidal behavior

Jan 7, 2004: FDA Sham Conflicts of Interest Policy

Dec 7, 2003: Stealth Merger: Drug Companies and Medical Research at NIH - LAT

Aug 15, 2003: Almost 1/2 of faculty on IRBs have ties to industry - Harvard Partners

Aug 3, 2003: Psychiatrist's Undisclosed Financial Ties Prompt Reproval - NYT

June 20, 2003: Time to put drug giants on trial - Scotsman (UK)

April 5, 2003: AHRP Comments: DHHS COI Guidance for Human Subject Protection

March 30, 2003: CNN: Drug Argument Embroils Psychiatrists, Pharma Companies

March 19, 2003: Conflicts of Interest Taint UK Gov panel investigating SSRI

November 22, 2002: Tonight PBS Is Science for Sale?

September 30: Ritalin Outrage: Congress_ Big Media Under the Influence of Big Drugs

August 25, 2002: Integrity in Scientific Research : Peer review ineffective - Institute of Medicine / Lancet / Science

August 1, 2002: Randomized Controlled Trials: Evidence Biased Psychiatry, an original article by David Healy MD, MRCPsych in which he challenges the scientific assumptions about the value of evidence obtained from randomized controlled clinical trials.
July 15, 2002: The Emperor's New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. By Irving Kirsch, Thomas J. Moore, and Alan Scoboria and Sarah S. Nicholls.

A meta-analysis of efficacy data submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval of the six most widely prescribed antidepressants approved between 1987 and 1999. They report that, although the difference in drug versus placebo response was statistically significant, approximately 80% of the medication response was duplicated in the placebo control. The accompanying expert commentaries reflect the broad range of reactions that such findings provoke. http://journals.apa.org/prevention/volume5...

Response to the commentaries Antidepressants and Placebos: Secrets, Revelations, and Unanswered Questions http://journals.apa.org/prevention/volume5...

July 15, 2002: Short Drug Tests, Fatal Flaws. Thomas J. Moore. Op Ed. Boston Globe

July 14, 2002: Corporate influence on medicine, budgets & investors

June 13, 2002: When Money Corrupts Medicine - Deaths Occur

June 13, 2002: In 1984 the NEJ M became the first of the major medical journals to require authors of original research articles to disclose any financial ties with companies that make products discussed in papers. In accordance with the NEJM policy, editorial reviewers could have no financial ties to the companies. In 2002, Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, the journal's new editor, abandoned the Journal's policy of containing conflicts of interest, claiming "it is becoming tough to find doctors to write such articles." The change, Drazen wrote in the June 13, 2002 issue of the Journal, is designed "to enhance the depth and breadth of the journal's content while ensuring that the articles we publish are not influenced by financial interests.'' The Boston Herald indicated that Drazen claimed: "We're strengthening the journal.'' But Dr. Jerome Kassirer, former editor of the NEJM, blasted the new policy.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_reg...

June 8, 2002: Fraudulent Conduct that Takes Lives: Why Criminal Prosecution of Medical Researchers with Financial Conflicts, Who Fabricate Safety Data, has Become an Essential Component of Regaining the Integrity of Device and Drug Research in the United States
By James J. Neal, Copyright 2002

"Giant corporations are locked in a life and death struggle to provide one of a kind instrumentation with which a given operation 'must' be done." Editor, Michael Baggish M.D., Journal of Gynecologic Surgery.

"Rare is the disinterested researcher. It is a phenomenon found in every medical treatment using devices." "If you can't trust the studies, what happens to the profession and what happens to patients." John Wasson, M.D., Dartmouth, New York Times.

"We've lost our way. We've terribly, terribly lost our way. Science has been lost in the rush for money." Steven Nissen, M.D., Cleveland Clinic, New York Times.

"Organs punctured include bile ducts, bowel, small intestine, liver and arteries and veins. Data shows high morbidity." Pennsylvania Medical Society, comments on "hi tech" surgical devices.

Summary: In recent years, surgical instrument companies working through surgeons with concealed equity interests in devices, have created new procedures, to promote the sale of equipment. Corporations have created demand for new surgical procedures "through massive advertising campaigns to convince the public of necessity." Rutkow, IRA,

The Socioeconomic Tyranny of Surgical Technology. Archives of Surgery. Leading surgical researchers, with equity interests have fabricated surgical research to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of new procedures with device costs of $2,000-$5,000 per operation. One sales rep described his companies' philosophy as "dollars per procedure." Although the device industry has generated tens of billions of dollars in revenue using these tactics, serious surgical morbidity from many new device dependent operations has multiplied. Treating MD's and patients need law enforcement's assistance in deterring fabricated research data published by research surgeons with concealed equity interests in expensive medical devices, and new drugs. The question raised in this analysis is whether fraudulent medical research is taking lives, and if so, how many. For complete article go to:
http://www.redflagsweekly.com/new_frontier...

June 5, 2002: APA Under the Influence of PhaRma

June 13, 2002: Vermont to Require Drug Makers to Disclose Payments to Doctors
By MELODY PETERSEN The New York Times. Vermont follows Minnesota in its efforts to contain the cost of medicine by requiring public disclosure of conflicts of interest. A law will require drug companies to disclose the gifts and cash payments they make to doctors. We have not heard of similar moves by states that have major medical centers such as: New York, Massachusetts, Maryland or California.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/13/business...

May 30, 2002: Bitter Medicine: Pills, Profit & the Public Health - ABC News

May 23, 2002: FDA -Conflicts of Interest to be expanded - Washington Post

May 21, 2002: Bitter Pill for David Healy: academia under pharma influence

May 6, 2002: "Conflicts of Interest in Clinical Trials", a presentation by Vera Hassner Sharav before the U.S. Army Medical Department and Henry M. Jackson Foundation for Advancement of Military Medicine on Conflicts of Interest in Medical Research.

