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| | | From: Rene (Original Message) | Sent: 3/7/2006 8:14 PM |
American Drugmaker Blasted For Unethical Practices
Sales representatives for Abbott Laboratories paid for lap dances, dog track entertainment, Wimbledon tickets, and other favors for health professionals.
As a result, Britain's leading drug industry trade group, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, has suspended Abbott's membership. The gesture is symbolic and will have little effect, but it does draw attention to the ethics violations practiced by many drug companies, even after the industry claimed it would begin voluntarily policing itself. Abbott, a Chicago-based company, claimed that only a small number of employees were involved, all of whom either resigned or were fired before any investigation began. Drug companies spend upwards of $20 billion a year in the United States marketing directly to health professionals, which is more than five times what they spend on television ads.
Chicago Tribune February 11, 2006, Dr. Mercola's Comment: Here's another blatant example of how the multi-national drug companies dispense their money freely to buy influence. Sad to say, the association's six-month suspension of Abbott doesn't even restrict sales of the company's products in the UK. And, even though all the Abbott employees who doled out favors and gifts left the company or were fired, you know that's just the tip of the iceberg. This demonstrates, according to a Public Citizen representative, just how weak voluntary guidelines can be -- and the result is inflated insurance premiums and taxes that cost you money. A great quote from Public Citizen sums it up best: "I wouldn't be happy to be taken care of by a doctor willing to jeopardize the sanctity of his prescribing practices at a lap dance club." Neither should you.
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| | | From: Rene | Sent: 7/17/2006 5:24 PM |
Deceptive Reporting and Supplements The recent media has claimed that when put to the test, America's most trusted supplements failed. I would suggest that it is the deceptive reporting, influenced by sensationalism, politics, monetary gain, and a pharmaceutical industry that has failed Americans!
Further research by individuals is needed to find the real truth before rejecting supplements that can be helpful. Robert Bazell, chief science and health correspondent of NBC (6/21/06), reminds us that medical reality often doesn't match the 'spin,' and scientific facts can be made to fit the perception desired.
Richard Smith, M.D., who was editor for the British Medical Journal for 25 years, suggests that medical journals are an extension of the marketing arm of the pharmaceutical companies and lists ways test results are easily skewed.
Here are only a few: conduct a trial of your drug against a treatment known to be inferior, trial your drugs against a too low dose of a competitor's drug (making yours seem less toxic), present results that are most likely to impress (reporting in relative risks rather than absolute risks), and only selecting the publications from centers that give favorable results.
Dr. Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, suggests that drug companies start divulging all placebo ingredients - this would help eliminate the pharmaceutical industry's cynical manipulation of test data.
June Russell
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Originally published July 11 2006 Medical journal reveals that 70 percent of drug decision-making panel members have financial ties to industry  The journal Nature has published studies showing that 70 percent of the drug decision panels run in this country are rigged with decision-makers who have strong financial ties to the very drug companies whose products are affected by these decisions.
So much for evidence-based medicine. Drug approval decisions have little to do with evidence and everything to do with materialistic greed and cold, hard cash. That cash is doled out to decision-makers in the form of research grants, consulting fees and outright bribes. These decision-makers, who are often physicians, generally do not reveal their conflicts of interest. Yet they accept positions on decision-making panels where these so-called experts sit around and decide what should be the standard practice for various diseases, symptoms and conditions. Write-ups of those practices are then distributed to physicians around the country who follow the procedures. The journal Nature has revealed that 70 percent of these panels are rigged with decision-makers who have conflicts of interest. Conventional medicine tries to say this is all evidence-based. They say you should trust all this information because doctors are trained in medical school and their studies are published in peer-reviewed journals. What they don't tell you is the reality of the situation, which is that pharmaceutical companies pay for most of the clinical trials conducted on drugs, and nearly all drug trials magically produce results that favor the firm footing the bill. They also don't tell you that the negative studies are swept under the rug and censored by the drug companies. You only hear about the positive studies. They could conduct trials on a particular drug in which five trials reveal that the drug kills people and five other trials reveal that it helps people, and guess which five you will hear about? Guess which five the mainstream press will cover in the news? Guess which five will show up in a published peer-reviewed article in the medical journals? They also don't tell you about the influence of medical journals themselves. Drug-pushing medical journals Drug company advertising brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year that fund these medical journals and pay the salaries of the editors who determine which studies the journal will and won't accept. So guess what gets into