Doctors and pharma fees – the stuff of nightmares
February 18, 2008 by Miki Saxon
The article is fascinating, the implications terrifying and I hope the quotes are enough to get you to read the whole thing.
“Should research scientists who have financial stakes in the products they are writing about be forced to disclose those ties?…”
“More than 60 percent of clinical studies–those involving human subjects–are now funded not by the federal government, but by the pharmaceutical and biotech industries…”
“…studies published in scientific journals like Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine…are increasingly likely to be designed, controlled, and sometimes even ghost-written by marketing departments, rather than academic scientists.
Companies routinely delay or prevent the publication of data that show their drugs are ineffective. The majority of studies that found such popular antidepressants as Prozac and Zoloft to be no better than placebos, for instance, never saw print in medical journals, a fact that is coming to light only now that the Food and Drug Administration has launched a reexamination of those drugs.”…
“…Increasing numbers of studies that get published are actually written by PR firms, “medical communications” specialists, who then go out and recruit an academic willing to put his name on the paper, for a fee…”
” In 1997, when Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of public policy at Tufts University, surveyed 61,134 articles in some 181 journals, he found that only 0.5 percent disclosed a conflict of interest related to the topic of the article, an impossibly low number…”
“By the time medical residents enter private practice or the lab, the gifts from industry no longer seem like gifts, but entitlements…”
” When industry has penetrated every level of medicine from the lab bench to the FDA advisory panels, from the pages of the medical journals to your doctor’s prescription pad, how are physicians to make decisions about treating their patients?”
What now. This isn’t just a dirty little corporate secret—or even a big one that can crash the economy like the sub prime mess.
This problem is legal, pervasive and grounded in the self-delusional arrogance of some of our most respected citizens.
What will you do if faced with the need to evaluate a drug for your child, loved one or yourself? What information can you trust? Whom can you trust?
What can we do?
Your comments—priceless
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On January 28th, BusinessWeek reported that one dirty little secret of modern medicine is that many drugs work only in a minority of people. Many drugs are most effective in relatively small subgroups of sufferers. With statins, these are the patients who already have heart disease. But that’s not a blockbuster market.
So companies have every incentive to market their drugs as being essential for wider groups of people, for whom the benefits are, by definition, smaller. “What the shrewd marketing people at Pfizer and the other companies did was spin it to make everyone with high cholesterol think they really need to reduce it,” says Dr. Bryan A. Liang, director of the Institute of Health Law Studies at the California Western School of Law and co-director of the San Diego Center for Patient Safety.
Thanks, John, I’d forgotten about that article (here’s a link to it). Remember when it was illegal for prescription drugs to advertise? Too bad that Congress didn’t renew that ban—or the ban on smoking ads, for that matter. Usage of both went way up once they could advertise .