September 24, 2001: The American Prospect.
Pharma Buys a Conscience By Carl Elliott, MD, PhD

The issue of corporate money has become something of an embarrassment within the bioethics community. Bioethicists have written for years about conflicts of interest in scientific research or patient care yet have paid little attention to the ones that might compromise bioethics itself. Arthur Caplan, the director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, counsels doctors against accepting gifts from the drug industry. "The more you yield to economics," Caplan said last January, "the more you're falling to a business model that undercuts arguments for professionalism." Yet Caplan himself consults for the drug and biotech industries, recently coauthored an article with scientists for Advanced Cell Technology, and heads a bioethics center supported by Monsanto, de Code Genetics, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Geron Corporation, Pfizer, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Human Genome Sciences, and the Schering-Plough Corporation.

By no means does Caplan's center stand alone in its coziness with industry. The University of Toronto houses the Sun Life Chair in Bioethics; the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics has a program in genetics funded by a $1-million gift from SmithKline Beecham Corporation; the Merck Company Foundation has financed a string of international ethics centers in cities from Ankara, Turkey, to Pretoria, South Africa. Last year the Midwest Bioethics Center announced a new $587,870 initiative funded by the Aventis Pharmaceuticals Foundation. That endeavor is titled, apparently without irony, the Research Integrity Project.

Bioethics appears set to borrow a funding model popular in the realm of business ethics. This model embraces partnership and collaboration with corporate sponsors as long as outright conflicts of interest can be managed. It is the model that allows the nonprofit Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C., to sponsor ethics and leadership programs funded by such weapons manufacturers as General Dynamics, United Technologies Corporation, and Raytheon. It also permits the former president of Princeton University, Harold Shapiro, to draw an annual director's salary from Dow Chemical Company while serving as chair of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. Dow, of course, has been the defendant in a highly publicized lawsuit over the Dow Corning silicone breast implants as well as in numerous legal actions involving disposal of hazardous waste.

Part of the problem is aesthetic. It is unseemly for ethicists to share in the profits of arms dealers, industrial polluters, or multinationals that exploit the developing world. But credibility also is an issue. How can bioethicists continue to be taken seriously if they are on the payroll of the very corporations whose practices they are expected to assess?

Read complete article (free): http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/17/ellio...

May 18, 2000. The New England Journal of Medicine. Is Academic Medicine for Sale?

By Marcia Angell, MD - Vol. 342, No. 20

Finding an editorialist to write about the article presented another problem. Our conflict-of-interest policy for editorialists, established in 1990, ( ) is stricter than that for authors of original research papers. Since editorialists do not provide data, but instead selectively review the literature and offer their judgments, we require that they have no important financial ties to companies that make products related to the issues they discuss. We do not believe disclosure is enough to deal with the problem of possible bias. This policy is analogous to the requirement that judges recuse themselves from hearing cases if they have financial ties to a litigant. Just as a judge's disclosure would not be sufficiently reassuring to the other side in a court case, so we believe that a policy of caveat emptor is not enough for readers who depend on the opinion of editorialists.

In this editorial, Angell discusses the extent to which academic medicine has become intertwined with the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, and the benefits and risks of this state of affairs. Bodenheimer, in his Health Policy Report elsewhere in this issue of the Journal, provides a detailed view of an overlapping issue -- the relations between clinical investigators and the pharmaceutical industry.

The ties between clinical researchers and industry include not only grant support, but also a host of other financial arrangements. Researchers serve as consultants to companies whose products they are studying, join advisory boards and speakers' bureaus, enter into patent and royalty arrangements, agree to be the listed authors of articles ghostwritten by interested companies, promote drugs and devices at company-sponsored symposiums, and allow themselves to be plied with expensive gifts and trips to luxurious settings. Many also have equity interest in the companies.

Read complete article (for pay) : http://www.nejm.org/content/2000/0342/0020...

May 18, 2000. The New England Journal of Medicine.
"Uneasy Alliance -- Clinical Investigators and the Pharmaceutical Industry"
By Thomas Bodenheimer, MD, MPH. Vol. 342, No. 20

How much influence does industry have over the work and products of the research community? Can practicing physicians trust the information they receive about the medications they are prescribing? Does the shift from the academic to the commercial research sector give industry too much control over clinical drug trials?

In this report, I discuss some of the problems raised by pharmaceutical-industry funding of drug trials, problems that may deepen as trials are increasingly conducted by commercial organizations. I interviewed 39 participants in the process: 6 pharmaceutical executives, 12 clinical investigators, 9 people from university research offices, 2 physicians with CROs, 8 people who have studied the process of clinical drug trials, and 2 professional medical writers. Each interview consisted of standard questions plus an opportunity for the interviewees to discuss the industry-investigator relationship in a general way. Several interviewees preferred not to allow the use of their names in the article.
Read complete article (for pay): http://www.nejm.org/content/2000/0342/0020...

May 22, 1999: This smashing NY Times editorial (below) should awaken the public and its elected policy makers to the need for reform our Federal human subject protection regulations so that patients don't become unwitting commodities.

THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL May 22, 1999 Patients for Hire, Doctors for Sale
People go to doctors because they assume the doctor will tell them what they need to do to stay healthy or get well. But in articles published in The Times on Sunday and Monday, the reporters Kurt Eichenwald and Gina Kolata have opened the door on a practice of medicine that few of us knew existed - a warped world in which patients have become commodities, lured into research projects for the profit of their doctors.

In pushing to create a supermarket of new pills, the pharmaceutical industry has created a frantic competition for patients on whom new drugs must be tested before they can be approved. A bounty system has evolved in which doctors are paid by drug companies to enroll research subjects with certain kinds of problems: $1,200 from Bayer for a patient with vaginitis; $2,955 from Merck for one with hypertension; $4,410 from SmithKline Beecham for a willing diabetic.

The devil's bargain is that the doctor knows that enrolling the patient is worth money, but the patient does not. It is a recruiting system with the potential to corrupt either the drug companies, because they are forced to outbid each other for patients, or the doctors, because they are tempted to enroll patients who may not be medically appropriate.

The articles reveal a whole research universe slipping out of control. A review by The Times of more than 300 recent drug studies, and more than 200,000 government research request files, found hundreds of thousands of patients involved and indications that some doctors make $500,000 to $1 million a year in recruitment bounties.