the journals? That's right -- the studies that promote prescription drugs http://www.newstarget.com/prescription_drugs.htm . The benefits of these drugs are routinely exaggerated and the risks are routinely minimized. When something goes wrong with the drug and it starts killing tens of thousands of Americans, guess what? They convene a decision panel. This is what happened with the FDA <http://www.newstarget.com/the_FDA.html> recently, when they convened a panel to decide whether Vioxx http://www.newstarget.com/Vioxx.html was dangerous enough to be banned from the marketplace. It turns out Vioxx has probably killed more than 60,000 Americans, according to a senior drug safety researcher at the FDA, Dr. David Graham. He revealed this in testimony before the U.S. Senate. According to the FDA, that's not dangerous enough to pull the drug. The FDA panel voted to keep Vioxx on the market. What they did not tell you is that many of those panel members had strong financial ties http://www.newstarget.com/financial_ties.html to drug companies. They were being paid consulting fees or receiving research grants from the very companies that were affected by their decisions. Once again, so much for evidence-based medicine. The only evidence that I'm finding here is evidence of a giant drug racket http://www.newstarget.com/drug_racket.html There is ample evidence of corruption and collusion. In fact, the more you look at this industry, the more you realize just how deeply the American people have been conned. It's a giant scam. There are really no other words to describe it. To call it scientifically based medicine is a hoax. It's an insult to real science and honest scientists. Prescription drugs are a leading cause of death in America Conventional medicine wants you to think these drugs are recommended because they've been scientifically proven, because they have undergone safety testing and have been approved as safe by the FDA. They don't tell you the rest of the story. Prescription drugs are now the fourth leading cause of death in this country. The drugs approved as safe by the Food and Drug Administration are now killing 100,000 Americans a year. Prescription drugs make deaths from terrorism, murder, automobile collisions and illegal drug use seem tiny by comparison. The number of deaths from prescription drugs dwarfs just about everything else that's happened in this country in terms of fatalities. That's the story they absolutely do not want you to know about. In fact, it has taken years for the truth to surface about these decision panels populated by experts with ties to the pharmaceutical industry. They don't go out of their way to tell you about their conflicts of interest. They keep them hidden until someone comes along, does the research and finds out that these people have been taking money from the very companies whose products they are testing. Intimidation of critics Do you know what happens when you're a doctor on one of these panels and you vote against the approval of one of these drugs? Take a guess. Your research money suddenly dries up, and you have no more research grants. Your career fizzles out. In fact, this was happening at the Harvard Research Medical Center. One of the people there, Dr. James Fries, characterized it as "a pattern of consistent intimidation by the drug companies." That's his quote, and that's what's happening to experts who don't say good things about prescription drugs. Critics can easily be blackballed by the industry, so there is tremendous pressure on doctors and decision-makers to always vote in favor of brand-named, high-profit prescription drugs anytime they sit on decision panels. Now, they will tell you they have no conflicts of interest. They say, "We only decide based on the evidence." And yet they consistently decide in favor of dangerous drugs, even when clear evidence of harm is right in front of them. They are heavily influenced by drug company money, intimidation, threats and the medical profession's "circle the wagons" mentality. For years and years, I've been warning about collusion in the drug industry and the magnitude of the drug racket in the United States. This industry is largely a scam. In fact, what's going on today is criminal in nature. If you wish to be a healthy individual, then you have to find alternatives to prescription drugs. You have to say no to unnecessary surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. You must get outside this corrupt system and move on to something that actually promotes healing like naturopathic medicine, nutrition, herbal medicine, homeopathy or massage therapy. These are the areas of medicine in which you can experience and discover lasting human health. Don't be a financial slave to drug companies that are only interested in turning your body into a profit center. Remember, they can only make more money by expanding the definition of disease and using your body as a system for generating financial profits. They're exploiting your health to generate shareholder profit. That's the reality of what's going on out there today, and thanks to the Internet, the truth about conventional medicine http://www.newstarget.com/conventional_medicine.html is finally beginning to be told.
All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products and earns no money from the recommendation of products. Newstarget.com is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner. Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. www.NewsTarget.com Reprint this article: Non-commercial permission granted (must cite source and provide link). Commercial use OK with permission http://www.newstarget.com/feedback.html. |
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| | | From: Rene | Sent: 1/17/2008 4:44 PM |
Antidepressant Studies Unpublished
By BENEDICT CAREY
January 17, 2008:- The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs�?true effectiveness, a new analysis has found.