One Southern California doctor now in prison forged his patients' medical records and test results on a massive scale to boost his income.

In the past, most clinical trials of drugs were conducted by doctors at medical research institutions. But that system proved too slow at recruiting patients, so the drug companies and their contractors turned to doctors in private practice, tripling their number since 1990.

Meanwhile, the monitoring systems to protect patient welfare, already under fire for past performance, have shown no interest in the ethical conflict of doctors being paid to recruit their own patients.

Dr. Nancy Dickey, president of the American Medical Association, says that the bounty system is unethical by A.M.A. standards and that the organization will work with Federal regulators to try to end the practice.

They need to act expeditiously. The patient search has now begun to tap the poor populations of South America, threatening to corrupt the practice of medicine even more widely. © The New York Times

HOO Cares!









HOO Cares! Copyright 2007 Rob McGrath - All Rights Reserved

.

The Big Business of Medicine
How the FDA Protects Big Pharma
By EVELYN PRINGLE

Why would Americans trust the FDA to regulate the pharmaceutical industry? Since the Bush administration took office the FDA has become the industry's partner in crime. The most notorious protection scheme put in place by the FDA and Big Pharma is the preemption policy that bans private lawsuits against drug companies in state courts once a drug and its label have been approved by the FDA.

On January 18, 2006, the FDA issued new rules for the labeling of prescription drugs, and in the preamble to the rules on page 43, the FDA says, State law actions "threaten FDA's statutorily prescribed role as the expert Federal agency responsible for evaluating and regulating drugs," requiring lay persons to second-guess its expert assessments of a drug's risks and benefits.

So, after all of the concerns raised about the FDA's failure to protect consumers against dangerous products over the last several year, by top experts from all over the world, the FDA has hereby declared itself the sole authority on decisions regarding prescription drugs, including whether a drug's label contains adequate descriptions of indications for use, risks and benefits.

In an October 6, 2006, articled titled, "The Doctrine of Preemption," Stan Kaufman aptly refers to the new policy as the "Doctrine of Preemptive Crony Capitalism." When announcing this multi-billion dollar immunization gift to Big Pharma, the FDA told drug makers:

"We think that if your company complies with the FDA processes, if you bring forward the benefits and risks of your drug, and let your information be judged through a process with highly trained scientists, you should not be second-guessed by state courts that don't have the same scientific knowledge."

more here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/pringle01102007.html

I shouldn't laugh. Those are pretty good comic strips.

By Bruce Levine

More than one journalist has uncovered corrupt connections between the Bush Family, psychiatry, and Eli Lilly & Company, the giant pharmaceutical corporation. While previous Lillygates have been more colorful, Lilly’s soaking state Medicaid programs with Zyprexa—its blockbuster, antipsychotic drug—may pack the greatest financial wallop. Worldwide in 2003, Zyprexa grossed $4.28 billion, accounting for slightly more than one-third of Lilly’s total sales. In the United States in 2003, Zyprexa grossed $2.63 billion, 70 percent of that attributable to government agencies, mostly Medicaid.

Historically, the exposure of any single Lilly machination—though sometimes disrupting it—has not weakened the Bush-psychiatry-Lilly relationship. In the last decade, some of the more widely reported Eli Lilly intrigues include:

Influencing the Homeland Security Act to protect itself from lawsuits
Accessing confidential patient records for a Prozac sample mailing
Rigging the Wesbecker Prozac-violence trial
A sample of those who have been on the Eli Lilly payroll includes:

Former President George Herbert Walker Bush (one-time member of the Eli Lilly board of directors)
Former CEO of Enron, Ken Lay (one-time member of the Eli Lilly board of directors)
George W. Bush’s former director of Management and Budget, Mitch Daniels (a former Eli Lilly vice president)
George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Advisory Council member, Sidney Taurel (current CEO of Eli Lilly)
The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (a recipient of Eli Lilly funding)

more here;
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2004/levine0504.html

and so disgusting. :puke: More Corporate Bullshit.

"They kill everything when it comes to bottom line," said Connecticut state Sen. Edith Prague, who has tried unsuccessfully to pass legislation legalizing foreign drug importation. "We can't get anything done because of Pfizer, Squibb and Bayer."

PhRMA is hardly secretive about its lobbying successes. In its 2003-2004 annual report, the organization claimed that it defeated "legislative proposals that would have restricted Medicaid patients' access to medicines by creating preferred drug lists and imposing supplemental rebates" in at least seven states — New York, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kansas and Washington.

Profitable victory on Medicare
The industry's statehouse successes were not the only hurdles for lawmakers; its federal lobbying campaigns also routinely have impacted their efforts.

Securing approval of the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, legislation termed "historic" and "breakthrough" by PhRMA, is considered to be among the pharmaceutical industry's most substantial victories. The law yielded the first prescription drug coverage under Medicare — a benefit that according for 2006 through 2015 is likely to cost the government more than $1 trillion according to March 2006 Congressional Budget Office estimates. The legislation was passed after a sustained lobbying campaign in the states and in Washington, D.C.


One of the law's controversial aspects is a provision that bars the federal government from negotiating price discounts with drug companies. An October 2003 study by two Boston University researchers found that 61 percent of Medicare money spent on prescription drugs becomes profit for pharmaceutical companies.

...both literally and metaphorically. Not that I can actually afford it, anyway. Also, animal testing is EVIL and hinders real progress. So in the end, giving it up wasn't all that hard for me, and since I've started looking into alternatives, physically I'm in better shape than I've ever been.

It's really true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Welcome to DU! :hi:

Drug Lobby Second to None
How the pharmaceutical industry gets its way in Washington

By M. Asif Ismail

WASHINGTON, July 7, 2005 — The pharmaceutical and health products industry has spent more than $800 million in federal lobbying and campaign donations at the federal and state levels in the past seven years, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found. Its lobbying operation, on which it reports spending more than $675 million, is the biggest in the nation. No other industry has spent more money to sway public policy in that period. Its combined political outlays on lobbying and campaign contributions is topped only by the insurance industry.

The drug industry's huge investments in Washington—though meager compared to the profits they make—have paid off handsomely, resulting in a series of favorable laws on Capitol Hill and tens of billions of dollars in additional profits. They have also fended off measures aimed at containing prices, like allowing importation of medicines from countries that cap prescription drug prices, which would have dented their profit margins. Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, made a profit of $11.3 billion last year, out of sales of $51 billion.

The industry's multi-faceted influence campaign has also led to a more industry-friendly regulatory policy at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that approves its products for sale and most directly oversees drug makers.



Most of the industry's political spending paid for federal lobbying. Medicine makers hired about 3,000 lobbyists, more than a third of them former federal officials, to advance their interests before the House, the Senate, the FDA, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other executive branch offices.



In 2003 alone, the industry spent nearly $116 million lobbying the government. That was the year that Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed, the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, which created a taxpayer-funded prescription drug benefit for senior citizens

more here:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/rx/report.aspx?aid=723

The settlement of the $185 million class action lawsuit against Bristol-Myers Squibb announced at the end of January is a lesson in how physicians paid by the pharmaceutical companies as speakers and consultants can be hazardous to your health. While most of the attention of this suit focuses on how company officials defrauded investors by overly flamboyant predictions for the sales of the highly touted ''blockbuster" drug Vanlev, documents prepared for the suit show that behind the scenes, Bristol-Myers Squibb-paid physicians in major medical meetings were shamelessly exaggerating the benefits of the drug for patients with high blood pressure and heart failure and failing to report publicly on substantial numbers of life-threatening drug complications which they knew, from their close relationship to the company, to exist.

Fortunately, the FDA saved hypertensive and cardiac patients from ever receiving Vanlev because it knew about the potentially fatal events, determined that they were excessive, and Bristol-Myers Squibb was eventually forced to withdraw its application to market the drug. A real save by the FDA!

The BMS settlement exposed a well-hidden method of influencing doctors. The biased talks were given in ''symposia" at major national medical meetings of major medical organizations such as the American Society of Hypertension and the American College of Cardiology. Symposia, little known to the public, are special events, usually lectures by leaders in the field, sponsored by drug and device companies and typically held in the morning before the official program or in the evening following the day's usual program. Nice snacks and drinks are often served and sometimes dinner also. As hard as they try to be objective, the speakers' financial ties to the industry often create subtle (or even overt) biases that induce them, either consciously or subconsciously, to adhere to the company line. From the experience with Vioxx, we learned that if they stray from the company's message, they may not last long as a paid speaker. (For perspective, the preliminary program of the American Psychiatric Association's June 2006 meeting in Toronto features at least 46 such symposia, sponsored by the major companies that make the drugs that psychiatrists prescribe.) What the APA gets for this collaboration with industry and what industry gets in return is not public knowledge.

The Senate Finance Committee is aware that the industry is using ''educational grants" to prominent physicians to influence the drugs that doctors prescribe. It is difficult enough to get reliable data on drug benefits and risks from industry-supported studies, but when physicians and physicians organizations, who should know better, knowingly exaggerate the efficacy of new drugs and underplay their complications, the consequences for the health of the public and individuals like you and me are too close for comfort. Lobbyists influence how the government spends your money, but financially conflicted physicians can threaten your well-being.

more here:
http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/other/articles/2006/02/13/how_drug_lobbyists_influence_doctors/

Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself. (Most of its marketing efforts are focused on influencing doctors, since they must write the prescriptions.)

<snip>

What does the eight-hundred-pound gorilla do? Anything it wants to.

What's true of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla is true of the colossus that is the pharmaceutical industry. It is used to doing pretty much what it wants to do. The watershed year was 1980. Before then, it was a good business, but afterward, it was a stupendous one. From 1960 to 1980, prescription drug sales were fairly static as a percent of US gross domestic product, but from 1980 to 2000, they tripled. They now stand at more than $200 billion a year.<6> Of the many events that contributed to the industry's great and good fortune, none had to do with the quality of the drugs the companies were selling.

The claim that drugs are a $200 billion industry is an understatement. According to government sources, that is roughly how much Americans spent on prescription drugs in 2002. That figure refers to direct consumer purchases at drugstores and mail-order pharmacies (whether paid for out of pocket or not), and it includes the nearly 25 percent markup for wholesalers, pharmacists, and other middlemen and retailers. But it does not include the large amounts spent for drugs administered in hospitals, nursing homes, or doctors' offices (as is the case for many cancer drugs). In most analyses, they are allocated to costs for those facilities.

Drug company revenues (or sales) are a little different, at least as they are reported in summaries of corporate annual reports. They usually refer to a company's worldwide sales, including those to health facilities. But they do not include the revenues of middlemen and retailers. Perhaps the most quoted source of statistics on the pharmaceutical industry, IMS Health, estimated total worldwide sales for prescription drugs to be about $400 billion in 2002. About half were in the United States. So the $200 billion colossus is really a $400 billion megacolossus.

more here:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13791

:applause:

Michael Moore really opened up my eyes about Big Pharma.

and disgusting.

DemEx

And they've been doing it successfully since the early 90's.

Tell me. Cancer, Lupus, Diabetes? High Blood Pressure? Heart Disease? MIGRAINES? All being treated successfully with pharmaceuticals. Parkinson's? Gene therapy being developed by the same biotech/biopharmaceutical industry which might CURE it.
Geez. Must be nice to live in Eden, cause thats the only place free of disease.

:shrug:

It's the only thing that's done anything for the severe, chronic intractable migraines I've had since my teens.

'Big Pharma selling drugs that we DO need for diseases that we DO have, at prices so high that those who need them most cannot afford them!"

then I might agree with you.

I dislike the profit motive in medicine, and support socialized medicine, which exists in my country. But to make the leap from 'profiteering on medicines is bad; therefore medicines are bad' is like saying 'landlords who exploit their tenants are bad; therefore homes are bad'.

And I don't work for Big Pharma. I just happen to have a medical condition, for which appropriate medication has revolutionized my quality of life. And I'm not prepared to lie down and die, or become an invalid when I don't have to, just to spite 'Pharma'!