In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Previous research had found a similar bias toward reporting positive results for a variety of medications; and many researchers have questioned the reported effectiveness of antidepressants. But the new analysis, reviewing data from 74 trials involving 12 drugs, is the most thorough to date. And it documents a large difference: while 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did. The finding is likely to inflame a continuing debate about how drug trial data is reported. In 2004, after revelations that negative findings from antidepressant trials had not been published, a group of leading journals agreed to stop publishing clinical trials that were not registered in a public database. Trade groups representing the world’s largest drug makers announced that members�?companies would begin to release more data from trials more quickly, on their own database, clinicalstudyresults.org. And last year, Congress passed legislation that expanded the type of trials and the depth of information that must be submitted to clinicaltrials.gov, a public database operated by the National Library of Medicine. The Food and Drug Administration’s Web site provides limited access to recent reviews of drug trials, but critics say it is very hard to navigate. “This is a very important study for two reasons,�?said Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, editor in chief of The New England Journal. “One is that when you prescribe drugs, you want to make sure you’re working with best data possible; you wouldn’t buy a stock if you only knew a third of the truth about it.�? Second, Dr. Drazen continued, “we need to show respect for the people who enter a trial.�? “They take some risk to be in the trial, and then the drug company hides the data?�?he asked. “That kind of thing gets us pretty passionate about this issue.�?/FONT> Alan Goldhammer, deputy vice president for regulatory affairs at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the new study neglected to mention that industry and government had already taken steps to make clinical trial information more transparent. “This is all based on data from before 2004, and since then we’ve put to rest the myth that companies have anything to hide,�?he said. In the study, a team of researchers identified all antidepressant trials submitted to the Food and Drug Administration to win approval from 1987 to 2004. The studies involved 12,564 adult patients testing drugs like Prozac from Eli Lilly, Zoloft from Pfizer and Effexor from Wyeth. The researchers obtained unpublished data on the more recently approved drugs from the F.D.A.’s Web site. For older drugs, they tracked down hard copies of unpublished studies through colleagues, or using the Freedom of Information Act. They checked all of these studies against databases of published research, and also wrote to the companies that conducted the studies to ask if specific trials had been published. They found that 37 of 38 trials that the F.D.A. viewed as having positive results were published in journals. The agency viewed as failed or unconvincing 36 other trials, of which 14 made it into journals. But 11 of those 14 journal articles “conveyed a positive outcome�?that was not justified by the underlying F.D.A. review, said the new study’s lead author, Dr. Erick H. Turner, a psychiatrist and former F.D.A. reviewer who now works at Oregon Health and Sciences University and the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center. His co-authors included researchers at Kent State University and the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Turner said the selective reporting of favorable studies sets up patients for disappointment. “The bottom line for people considering an antidepressant, I think, is that they should be more circumspect about taking it,�?he said, “and not be so shocked if it doesn’t work the first time and think something’s wrong with them.�? For doctors, he said, “They end up asking, ‘How come these drugs seem to work so well in all these studies, and I’m not getting that response?�?�?/FONT> Dr. Thomas P. Laughren, director of the division of psychiatry products at the F.D.A., said the agency had long been aware that favorable studies of drugs were more likely to be published. “It’s a problem we’ve been struggling with for years,�?he said in an interview. “I have no problem with full access to all trial data; the question for us is how do you fit it all on a package insert,�?the information that accompanies many drugs. Dr. Donald F. Klein, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Columbia, said drug makers were not the only ones who can be reluctant to publish unconvincing results. Journals, and study authors, too, may drop studies that are underwhelming. “If it’s your private data, and you don’t like how it came out, well, we shouldn’t be surprised that some doctors don’t submit those studies,�?he said.
From: [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/health/17depress.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin]
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| | | From: Rene | Sent: 1/24/2008 4:32 PM |
I find some of the 'emotional' wording distasteful, however so is the actual material being reported & I feel the information is important to all of us. RM Pfizer Ads Come Clean About Lipitor But is Anyone Paying Attention?
Accounting for 6.5% of the total market share, statin drugs are the most widely sold pharmaceutical drugs in history. To date, Forbes Magazine tells us that statins are earning drug companies $26 billion in annual sales.