Weird.

for the vaccines they manufacture to be given to infants-INFANTS! Cha-ching!

And those same people disregard the fact that Big Pharma has funded what few studies that have been done about the Autism epidemic and worked relentlessly to muddy the waters, so they get off scot free and don't have to pay any compensation to the families of children with vaccine injuries because of Big Pharma GREED. Cha-ching!

Win Win for them isn't it? :puke:


p.s. BTW- If you had mentioned Autism in the title of your thread, propagandists for Big Pharma would have been all over this thread in a New York minute trying to beat down anyone who points a finger at them.

Disgusting low life pieces of sh*t! :grr:

that has wiped out small pox, polio ect, increasing the average life span of the american greatly in the last 40 years. Those greedy fuckers Jennings and Saulk. Saving people's lives. What jerks
BTW- TONS of research on vaccine safety
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/thimerosalqa.htm
What's that you say? All the world renowned scientists at NIH are unthinking bushbots?
How about the World Health Organization:
http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/topics/hpv/Jun_2007/en/index.html
Oh those EVUL swiss epidemiologists. They must all be bushbots too.

see anything wrong with its tactics.

:thumbsup:

p.s. Told ya'll they would crawl out of the wood work at the mere mention of Autism. :puke:

This has been debunked time and time again and still people fall for the bullshit.

I assume you are referring to individuals who work for the pharmaceutical companies "crawling" out of the woodwork? Or are you referring to scientists in general? Because the anti-science, anti-medical establishment bullshit has gotten rather thick around here lately.

The OP is just a broad-brush slam against "Big Pharma" (whatever that may be). There are thousands of individual scientists involved who do good work and just want to help people. Or they are interested in solving a problem. It is by no means a perfect system but because of them we have no smallpox (because of those hateful vaccines), we have flu vaccines (which save thousands of lives each year), and any number of other treatments. I do agree that they spend too much time and money on things like Viagra but that also helps people.

I'll bet you would not like living in the days before vaccines and antibiotics (brought to you by "Big Pharma"). Well actually you would probably not have survived childhood. Or you might have died of an infection.

In addition, they have actively worked to stop homeopathic cures because it cuts into their bottom line. They are lobbying to get homeopathic cures outlawed as we speak.

BIg Pharma doesn't actively work to find cures these days-it's ALL about keeping the consumer addicted to their pills for as long as they can. Just how many of their pills have ugly side effects, hmm?

It's not about WELLNESS or CURES for them. Oh Hell NO!

What illnesses have they CURED lately? Hmm?

FYI-I was BORN with measles some 40 odd years ago. I survived. So-NO-I don't buy into their hype and fear tactics.

And BTW-It's not the vaccinations but the preservative in them called Thimerosol that contains MERCURY-A KNOWN POISON-that people are blaming for triggering Autism.

'It's not about WELLNESS or CURES for them. Oh Hell NO!

What illnesses have they CURED lately? Hmm?'

They have PREVENTED lots of illnesses by vaccines, but you don't like vaccines. They CURE a lot of illnesses through antibiotics, but you seem to ignore this. And even if in some cases, they ameliorate rather than cure, isn't that much better than nothing at all? Would you say that if you can't be rich, you might as well be a beggar in the street; or that if you can't have the house you most want, you might as well be totally homeless? This gets to me a bit personally, because it's implying that if my medical problems can't be 100% cured, some would rather see me dead than be partially helped by products of Big Pharma.

More than three-quarters of children with leukemia get cured nowadays. In the 1960s, it was a virtual death sentence.

Over three-quarters of women with breast cancer survive nowadays. There have been dramatic improvements within the last 10 years.

Just saw a friend of mine recently. She had Hodgkins disease in the 1970s, and was cured. Just one example.

There is no evidence that autism and vaccines are linked, and yet you claim that pharmaceutical companies are just manufacturing the research? Are you saying that it is a grand conspiracy involving tens of thousands of researchers, statisticians, participants, and peer-reviewers? Are they all in on it?

Homeopathy doesn't work. The best designed studies (read: the ones with the best methodology that control for confounding variables) show no effect for homeopathic treatment. Even one of the big mucka-mucks of the homeopathic movement conceded that it appeared that double-blind studies appear not to work for homeopathy (but, of course, he just said that in the context that they need to develop new ways of studying it). This is a classic example of someone who has already accepted a conclusion (homeopathy is effective) and then looks for the facts to support it. Finding none, the next best thing is just to claim undeserved oppression at the hands of big pharma. The water doesn't remember. There is no such thing as like cures like. There's no molecules left in the solution. Homeopathy is, at best, crap and at worst it is a dangerous distraction for people who could actually be helped with legitimate treatment.

Big Pharma doesn't actively work to find cures these days-it's ALL about keeping the consumer addicted to their pills for as long as they can. Just how many of their pills have ugly side effects, hmm?

Natural remedies can have ugly side effects, as well. In fact anything that you put into your body can mean unexpected consequences for you. The same goes for medicine. If the pills didn't make people better, then people would stop taking them - end of story. The fact is, though, that medicine has proven results. If you really don't think that medicine helps us to survive longer and longer, then I would most respectfully submit that you are in dire need of a reality check.

It's not about WELLNESS or CURES for them. Oh Hell NO!

Docs teach their patients all the time about taking preventative action. Every day, some doctor is telling some patient that they need to lose weight and quit smoking cigarettes in order to prevent more significant health effects down the line. Also, medicine has cured disease. The polio vaccine, for one, has pretty much eliminated polio in most of the world...except, that is, for places where anti-vaccine crusaders have managed to scare enough people into staying away from vaccines.

FYI-I was BORN with measles some 40 odd years ago. I survived. So-NO-I don't buy into their hype and fear tactics.

Are you seriously arguing that, therefore, measles are not dangerous because you survived and that any evidence to the contrary is "hype and fear tactics"?

And BTW-It's not the vaccinations but the preservative in them called Thimerosol that contains MERCURY-A KNOWN POISON-that people are blaming for triggering Autism.


And BTW - There's no link between thimerosol and autism.

Me, I'd rather believe millions of parents who were EYEWITNESSES to a profound change in their infants after vaccination.

I will continue to believe these parents until there is TOTAL unbiased evidence to the contrary. But there will NEVER be because the Pharma Giants won't allow a real study to be done.

For your education:

Deadly Immunity by ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. "We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country." Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that "perhaps this study should not have been done at all." He added that "the research results have to be handled," warning that the study "will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group."
<snip>

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7395411/deadly_immunity/




VACCINE STUDY IN NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE WRONG IN CONCLUDING MERCURY EXPOSURES ARE HARMLESS, STATES SAFEMINDS

ATLANTA, GA - A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study on the relationship between mercury (thimerosal) in vaccines and children's brain functioning draws a misleading conclusion, says one of the study's external consultants, Sallie Bernard, Executive Director of SafeMinds.

"Early Thimerosal Exposure and Neuropsychological Outcomes at 7 to 10 Years," appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM, 9/27/07 issue), concludes that the study "does not support a causal association" between thimerosal and neuropsychological outcomes in children. The conclusion misleads the public, implying without qualification that a relationship has been disproved. In fact, "the study was unable to prove either the presence or absence of a causal relationship," noted Bernard, the panel's only consumer representative.
<snip>

http://www.safeminds.org/pressroom/vaccine-study.html
http://www.safeminds.org/

As "proof" you're offering me Robert Kennedy and Sallie Bernard? You're kidding me, right? Robert Kennedy is not a scientist, so you might as well be offering me Jenny McCarthy's comments on vaccines and autism. Sallie Bernard has zero credibility on this issue. There's a very interesting history between her and the study that she mentions. She was actually invited to oversee and be a part of the research design, but then when the study didn't arrive at the conclusions that she wanted she had her name removed from the publication. This might be a bit complicated, but the way research works is by operating on the notions of a null and an alternative hypothesis. What researchers try to do is reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis. If there is no observed effect, then they only fail to reject the null hypothesis. In other words, they're not claiming that they have disproved it - and no in is asserting that except Mrs. Bernard in trying to take apart a straw man. Rather, they are simply saying that they don't see evidence to support that conclusion (the alternative hypothesis). Numerous other studies on the subject say the exact same thing.

I offered you a link to a Denmark study that showed no connection between autism and thimerosol, but apparently "proof" is only sufficient to you when it supports the conclusions that you already hold.

Also, parents who say that vaccines caused their child's autism because the autism was diagnosed after the vaccination are guilty of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy. Just because event X occurs before event Y in time does not mean that event X causes event Y.

If you are dead-set on the conclusion, though, regardless of what the evidence says then there is not a whole lot that I can do to convince you otherwise. I just hope and pray that my child does not end up in the same school as yours.

But I've worked with people who have developmental disabilities, including Autism, for the past 20 years. And I'm telling you that there is no link.

Lack of Evidence: Vaccine additive not linked to developmental problems

MMR and autism not linked

Autism Not Linked to Mercury

Vaccines Not Linked To Autism, ADHD

Autism Not Linked to Immunization: Debunking the Myth

And since you'll accuse me of it anyway:

blanket condemnations are as stupid as the people who make them.

Sid

The problem with a lot of arguments such as this is that they latch onto a kernel of truth while, at the same, time, drastically overstating the conclusions that can be logically drawn from the premises.

I will be the first to admit that the health care field has a problem with money, and that should be obvious. From teaching doctors having significant ties with numerous pharmaceutical companies to managed care operations, it's fairly obvious that there are some troubling flaws in the system. Opponents of "Big Pharma" like to point this out, and they should. There needs to be a financial incentive to provide care - not deny it. There needs to be greater financial transparency with respect to research and affiliation. I agree with you all 100% on this.

But here's where the argument jumps the shark. If the premises are that there are significant flaws in the system and that pharmaceutical companies' primary motivation is mercenary, then the conclusions that they are "evil" or that their medicine is meant to poison us (or is completely ineffective), or that alternative treatments (such as homeopathy) are better courses of treatment do not follow.

I will even grant that pharmaceutical companies do not care about you. They do not care about your grandma or your sister. They do not care about your father or your mother. They care about making money - that's what corporations do. There's nothing inherently evil about making money, though it should be balanced out with ethical stewardship. But pharmaceutical companies aren't going to make any money by selling you pills that kill you. The way you make money in a free market system is by selling a product that people want and that works.

The fact is, medicine has been a boon to our collective human civilization. The advent of science as a way of understanding our world has allowed for the eradication of diseases and the elongation of our life-spans. We're able to take care of things now that, few generations ago, would of been fatal due to advances in medicine.

The bottom line is, I think, a grey one. Even though the pharmaceutical companies can and do engage in unethical behavior, they nonetheless produce an invaluable product that saves lives. Congress should pass legislation forcing greater transparency on the whole system, we should demand universal care, we shouldn't have to put up with companies burying data that ends up costing lives, we shouldn't have to fork over half our paycheck to pay for pills. But, at the end of the day, to ignore the very obvious benefits extended do us as a result of scientific advancement in the field of medicine and to make hysterical claims about pharmaceuticals that are not supported by the premises is...well...hysterical.

I get so sick of the anti-science (of all kinds) bullshit on here.

No doubt your post will fall on deaf ears.

...cures for disease should be prohibited.

"The way you make money in a free market system is by selling a product that people want and that works."

Calling 'heartburn/indigestion/gluttony etc' a disease that can be fixed with a pill is selling the need, not the product.

In our public health system in Canada, television advertising pharmaceutical products are banned, but in the areas closest to TV from the USA(southern canada), the use of 'advertised pills' is way above the national average.

Lucky for you, the bigpharma companies know something you do not...

If they can convince you it works, no matter what it is, it will work.

OK so now you know the secret too....




.

I agree that direct-to-consumer drug marketing should be prohibited. That would help control costs and help cut down on unecessary doc vists.

The fact is the some people do suffer from chronic heartburn or indigestion, and there are medications that can help control those problems. I agree that not everyone needs to be on those medications, but to assert that they are simply solutions to a problem where no problem exists is rather foolish IMO.