Pfizer spends over $3 billion each year to convince us that we need more and more drugs to be healthy. The public and the medical profession have been bamboozled by the legions of drug reps, billion dollar ad campaigns, and creative statistics. Every weekday, some 38,000 Pfizer sales reps, roughly the size of three army divisions, make their pitches around the globe. They’re armed with briefcases full of free drug samples, reams of manipulated clinical data, and lavish expense accounts for wining-and-dining doctors and their staff. The medical profession, its organizations, the media, and the public at large have swallowed the statin drug propaganda, hook, line and sinker.
In 2004, Pfizer's blockbuster drug Lipitor became the first prescription drug to make more than $10 billion in annual sales. Over twenty six million Americans have taken Lipitor, the most popular statin drug. Pfizer is now running full-page Lipitor ads in numerous papers, including The New York Times and USA Today. The ads feature Dr. Robert Jarvik, inventor of the artificial heart. The ad reads:
In patients with multiple risk factors for heart disease, LIPITOR REDUCES RISK OF HEART ATTACK BY 36%*
The noteworthy part of this ad is the asterisk and this explanation of the 36% statistic: "That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor."
Another Jarvik/Lipitor Times ad proclaims: In patients with type 2 diabetes, LIPITOR REDUCES RISK OF STROKE BY 48%* If you also have at least one other risk factor for heart disease... The explanation: That means in a large clinical study, 2.8% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a stroke compared to 1.5% of patients taking Lipitor.
Twenty six billion dollars a year for a one to two percent decrease risk for heart attack and stroke- that’s what all the fuss is about? It almost seems like snake oil. Yet, some doctors are recommending we put statins in the drinking water. Others are now suggesting that infants with a family history of heart disease should take statins as a preventative measure.
The Washington Post ran an article that reported on the PROVE-IT study: "The findings should prompt doctors to give much higher doses of drugs known as statins to hundreds of thousands of patients who already have severe heart problems," experts said. Perhaps "the experts" aren’t aware of studies that show low serum total cholesterol is associated with a marked increase in mortality in advanced heart failure.
One of the largest of these studies was conducted at UCLA Department of Medicine and Cardiomyopathy Center in Los Angeles. The study involved more than a thousand patients with severe congestive heart failure (CHF). After five years, 62 percent of the patients with cholesterol below 129 mg/l had died, but only half as many of the patients with cholesterol above 223 mg/l.
The Post article goes on to say:
In addition, it will probably encourage physicians to start giving the medications to millions of healthy people who are not yet on them and to boost dosages for some of those already taking them to lower their cholesterol even more.
The last line of this quote above should illicit alarm from every taxpayer in America. Why? Because it will be the taxpayers who will pay for all those Medicaid and Medicare statin prescriptions -- amounting to billions of dollars spent on worthless and dangerous drugs. Worse, we’ll also be paying for all the costs associated with the drug-induced side effects of the statin medications - congestive heart failure, polyneuritis, muscle pain, depression, memory loss (dementia), poor immune function, and fatigue to name a few. Ok the real question is this: "Do statin drugs reduce deaths associated with cardiovascular disease?" Contrary to the Lipitor ads, apparently not, since a meta-analysis of 44 trials involving almost 10,000 patients showed the death rate was identical at 1 percent of patients in each of the three groups—those taking atorvastatin (Lipitor), those taking other statins and those taking nothing.
And what about using statins as a prophylactic measure?
A meta-analysis of 5 major statin drugs which showed that statin drugs provided a total absolute reduction in total mortality of 0.3% among those who showed no signs of having cardiovascular disease (primary prevention). With respect to preventing heart attack and stroke, the five combined studies showed that statins prevented these events by a mere 1.4%.
We’d be wise to read the study below before putting statins in the drinking water.
The British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology reported on an analysis of all the major controlled trials before the year 2000 and found that long-term use of statins for primary prevention of heart disease produced a 1 percent greater risk of death over 10 years compared to a placebo.
The only thing statin drug trials have proven for sure is that statin drugs lower cholesterol by inhibiting an enzyme known as HMG-CoA-Reductase. Regardless of their ability to lower cholesterol, they failed to show that this effect has any meaningful benefit for preventing early death from heart disease, heart attack or stroke. And they’ve proven to be a catalyst for dangerous side effects. The most common side effect associated with statin drugs is muscle pain and weakness. The symptoms are most likely due to the depletion of CoQ10, a nutrient that supports muscle function. One study found that 98% of patients taking Lipitor and one-third of the patients taking Mevachor (a lower-dose statin) suffered from muscle problems.