At the end of the day, they can convince me that it works through science - not through advertising. After all, if the numbers aren't there then the FDA isn't going to let it get to market in the first place (ideally). Of course, this whole process can be circumvented or compromised by unethical activity on the part of the pharmaceutical companies - but the key is that sort of behavior is not and should not be tolerated.

There's nothing in it but sugar water, and yet it works for a lot of people. That's called the placebo effect, and having experienced it myself during childbirth, I know that it's a strong and amazing thing. Thank goodness for it!

Still, there are real diseases that real medicine helps and even cures. The direct-to-consumer stuff is fairly recent, but there are drugs that have been on the market from before those ads that people need and survive on every day.

Beta blockers and statins are keeping people alive longer, and they've been tested against placebos. They work. Insulin, prednisone, hormones, blood-thinners, all those are important and keep people alive longer.

It's not just that I agree, it's that what you say is calm and logical and backed up with facts. Thank you!

a specific paragraph that brought you to the conclusions you have arrived at.

This has indeed been an interesting thread. What we have witnessed by and large are a collection of reactionary responses.

Nowhere in my OP did anyone castigate the totality of Science and yet look at who came to the illogical conclusions that the OP was about the "evils" of science. People who must have an agenda just made that up from whole cloth.

I would like to see a single refutation to any specific paragraphs in any of the posts that I put in this thread. But we haven't seen anything like that.

Perhaps this touched a nerve but the conversation would be more productive if the substance of the articles were the point of debate. This was not the case.

I can't believe that anyone who took the time to bring forth these many knee-jerk reactions even took the time to read the articles. It's obvious they did not as the articles are about Political-Corporate collusion more than anything else and if you or anyone can bring forth the argument that pharmaceutical companies are not one of THE if not THE most corrupted industries in America I'm interested in hearing that argument.

It wasn't anything with the OP per se that I was objecting to (although, for example, the first cartoon seems to lend itself to being used as a battleflag by individuals who make arguments that I do object to).

For my part, I'm not saying that pharmaceutical corporations are not corrupt - but realize that the phrase "pharmaceutical coroprations" does not refer to a homogeneous population. There are many different companies, and within those companies there are many different people. Some of the decisions that those companies make are unethical, and some are not. I think a more useful discussion would be to examine the individual actions of companies rather than lambasting the whole field.

Since you bring it up though, I do agree with a lot you have to say (as I noted in my post). But to point out that there are conflicts of interest does not make pharmaceutical companies "THE most corrupted industry in America". Conclusions like that are, for my money, hysterical. Are some of them corrupt? Certainly. Are there problems inherent in the way things are run? Absolutely. We should also work to fix these problems. We're never going to remove money from the system, as money is the engine that drives the whole thing. We can, however, force transparency onto the whole thing (as I posted above) as well as ban private campaign contributions outright (but that's a whole 'nother story).

ETA:Aside from the cartoons in your OP, here's one thing that I do object to:

Is Big Pharma in fact the moral equivalent of the tobacco industry?

No, it is not - and the rhetorical suggestion that it is strikes me as ludicrous. For one, pharmaceutical companies make medicine where as tobacco companies make tobacco products. One, ostensibly, is supposed to cure illnesses. The other causes them. You're comparing apples and oranges.

With some reservations, I agree with pretty much everything else that you have to say with the exception of your sweeping conclusions. As I posted, the bottom line, I think, is a grey one.

You're never going to get money out of the system, because money drives the whole thing forward. What is needed is greater transparency and for the pharmaceutical companies to take a totally "hands-off" approach to the research that they fund.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/us/politics/29health.html?_r=1&ref=health&oref=slogin

In all, the Democratic presidential candidates have raised about $6.5 million from the industry, compared with nearly $4.8 million for the Republican candidates. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has amassed the most of any candidate, even as she calls for changes to the health care system that could pose serious financial challenges to private insurers, drug companies and other sectors.

Mrs. Clinton received $2.7 million through the end of September, far more than Mitt Romney, the Republican who raised the most from the health care industry, with $1.6 million. The industry’s shift in contributions toward Democratic candidates mirrors wider trends among donors, but the donations from this sector are particularly notable because of the party’s focus on overhauling the health care system.

I hope the other candidates are as serious about fighting disease as she is.

No more PIRG donations for me if I search that out to be true

I'd be shocked... yet again, at the betrayal of democracy by so many once noble organizations

IF true

That was 20 years ago. AFAIK they do not support candidates at all.

I seem to recall people saying the same thing about Al Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. It's wearing a bit thin.

It shows everyone who the anti-science woo woo's are.

I'm not even sure if I fully agree with the OP, since I skimmed it. I have a beef with big pharmaceutical companies, though, which has nothing do do with the science involved.

Or perhaps you think I'm imagining Multiple Sclerosis? Or that the drugs I take to combat its effects (which, because I live in a socety with a Health Care system, cost me nothing) are just a way of making me a slave of Big Pharma?

You people would be funny if you weren't so dangerous.

Just take some Nux Moschata 2X and you'll not need those nasty Big Pharma poisons any more. ;-)

MS can be cured with magic memory water.

I'm series!!!

Sid

Then advertise how cheap their prices are.

A-holes one and all.

...the licensing, the lights, the cost of the building, records maintenance etc.

...to the big nationwide stores as well as those warm cuddly "mom and pop's".

The issue is screwing over consumers.

Most of us would be dead by now if it were not for modern medicine and vaccination.

Half of us would have died in childhood. A good fraction of women would have died giving birth. Many of us would have died from infections as young adults. Most of the over sixty crowd would be dead from various ailments associated with aging.

And as far as the new generation of psychiatric medication goes, I sure don't miss having spontaneous fits of rage.

P.S. Ingrid Newkirk can go fuck herself.

I don't think anyone is saying ALL medicine is bad - but the amount of garbage being prescribed these days and their prices - come on, it's a HUGE SCAM

:thumbsup:

We all have benefited enormously from medicine and pharmaceuticals - that is not the point of the cartoons and message of the OP or of the growing debate in society about this huge problem.