A Denmark study that evaluated 500,000 patients found that taking statins for one year raised the risk of nerve damage by about 15%—about one case for every 2,200 patients. For those who took statins for two or more years, the additional risk rose to 26%.
Former astronaut, Dr. Duane Graveline describes in his book, Lipitor: Thief of Memory, his complete memory loss due to the side effects of Lipitor. The incidence of congestive heart failure (CHF) has steadily increased since the introduction of statin drugs. In fact, while heart attacks have slightly declined, CHF has more than doubled since 1989. Statins were first prescribed in 1987.
An article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that in every study with rodents to date, statins have caused cancer. In the CARE trial, breast cancer rates of those taking a statin went up 1500%.
And one last reason to avoid statins- men whose cholesterol levels are lowered through the use of prescription medications double their chances of committing suicide.
Recent Study Shows Cholesterol Drug Vytorin Actually Increases Arterial Plaque!
Study Casts Doubts on Vytorin, Zetia Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs May Not Reduce Plaque Buildup
WebMD Medical News
Jan. 15, 2008 -- Disappointing results from a long-awaited trial of the best-selling cholesterol drug Vytorin drew mixed reactions from some of the nation's leading cardiologists. Vytorin, which combines the unique cholesterol drug Zetia with the traditional statin drug simvastatin, was found to be no better than simvastatin alone for reducing plaque buildup in the carotid arteries. The carotid arteries run through both sides of the neck to the brain.
In fact, patients taking Vytorin actually had slightly more plaque buildup during the trial than those taking simvastatin alone.
The findings were revealed Monday morning in a news release issued by the drug companies Merck and Schering-Plough, which jointly market Vytorin and Zetia.
In an interview with WebMD, cardiologist Steven E. Nissen, MD, called the results "a stunning reversal for Zetia and Vytorin."
Nissen is chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, and is a past president of the American College of Cardiology.
Read the entire article here
[http://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/news/20080115/study-casts-doubts-on-vytorin-zetia?src=RSS_PUBLIC]
In closing...
I hope the public and the brainwashed medical community pays attention to the asterisk and the fine print. A one to two percent benefit earns Pfizer 10 billion dollars a year. Mind-boggling isn’t it?
1.Eleanor Laise. The Lipitor Dilemma, Smart Money: The Wall Street Journal Magazine of Personal Business, November 2003.
2. Hecht HS, Harmon SM. Am J Cardiol 2003; 92:670�?76.
3. Jackson PR. Br J Clin Pharmacol 2001;52:439�?6
4. The ALLHAT Officers and Coordinators for the ALLHAT Collaborative Research Group. JAMA 2002;288:2998�?007.
5. Heart Protection Study Collaborative Group. Lancet 2002;360:7�?2.
6. Matsuzaki M and others. Circ J. 2002 Dec;66(12):1087�?5.
7. Jacobs D and others. Report of the conference on low blood cholesterol: Mortality associations. Circulation 86, 1046�?060, 1992.
8.Horwich TB and others. Journal of Cardiac Failure 8,216�?24,2002.
9. Therapeutics Initiative. "Evidence Based Drug Therapy. Do Statins have a Role in Primary Prevention?" April-May-June 2003. The University of British Columbia. www.ti.ubc.ca.
10. American Heart Association. Inflammation, Heart Disease and Stroke: The Role of C-Reactive Protein. www.americanheart.org. Accessed August 15, 2002. Miyao Matsubara, Katsuhiko Namioka and Shinji Katayose.
Smith DJ and Olive KE. Southern Medical Journal 96(12):1265�?267, December 2003.
11. Gaist D and others. Neurology 2002 May 14;58(9):1321�?.
12.Newman TB, Hulley SB. JAMA 1996;27:55-60
13.Sacks FM and others. N Eng J Med 1996;385;1001�?009.
14.Rodger H. Murphree, D.C.; Heart Disease What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You.
Harrison and Hampton Publishing, Birmingham, AL 2005.
From: January 23, 2008 Newsletter; Dr. Rodger Murphree, D.C., has been in private practice since 1990. He is the founder of, and past clinic director for a large integrated medical practice, which was located on the campus of Brookwood Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of Treating and Beating Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Heart Disease What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You, and Treating and Beating Anxiety and Depression With Orthomolecular Medicine. He can be reached at [www.treatingandbeating.com] |
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