DemEx

:loveya:

has morphed from being respectable companies providing needed services to greedy, money grubbing organizations, not unlike organized crime. Their goal is to develop drugs that each and every person will need to take daily for their entire lives and they plan to charge as much as humanly possible for said drugs. The pushers are the doctors who have their continuing educations provided by big pharma . . . in addition to the standard gifts everyone knows about. Each and every person needs to wake up, learn about their "condition" (often manufactured in order to prescribe a drug), read the literature, weigh the benefits and have the courage to tell the person in the white coat "no."

Upjohn actually cared about the community, treated his workers well, and did good research on meds that changed people's lives and helped them live longer and better. Talk to someone who works for Pfizer today (that bought out Pharmacia that bought out Upjohn) and ask them if corporate is as good as when it was Upjohn.

Those people would've died even just twenty years ago, but let's ignore that for a moment. Let's say, for argument's sake, that people would live longer just if they exercised enough, ate right, and kept their numbers in the right area.

What about childbirth complications? What about infections? What about pain? What about genetic diseases? What about autoimmune diseases? Homeopathy and other "natural" companies also advertise, also profit, and even better, don't have to pay for research or testing. They get to put it on their labels that their claims have not been tested and still know that people will buy them.

See, I've lived in pain. I know pain. I had appendicitis for ten years that was misdiagnosed as something else. I ate right, I gave up meat and dairy, I exercised, I prayed, knitted, and meditated to deal with stress and pain--and I still needed ibuprofen. I took my supplements, but they did nothing for the pain. I needed ibuprofen. I even took Bextra before they took it off the market and was mad as hell when they did. Bextra may have caused heart problems, but with the pain I was in, I didn't care what it did to my heart if it helped me walk and take care of my kids.

An expected result, the ibuprofen gave me an ulcer, so I take Prevacid to keep that in check (yes, it was biopsied, and it wasn't the bacterial infection). I like Prevacid, thank you. It makes me feel better. That means a lot to me, given my other health problems. I also don't need esophageal cancer, thanks.

I had a kidney tumor. They gave me Versed before the surgery to knock me out. Thank God they did. Is Versed bad because it's a drug? Hell no! After the surgery, they gave me morphine, which doesn't work on me, and a numbing agent that helped a little. Did I need that numbing agent? Hell yeah! They quartered me, took out a pound of flesh, and sawed off three inches of rib. Did my doctors and nurses worry about me and try to make me as comfortable as possible? Sure they did! Oh, right, those caring people, even the surgeon who came in on his day off to check on me, must all be bastards because they use drug rep pens and sticky notes. :eyes:

Whenever I see posts like this, I get pissed. See, I've actually been sick. I've actually known pain, real level-ten pain on the pain scale. Medicine and doctors helped me through all of that and are still helping me through all of it. Are there bad docs? Sure there are. Are there great docs? Sure there are (I'm married to one). Are there good people working for pharmaceutical companies working hard to make sure that the pills are safe and help people feel better and live longer? Yup--I know several, being from Southwest Michigan where Upjohn got started and now is Pfizer.

Supplements are advertised and cost money, millions are made every year for weight-loss programs and exercise programs, and books sell by the thousands that promise a way to live without medicine. Everyone's making a buck, and if something works for you, that doesn't mean it works for everyone.

have to do with any of the articles posted?

Could you please refer me to a specific citation that connects to your response.

Specifically what article or which part of an article pissed you off?

You called doctors "bought and paid for" and posted this:
"Big business and physicians alike are involved in a massive charade. Representatives of the drug companies claim repeatedly that marketing serves an essential function in the health-care delivery system by helping to educate doctors so they can prescribe drugs more appropriately. At the same time, they press their drug salesmen to push the newest (and usually the most expensive) products, and their surrogate intermediaries, the medical education companies, are advertising their services as 'persuasive' education."

My argument is that there are good doctors out there saving lives. There's no charade there--they're doing their damndest to keep people from dying. I have yet to meet a doctor that would ever trust a drug rep, and I'd bet that I know more doctors than you do.

You blame Pharma for making drugs that make people sick. Hell, I'm one of them--that ibuprofen gave me an ulcer. I should sue or at least be super angry, according to your post, right? Instead, I knew it was one of the risks, balanced that risk with my need for pain control, and understood that I might get hurt by the drug. Thankfully, we caught it before it got too bad, but then, we knew it was a possibility and so were careful to check me for it early. In your cartoons that you chose to put in your post, you would blame Pharma for what happened to me and the drug reps for making my doctors prescribe me the drugs I needed (Prevacid, Versed, ibuprofen, etc.): I choose to be thankful that I made it through a year of hideous pain alive and that I'm alive because of doctors today.

You post against off-label uses for drugs. Two of the drugs I'm on are off-label. They're the first things that have worked at all for one of my conditions. The drug reps didn't tell my husband to come up with that combination--his knowledge of how the drugs work on a molecular level (you know, that stuff he learned in med school) made him consider the theory and then talk with my doctor about it and then have her work out a dosing system. Off-label treatments for kidney cancer are the only ones that since have shown any promise of any decent success at all. Wow, those off-label uses are horrible! They're keeping people alive!

I live with a wonderful doctor who hates drug reps to the core of his being and does everything he can to avoid them. I hear every day how awful Pharma is and how much he hates the drug ads on tv and in his medical journals. He would never take the word of a drug rep for anything and instead spends a lot of time reading the latest research and working on how to keep his patients healthier. Calling him "bought and paid for" and "living a charade" is more than a little offensive.

COUNTERTHINK.. I've discovered over the years that they're dead on.

Right out in front of god and everybody.

As Candidate in '04 he wanted to Ban Drug Advertising from TV... He's correct. Drug Advertising was BANNED until Clinton... And...it's a Bad thing it was allowed.

John Edwards is Correct on this! How many folks are lured into Drugs that Kill Them because of our Lax Regulatory Policies and BIG PHARMA Influence? How many lawsuits that never can make up for the DEATHS due to experimenting on REAL PEOPLE! :cry: