BiondVax surges as swine flu stokes interest in vaccines

From the Jerusalem Post.

BiondVax Pharmaceuticals Ltd., an Israeli developer of intra-nasal flu vaccines, soared the most on record in Tel Aviv trading on Monday as the swine-flu outbreak spread.

BiondVax surged 211 percent, the most since shares began trading in 2007, to NIS 1.06. NasVax Ltd., which also develops flu vaccines, rose as much as 150% to NIS 2, before closing 1.3% higher at NIS 0.81 after the company said it wasn’t planning to develop a swine-flu vaccine.

Mexico’s toll of flu-related deaths exceeded 100, while Spain reported its first case of swine influenza and Asian countries screened travelers for symptoms of the virus. Two people are in hospital in Israel on suspicion of swine flu.

“Swine-flu concerns have spilled over into the local market and health-care stocks are outperforming,” Michelle Spivak, a trader at Clal Finance Brokerage Ltd. in Tel Aviv, said Monday.

Health-care stocks were the only gainers among the MSCI Emerging Markets Index’s 10 industry groups Monday. Biota Holdings Ltd., which earns royalties from sales of GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s flu drug Relenza, soared 82% in Sydney trading, the most since 1987. Yuhan Corp., the South Korean drugmaker chosen in 2006 to supply Roche Holding AG with an ingredient for antiviral drug Tamiflu, climbed 15%.

Israeli health-care companies advanced as much as 25% on Monday, with gains in shares of D. Medical Industries Ltd., which develops medical equipment for diabetes, Biomedix Incubator Ltd. and TopSpin Medical Inc.

Israeli biotechnology shares have surged as much as 473% this year after Johnson & Johnson’s buyout of a medical-equipment maker ignited takeover speculation and the government pledged money for research. Overseas regulatory approvals for products and positive test results also pushed shares higher.

NasVax is developing vaccines for preventing several types of flu as well as alternative methods of administration such as a nasal spray. The company’s technology for improving vaccines is based on research by professors Eli Kedar and Yehezkel Barenholz, the co-inventor of a cancer treatment marketed in the US by Johnson & Johnson.

“We have had some success in testing a flu vaccine on animal subjects and are looking to go ahead to human trials,” Barenholz, Nasvax co-founder and head of its scientific advisory board, said Monday from Sao Paulo in a telephone interview.

At this stage, the company doesn’t have plans to develop a vaccine for swine flu, the Ness Ziona-based company said Monday in a statement to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Girl, 13, may be paralysed by disease that baffled doctors for six months – but her mother diagnosed on the internet

This goes to show that parents following their instincts can help cure their children. Always listen to that gut feeling, no matter what any “expert” says!

Unfortunately, the lack of decent medical “care” due to over-reliance on big pHARMa forces many people to become their own doctors. Beware if a doctor wants to prescribe anti-depressant meds instead of trying to find out what’s wrong with you. You may spend years still sick and with additional “side” effects from the pills.

Source: This Is London.

A schoolgirl who has been left bed-ridden with a serious illness for six months, was only diagnosed after her mother looked up her symptoms on the internet.

Danielle Fisher, 13, fell ill in October and doctors were baffled by her mysterious condition.

Her mother Dominique, 35, took her to the doctors after she began suffering from viral meningitis-like symptoms, including severe headaches and fatigue.

Over the next few months, Danielle’s condition worsened as her eyes became ultra-sensitive to light and she began suffering from vertigo and shortness of breath.

Danielle Fisher has been left bed-ridden by Lyme Disease
after doctors failed to diagnose the condition for six months

Danielle, from Whitefield, Greater Manchester, attended various doctor and hospital appointments where she was diagnosed with a variety of possible illnesses, including meningitis, Epstein-Bar virus, a tumour and even psychological problems.

Her mother, 35, said, ‘She was admitted to hospital a few times, she was in and out for a long time and we got an array of diagnoses which were all wrong.

‘She was diagnosed with Epstein-Bar virus, without the glandular fever. Then meningitis, then the psychiatrist comment was the best one.

‘They even suggested it could be a clot or a tumour at one point, which was worrying.

‘The last time she was in, the doctor said there’s nothing wrong with her, she needs a psychiatrist, which I knew was wrong, the poor girl could hardly walk.’

Frustrated at the lack of an appropriate diagnosis, Dominique, who is an estate agent, was so worried that she began doing some research herself on the internet into Danielle’s symptoms.

She had severe vertigo and couldn’t walk any more

She was shocked to discover her daughter’s illness may have been caused by a bite from a tick, a tiny spider-like blood-sucking parasite which usually feeds off animals.

Dominique said, ‘I’d begun doing some research myself by then as she had severe vertigo, couldn’t walk any more and had severe muscle and joint pain.

‘I came across Lyme Disease and it just seemed to fit. There’s a lot of controversy over the treatment of the disease and over diagnosing the disease.

‘I took Danielle to see a professor in Newcastle privately and he diagnosed her with Lyme Disease and three core infections. That’s why she was so ill.

‘If it hadn’t have been diagnosed, she could have become paralysed or blind.’

Danielle’s condition was diagnosed as borreliosis, also known as Lyme Disease in April. If left untreated, it can cause nerve damage, paralysis and blindness.

The Manchester schoolgirl is now taking several courses of antibiotics to treat the condition but it is feared she may never fully recover.

‘If she had been diagnosed straight away, it would have been a course of six weeks of antibiotics but now she’s on heavy antibiotics. It’s gone past the blood-brain barrier,’ Danielle’s mother said.

‘Thankfully she is now on a course of treatment and we are just hoping as much as we can that she will get better. On one extreme she could be better in weeks and on the other extreme she might always be like she is now. ‘

Dominique added: ‘Danielle is fed up. She’s lost a lot of weight, she’s miserable and she just wants to be better. She just wants to be back at school and with her friends.’

The disease has seen a fivefold increase in Britain in the past decade.

‘It’s staggering that this has been caused by one bite. Danielle is literally bed-ridden. She can barely walk because she is so weak and she gets tired really easily.

‘This disease is a lot more common than people think and I just want to make people aware of it.’

‘It can happen anywhere in the UK. There seems to be quite a lot of it in certain big parks. It’s like an unlucky lottery, it can happen to anyone.’

Wendy Fox, Chairperson and Director of BADA (Borreliosis and Associated Diseases Awareness UK) said: ‘Doctors need to be much more aware of early signs and symptoms, the fact that ticks can carry more than one infection concurrently and the fact that rashes can differ to those in medical journals.”

Currently the only defence against Lyme Disease in the UK is wearing sensible clothing, using repellent and being aware of possible symptoms.

Scientist criticizes corruption of medical industry

Source: Matt McGrath, BBC.

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has hit out at what he terms the “moral corruption” of the medical industry.

Britain’s Sir John Sulston says that profits are taking precedence over the needs of patients, particularly in the developing world.

He was speaking at the launch of a new research institute into science, ethics and innovation.

Sir John shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for medicine for his work on the genetics controlling cell division.

He is well known for his commitment to public medicine and his opposition to the privatisation of scientific information.

Eight years ago he led the fight to keep the data being derived from the Human Genome Project open and free to any scientist who wanted to use it.

‘Fair access’

He says there is now great concern among researchers about private companies patenting genes and genetic tests. He is also concerned about the misuse of information, and what he terms “disease mongering“.

He is taking these concerns over the direction that science and medicine are going in, onto a broader stage.

Sir John is to be the chairman of a new UK-based institute that will research the ethical questions raised by science and innovation.

He wants the group to try to provide ground rules and guidance on issues such as the patenting of genes, and how people in developing countries have fair access to medicines.

Sir John believes that our current systems place the needs of shareholders ahead of the needs of patients.

Treaty requirement

The Nobel Laureate told the BBC: “Some people would say it is not corrupt because it is not illegal, and that is true; but I consider that advertising a medicine that doesn’t make clear any disadvantages of the medicine, or, in fact, the fact that most people don’t need this particular medicine – I would cite, for example, anti-depressants which are hugely oversold, especially in America. This is the sort of thing I mean by corruption. It’s not legal corruption; it’s moral corruption.“

According to Sir John, the world is at a crisis point in terms of getting medicines to sick people, particularly in the developing world.

He says that the world needs an international biomedical treaty to iron out issues over patents and intellectual property.

Sir John is setting up the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation with the bioethicist John Harris.

The institute is staging a one-day conference on Saturday called Who Owns Science?

8 drugs doctors wouldn’t take—should you?

I bet this is a small list of the meds doctors won’t take themselves. Stay clear of doctors with Big Pharma posters pushing pills in their offices.

Source: Morgan Lord, MSNBC.

With 3,480 pages of fine print, the Physicians’ Desk Reference (a.k.a. PDR) is not a quick read. That’s because it contains every iota of information on more than 4,000 prescription medications. Heck, the PDR is medication — a humongous sleeping pill.

Doctors count on this compendium to help them make smart prescribing decisions — in other words, to choose drugs that will solve their patients’ medical problems without creating new ones. Unfortunately, it seems some doctors rarely pull the PDR off the shelf. Or if they do crack it open, they don’t stay versed on emerging research that may suddenly make a once-trusted treatment one to avoid. Worst case: You swallow something that has no business being inside your body.

Of course, plenty of M.D.’s do know which prescription and over-the-counter drugs are duds, dangers, or both. So we asked them, “Which medications would you skip?” Their list is your second opinion. If you’re on any of these meds, talk to your doctor. Maybe he or she will finally open that big red book with all the dust on it.

Advair
It’s asthma medicine … that could make your asthma deadly. Advair contains the long-acting beta-agonist (LABA) salmeterol. A 2006 analysis of 19 trials, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that regular use of LABAs can increase the severity of an asthma attack. Because salmeterol is more widely prescribed than other LABAs, the danger is greater — the researchers estimate that salmeterol may contribute to as many as 5,000 asthma-related deaths in the United States each year. In 2006, similarly disturbing findings from an earlier salmeterol study prompted the FDA to tag Advair with a “black box” warning — the agency’s highest caution level.

Your new strategy: No matter what you may have heard, a LABA, such as the one in Advair, is not the only option, says Philip Rodgers, Pharm.D., a clinical associate professor at the University of North Carolina school of pharmacy. For instance, if you have mild asthma, an inhaled corticosteroid such as Flovent is often all you need. Still wheezing? “Patients can also consider an inhaled corticosteroid paired with a leukotriene modifier,” says Dr. Rodgers. This combo won’t create dangerous inflammation, and according to a Scottish review, it’s as effective as a corticosteroid-and-LABA combo.

Avandia
Diabetes is destructive enough on its own, but if you try to control it with rosiglitazone — better known by the brand name Avandia — you could be headed for a heart attack. Last September, a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study found that people who took rosiglitazone for at least a year increased their risk of heart failure or a heart attack by 109 percent and 42 percent, respectively, compared with those who took other oral diabetes medications or a placebo.

The reason? While there have been some reports that Avandia use may cause dangerous fluid retention or raise artery-clogging LDL cholesterol, no one is sure if these are the culprits. That’s because the results of similar large studies have been mixed. So the FDA has asked GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Avandia, to conduct a new long-term study assessing users’ heart risks. There’s only one problem: The study isn’t expected to start until later this year.

Your new strategy: Stick with a proven performer. “I prefer metformin, an older, cheaper, more dependable medication,” says Sonal Singh, M.D., the lead author of the JAMA study. “Avandia is now a last resort.” Dr. Singh recommends that you talk to your doctor about cholesterol-lowering medicines, such as statins or the B vitamin niacin. Swallowing high doses (1,000 milligrams) of niacin daily may raise your HDL (good) cholesterol by as much as 24 percent, while at the same time lowering your LDL and triglyceride levels.

Celebrex
Once nicknamed “super aspirin,” Celebrex is now better known for its side effects than for its pain-relieving prowess. The drug has been linked to increased risks of stomach bleeding, kidney trouble, and liver damage. But according to a 2005 New England Journal of Medicine study, the biggest threat is to your heart: People taking 200 mg of Celebrex twice a day more than doubled their risk of dying of cardiovascular disease. Those on 400 mg twice a day more than tripled their risk, compared with people taking a placebo.

And yet Celebrex, a COX-2 inhibitor, is still available, even though two other drugs of that class, Bextra and Vioxx, were pulled off the market due to a similar risk of heart damage. The caveat to the consumer? In 2004, the FDA advised doctors to consider alternatives to Celebrex.

Your new strategy: What you don’t want to do is stop swallowing Celebrex and begin knocking back ibuprofen, because regular use of high doses of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) can lead to gastrointestinal bleeding. A safer swap is acupuncture. A German study found that for people suffering from chronic lower-back pain, twice-weekly acupuncture sessions were twice as effective as conventional treatments with drugs, physical therapy, and exercise. The strategic needling may stimulate central-nervous-system pathways to release the body’s own painkillers, including endorphins and enkephalins, says Duke University anesthesiologist Tong-Joo Gan, M.D. You can find a certified acupuncturist in your area at medicalacupuncture.org/findadoc/index.html.

Ketek
Most bacteria in the lungs and sinuses don’t stand a chance against Ketek, but you might not either. This antibiotic, which has traditionally been prescribed for respiratory-tract infections, carries a higher risk of severe liver side effects than similar antibiotics do. “Ketek can cause heart-rhythm problems, can lead to liver disease, and could interact poorly with other medications you may be taking,” says Dr. Rodgers. “Unfortunately, it’s still available, and although many doctors are aware of the risks, some may still prescribe it without caution.” In February 2007, the FDA limited the usage of Ketek to the treatment of pneumonia.

Your new strategy: Can’t imagine catching pneumonia? The last time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated the top 10 killers of men, this deadly lung infection (along with the flu) came in seventh. Avoid backing yourself into a corner where you might need Ketek by always signing up for your annual flu shot — if you have pneumonia, it’ll reduce your risk of dying of the infection by 40 percent. And if you still end up staring at a scrip for Ketek, Dr. Rodgers recommends asking to be treated with one of several safer alternatives, such as Augmentin or the antibiotics doxycycline or Zithromax.

Prilosec and Nexium
Heartburn can be uncomfortable, but heart attacks can be fatal, which is why the FDA has investigated a suspected link between cardiac trouble and the acid-reflux remedies Prilosec and Nexium. In December 2007, the agency concluded that there was no “likely” connection. Translation: The scientific jury is still out. In the meantime, there are other reasons to be concerned. Because Prilosec and Nexium are proton-pump inhibitors, they are both incredibly effective at stopping acid production in the stomach — perhaps too effective.

A lack of acid may raise your risk of pneumonia, because the same stuff that makes your chest feel as if it’s burning also kills incoming bacteria and viruses. You may also have an elevated risk of bone loss — in the less acidic environment, certain forms of calcium may not be absorbed effectively during digestion. “The risk of a fracture has been estimated to be over 40 percent higher in patients who use these drugs long-term, and the risk clearly increases with duration of therapy,” says Dr. Rodgers.

Your new strategy: When you feel the fire, first try to extinguish it with Zantac 150 or Pepcid AC. Both of these OTC products work by blocking histamine from stimulating the stomach cells that produce acid. Just know that neither drug is a long-term fix.

“To really cure the problem, lose weight,” says Michael Roizen, M.D., chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic and co-author of “YOU: The Owner’s Manual.” That’s because when you’re overweight, excess belly fat puts pressure on and changes the angle of your esophagus, pulling open the valve that’s supposed to prevent stomach-acid leaks. This in turn makes it easier for that burning sensation to travel up into your chest.

Visine Original
What possible harm to your peepers could come from these seemingly innocuous eyedrops? “Visine gets the red out, but it does so by shrinking blood vessels, just like Afrin shrinks the vessels in your nose,” says Thomas Steinemann, M.D., a spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Overuse of the active ingredient tetrahydrozoline can perpetuate the vessel dilating-and-constricting cycle and may cause even more redness.

Your new strategy: If you still want to rely on Visine, at least make sure you don’t use too many drops per dose and you don’t use the stuff for more than 3 or 4 days. But you’d really be better off figuring out the underlying cause of the redness and treating that instead. If it’s dryness, use preservative-free artificial tears, recommends Dr. Steinemann. Visine Pure Tears Portables is a good choice for moisture minus side effects. On the other hand, if your eyes are itchy and red because of allergies, pick up OTC antiallergy drops, such as Zaditor. It contains an antihistamine to interrupt the allergic response but no vasoconstrictor to cause rebound redness.

Pseudoephedrine
Forget that this decongestant can be turned into methamphetamine. People with heart disease or hypertension should watch out for any legitimate drug that contains pseudoephedrine. See, pseudoephedrine doesn’t just constrict the blood vessels in your nose and sinuses; it can also raise blood pressure and heart rate, setting the stage for vascular catastrophe. Over the years, pseudoephedrine has been linked to heart attacks and strokes. “Pseudoephedrine can also worsen symptoms of benign prostate disease and glaucoma,” says Dr. Rodgers.

Your new strategy: Other OTC oral nasal decongestants can contain phenylephrine, which has a safety profile similar to pseudoephedrine’s. A 2007 review didn’t find enough evidence that phenylephrine was effective. Our advice: Avoid meds altogether and clear your nasal passages with a neti pot, the strangely named system that allows you to flush your sinuses with saline ($15, sinucleanse.com). University of Wisconsin researchers found that people who used a neti pot felt their congestion and head pain improve by as much as 57 percent. Granted, the flushing sensation is odd at first, but give it a chance. Dr. Roizen did: “I do it every day after I brush my teeth,” he says.

Big Pharma Reaches Out To Higher Learning

By Jane Akre, InjuryBoard.com.

Tight budgets affect almost everyone at home and in the workplace. But when does a tight budget at a university invite corporate conflicts of interest that potentially taint professors and their curriculum?

The American Medical Student Association (AMSA) has issued a scorecard on conflicts of interest by pharmaceutical companies on universities across the country.

The research finds most of the 150 medical schools in the U.S. are failing when it comes to erecting conflict of interest policies that ensure pharmaceutical marketing cannot take hold on campus.

The pharmaceutical industry spends large sums of money to market to doctors about drugs, an amount estimated to be about $28 to $46 billion a year.

AMSA represents physicians-in-training. For this project, the group collaborated with The Prescription Project, funded by the Pew Charitable Trust.

The goal of the Prescription Project is to avoid compromises in patient care resulting from conflicts of interest that erode public confidence in the medical profession.

“The schools that earned ‘A’ and ‘B’ scores are to be commended for setting a high bar and aggressively moving forward to ensure medical education, training and patient care is free of commercial bias,” says RxP executive director Robert Restuccia in a statement.

“While we still have a long way to go, we are optimistic that the growing momentum for reform will change the landscape and there will be great improvement next year.”

Conflict of interest is defined by 11 different criteria: whether the school has a policy on accepting gifts and meals; whether consulting relationships are allowed as well as industry-funded speaking, both on and off campus.

The AMSA grades on whether faculty is required to disclose potential conflicts of interest to supervisors on a regular basis; and on whether they can accept pharmaceutical samples. They also gauge whether there are industry-sponsored scholarships and funds.

A conflict is also defined as adjusting the medical school curriculum to reflect the marketing of pharmaceuticals. Schools are judged on whether there is oversight to prevent such things. Lastly, AMSA asked whether there were explicit sanctions for noncompliance with school policies against conflicts of interest.

Seven schools go to the head of the class, graded with words like “exemplary”, “model”, and “a complete ban.”

They include, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, PA; Mount Sinai School of Medicine, NY; University of California Davis School of Medicine, Sacramento, CA; University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA; University of California Los Angeles, CA; Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD.

On the other end of the scale are many universities that didn’t respond.

In January, a published study estimated that U.S. pharmaceutical companies spend twice as much marketing drugs as they spend researching new ones.

“The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States,” estimates that U.S. drug sales amount to about $235.4 billion annually.

That translates to $57.5 billion spent on total promotion by pharmaceutical companies in 2004 or about $61,000 per physician in promotion that year.

Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay

We’ll never know how many doctors the long arm of big pHARMa reaches, because they only need to “volunteer” how much they receive from it.

By GARDINER HARRIS and BENEDICT CAREY, New York Times.

A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators.

By failing to report income, the psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, and a colleague in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, may have violated federal and university research rules designed to police potential conflicts of interest, according to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Some of their research is financed by government grants.

Like Dr. Biederman, Dr. Wilens belatedly reported earning at least $1.6 million from 2000 to 2007, and another Harvard colleague, Dr. Thomas Spencer, reported earning at least $1 million after being pressed by Mr. Grassley’s investigators. But even these amended disclosures may understate the researchers’ outside income because some entries contradict payment information from drug makers, Mr. Grassley found.

In one example, Dr. Biederman reported no income from Johnson & Johnson for 2001 in a disclosure report filed with the university. When asked to check again, he said he received $3,500. But Johnson & Johnson told Mr. Grassley that it paid him $58,169 in 2001, Mr. Grassley found.

The Harvard group’s consulting arrangements with drug makers were already controversial because of the researchers’ advocacy of unapproved uses of psychiatric medicines in children.

In an e-mailed statement, Dr. Biederman said, “My interests are solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study,” and he said he took conflict-of-interest policies “very seriously.” Drs. Wilens and Spencer said in e-mailed statements that they thought they had complied with conflict-of-interest rules.

John Burklow, a spokesman for the National Institutes of Health, said: “If there have been violations of N.I.H. policy — and if research integrity has been compromised — we will take all the appropriate action within our power to hold those responsible accountable. This would be completely unacceptable behavior, and N.I.H. will not tolerate it.”

The federal grants received by Drs. Biederman and Wilens were administered by Massachusetts General Hospital, which in 2005 won $287 million in such grants. The health institutes could place restrictions on the hospital’s grants or even suspend them altogether.

Alyssa Kneller, a Harvard spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement: “The information released by Senator Grassley suggests that, in certain instances, each doctor may have failed to disclose outside income from pharmaceutical companies and other entities that should have been disclosed.”

Ms. Kneller said the doctors had been referred to a university conflict committee for review.

Mr. Grassley sent letters on Wednesday to Harvard and the health institutes outlining his investigators’ findings, and he placed the letters along with his comments in The Congressional Record.

Dr. Biederman is one of the most influential researchers in child psychiatry and is widely admired for focusing the field’s attention on its most troubled young patients. Although many of his studies are small and often financed by drug makers, his work helped to fuel a controversial 40-fold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder, which is characterized by severe mood swings, and a rapid rise in the use of antipsychotic medicines in children. The Grassley investigation did not address research quality.

Doctors have known for years that antipsychotic drugs, sometimes called major tranquilizers, can quickly subdue children. But youngsters appear to be especially susceptible to the weight gain and metabolic problems caused by the drugs, and it is far from clear that the medications improve children’s lives over time, experts say.

In the last 25 years, drug and device makers have displaced the federal government as the primary source of research financing, and industry support is vital to many university research programs. But as corporate research executives recruit the brightest scientists, their brethren in marketing departments have discovered that some of these same scientists can be terrific pitchmen.

To protect research integrity, the National Institutes of Health require researchers to report to universities earnings of $10,000 or more per year, for instance, in consulting money from makers of drugs also studied by the researchers in federally financed trials. Universities manage financial conflicts by requiring that the money be disclosed to research subjects, among other measures.

The health institutes last year awarded more than $23 billion in grants to more than 325,000 researchers at over 3,000 universities, and auditing the potential conflicts of each grantee would be impossible, health institutes officials have long insisted. So the government relies on universities.

Universities ask professors to report their conflicts but do almost nothing to verify the accuracy of these voluntary disclosures.

“It’s really been an honor system thing,” said Dr. Robert Alpern, dean of Yale School of Medicine. “If somebody tells us that a pharmaceutical company pays them $80,000 a year, I don’t even know how to check on that.”

Some states have laws requiring drug makers to disclose payments made to doctors, and Mr. Grassley and others have sponsored legislation to create a national registry.

Lawmakers have been concerned in recent years about the use of unapproved medications in children and the influence of industry money.

Mr. Grassley asked Harvard for the three researchers’ financial disclosure reports from 2000 through 2007 and asked some drug makers to list payments made to them.

“Basically, these forms were a mess,” Mr. Grassley said in comments he entered into The Congressional Record on Wednesday. “Over the last seven years, it looked like they had taken a couple hundred thousand dollars.”

Prompted by Mr. Grassley’s interest, Harvard asked the researchers to re-examine their disclosure reports.

In the new disclosures, the trio’s outside consulting income jumped but was still contradicted by reports sent to Mr. Grassley from some of the companies. In some cases, the income seems to have put the researchers in violation of university and federal rules.

In 2000, for instance, Dr. Biederman received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study in children Strattera, an Eli Lilly drug for attention deficit disorder. Dr. Biederman reported to Harvard that he received less than $10,000 from Lilly that year, but the company told Mr. Grassley that it paid Dr. Biederman more than $14,000 in 2000, Mr. Grassley’s letter stated.

At the time, Harvard forbade professors from conducting clinical trials if they received payments over $10,000 from the company whose product was being studied, and federal rules required such conflicts to be managed.

Mr. Grassley said these discrepancies demonstrated profound flaws in the oversight of researchers’ financial conflicts and the need for a national registry. But the disclosures may also cloud the work of one of the most prominent group of child psychiatrists in the world.

In the past decade, Dr. Biederman and his colleagues have promoted the aggressive diagnosis and drug treatment of childhood bipolar disorder, a mood problem once thought confined to adults. They have maintained that the disorder was underdiagnosed in children and could be treated with antipsychotic drugs, medications invented to treat schizophrenia.

Other researchers have made similar assertions. As a result, pediatric bipolar diagnoses and antipsychotic drug use in children have soared. Some 500,000 children and teenagers were given at least one prescription for an antipsychotic in 2007, including 20,500 under 6 years of age, according to Medco Health Solutions, a pharmacy benefit manager.

Few psychiatrists today doubt that bipolar disorder can strike in the early teenage years, or that many of the children being given the diagnosis are deeply distressed.

“I consider Dr. Biederman a true visionary in recognizing this illness in children,” said Susan Resko, director of the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation, “and he’s not only saved many lives but restored hope to thousands of families across the country.”

Longtime critics of the group see its influence differently. “They have given the Harvard imprimatur to this commercial experimentation on children,” said Vera Sharav, president and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a patient advocacy group.

Many researchers strongly disagree over what bipolar looks like in youngsters, and some now fear the definition has been expanded unnecessarily, due in part to the Harvard group.

The group published the results of a string of drug trials from 2001 to 2006, but the studies were so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive, experts say. In some studies testing antipsychotic drugs, the group defined improvement as a decline of 30 percent or more on a scale called the Young Mania Rating Scale — well below the 50 percent change that most researchers now use as the standard.

Controlling for bias is especially important in such work, given that the scale is subjective, and raters often depend on reports from parents and children, several top psychiatrists said.

More broadly, they said, revelations of undisclosed payments from drug makers to leading researchers are especially damaging for psychiatry.

“The price we pay for these kinds of revelations is credibility, and we just can’t afford to lose any more of that in this field,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, which finances psychiatric studies. “In the area of child psychiatry in particular, we know much less than we should, and we desperately need research that is not influenced by industry money.”

Pharmaceutical Payola — Drug Marketing to Doctors

One way you can tell if a doctor is under the influence of big pHARMa is the presence of posters, pens and pads with pharmaceutical advertising in the office. If s/he has a lot of them, find someone else. The best ones are independent, and often don’t take HMOs, but are worth the price you pay out of pocket. They don’t peddle vaccines, pills, and other questionable “cures,” and emphasize wellness.

By Rob Weissman, Multinational Monitor.

Last week, a Congressional committee properly raked Big Pharma over the coals for misleading advertising of pharmaceuticals.

A hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight subcommittee focused on advertising campaigns for three drugs, including the remarkable case of Robert Jarvik. Jarvik is featured in endlessly re-run ads for Pfizer’s blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor. Known as the inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart, he is not a cardiologist, not a licensed medical doctor and not authorized to prescribe pharmaceuticals. He’s shown in the ads engaged in vigorous rowing activity, but in fact he doesn’t row. Pfizer pulled the ads in February after controversy started brewing.

Among industrialized countries, only the United States and New Zealand permit drug companies to market directly to consumers. It’s a bad idea, it drives bad medicine, and it should be banned.

But although it has the highest profile, direct-to-consumer advertising is a small part of Pharma’s marketing machine.

Researchers Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin conclude in a recent issue of the journal PLOS Medicine that direct-to-consumer ads make up less than a tenth of industry marketing expenditures ($4 billion of $57.5 billion in 2004). And Gagnon and Lexchin’s estimate of $57.5 billion on marketing excludes many industry expenditures that are really driven by marketing, including clinical trials conducted for marketing purposes.

The bulk of the industry marketing effort — more than 70 percent by Gagnon and Lexchin’s calculation — is directed at doctors.

Why?

Because it works.

The companies spend huge amounts paying firms that carefully track what doctors prescribe, and then they use the information to tailor messages to doctors, distribute samples and develop continuing medical education programs.

Gagnon and Lexchin report that Pharma spends more than $20 billion a year on “detailers” — the pharma reps that knock on doctor doors, ply the staff with free coffee and lunches, distribute samples ($16 billion worth), and prod docs to prescribe their drugs.

This is complemented by a host of tactics that in other circumstances might be called bribes.

“Virtually all physicians in America take cash or gifts from the drug companies,” says Melody Petersen, author of Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs, and a former New York Times reporter. “A recent survey said 94 percent of physicians took something of value from the drug companies. Some doctors take hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from these companies, and there’s no law that says they can’t.”

Petersen says she “had no idea this was so extensive until one day I was writing a story about Celebrex and Vioxx — this was before Vioxx was taken off the market. The story was about the marketing battle between these two pain drugs. I called one of the large societies of rheumatologists and asked for an expert on arthritis. I specifically said I needed an expert who was not being paid as a consultant to one of the manufacturers of these drugs. A staff person said, ‘We have lots of people you can talk to, but all of these doctors are consultants to one or both of the drug companies.’”

Drug companies hire doctors to give lectures, and they hire other doctors as “consultants” to go to fancy dinners and listen to the lectures. “There are more than 500,000 of these dinners or events in America every year,” Petersen says.

The drug companies weave these diverse strategems into an elaborate tapestry — not infrequently to push drugs for inappropriate purposes. One eye-opening case that Petersen details in Our Daily Meds concerns Neurontin, a mediocre drug for epilepsy that Warner-Lambert illegally peddled as an unapproved treatment for bipolar disorder, migraines, attention deficit disorder in children and other conditions. The drug does not work for most of these conditions. Many persons were injured by taking excessive doses of Neurontin, and many others wasted money and emotional energy on hopeless Neurontin treatment strategies. Warner-Lambert ultimately paid $430 million to settle criminal and civil charges related to Neurontin marketing, but Petersen says that, even so, the illegal marketing scheme was clearly profitable for Warner-Lambert (and Pfizer, which acquired Warner-Lambert in 2000).

Petersen’s account of the Neurontin nightmare draws heavily on a whistleblower, David Franklin. She summarizes the central theme of the story Franklin revealed: “The company got doctors to prescribe the drug for all these experimental uses by paying them. They paid physicians to give speeches to other physicians at restaurants or hotels or resorts. The doctors not only enjoyed a nice meal or a weekend vacation, they often also received a $500 check for attending. The physicians giving lectures at these parties were often trained by the drug company’s ad firm to describe how Neurontin could work for conditions like bipolar. … The company tracked the doctors’ prescriptions before and after these dinners or weekend retreats. The executives saw how well it worked.”

Which raises an interesting question: How is that industry can so effectively manipulate highly trained doctors?

Answers Adriane Fugh-Berman, a doctor and Georgetown University professor who runs PharmedOut, a project that focuses on how pharmaceutical companies influence prescribing decisions and encourages physicians to educate themselves from non-industry sources: “Physicians are trained in medicine, not psychological manipulation. Every bit of flattery, friendship and information offered by reps is aimed at selling drugs.”

There is no simple solution to these problems, though ending patent-based marketing monopolies would transform pharmaceutical marketing practices and likely eliminate most abuses.

In the meantime, a ban on Pharma gifts to doctors would be a modest step forward. In the United States, notes Petersen, “radio disc jockeys can’t take cash from music companies. But when it comes to something like medicines — which mean life or death for people — doctors can take as much money as they want from the drug companies. We need a law to stop that.”

Note: I serve as managing director for Commercial Alert, which advocates for elimination of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.

Heparin Contamination Fiasco Reveals Dirty Secret of Drug Industry: Their Pills are Made in China!

Source: Mike Adams, Natural News.

Remember a couple of years ago how the FDA warned Americans not to buy prescription drugs from Canada because they might be “contaminated by terrorists?” I’m not making that up: That was the official announcement of an FDA spokesperson, and it was part of their fear strategy for enforcing a monopoly on U.S. consumers so that Big Pharma could continue engaging in rampant price fixing.

The implication in that warning is that drugs purchased in the United States are therefore safer, correct? What the FDA didn’t tell anyone, however, is that most pharmaceuticals purchased in the United States are manufactured outside the U.S.; many from China or Puerto Rico. So they’re not even made in the U.S. anyway, and drug companies are simply importing them from other countries just like a consumer might do if she drove across the border and bought her medications in Canada or Mexico.

But hold on: The FDA actually used to run full-page magazine ads warning consumers about the dangers of drugs being contaminated if they were bought from Mexico, Canada or — God forbid — the Internet! Those drugs were dangerous, the FDA warned us, because they were not subjected to rigorous quality control requirements. The implication in that warning, of course, is that brand-name pharmaceuticals sold in the U.S. at U.S. pharmacies must therefore NOT be contaminated.

Enter the blood-thinning drug Heparin. This blood-thinning drug, made by Baxter International, was recently discovered by consumers to have been manufactured in China. Worse yet, the quality controls in China were so low that this FDA approved, brand-name prescription drug was apparently deliberately contaminated with an adulterated chemical that has now resulted in the death of dozens of consumers in the United States. Sound familiar? It’s precisely the scenario dreamed up by the FDA to warn consumers away from pharmaceuticals purchased in Canada, Mexico or elsewhere. But guess what? It turns out that brand-name, FDA-approved prescription drugs sold at monopoly prices right here in the United States are adulterated too!

Three astonishing facts about brand-name pharmaceuticals

So far, then, there are three astonishing facts that have come out of this recent news about Heparin:

Fact #1: Most U.S. prescription drugs aren’t even made in the U.S.

Fact #2: Many U.S. prescription drugs are made in China, a country widely known to have the lowest quality control standards in the world.

Fact #3: U.S. drug companies don’t even run quality control checks on the drugs they import from China!

That third fact should send a chill up your spine. What it means is that U.S. drug companies contract with cheap, low-end Chinese chemical factories to manufacture their drugs at something like two cents a pill (which they can mark up to $20 a pill or more…), and then they import these Chinese-made pills and don’t even test them before selling them to U.S. consumers!

If it wasn’t for the fact that so many Americans have now died from this, the whole thing would be quite hilarious. Why? Because the FDA and Big Pharma are always running around touting how “safe” their products are while screaming about how dangerous herbs and supplements are. And yet nutritional supplement companies test their ingredients for contaminants with far greater frequency than drug companies. That Heparin contamination flap would never have happened to an honest nutritional supplement company because they’re always testing their raw materials — especially if they buy materials from China, which is known all over the world as the Capitol of Contamination!

Big Pharma, it seems, just skips that step. Whatever the Chinese throw into their pill bottles, U.S. drug companies just buy it and pass it on to patients and consumers without bothering to test the pills before selling them. Wow. Talk about trading safety for profits…

So much for the “safety” of Big Pharma’s drugs sold in the United States, huh? This isn’t something you hear in Big Pharma’s TV ads, is it? “Buy Vytorex. Made in China! Never tested for contaminants! Take at your own risk!”

Did you know that the FDA has not inspected 93% of the factories that manufacture pharmaceuticals outside the U.S.? You can read more details on that in my article entitled Heparin Blood Thinner Drug Linked to Sudden Deaths; Cheap Ingredients Imported from Chinese Chemical Factory HERE

As it turns out, many of the pharmaceuticals manufactured for U.S. drug companies are contaminated with bizarre things like metal parts from the gears of processing machines, flecks of paint from factory walls, and who knows what else. The safety standards are so incredibly low for pharmaceuticals that cheap, low-cost manufacturers in China and elsewhere can apparently put almost anything in the drugs, and nobody ever checks the quality anyway. These drugs are rushed right from the cheap Chinese factories to pharmacy shelves in the United States where gullible consumers — comforted by the FDA’s proclamations of quality and safety — swallow these pills and die.

How China could poison half the U.S. population

Now, remember the fictional terrorist plot I mentioned above that the FDA used to try to scare Americans away from buying pharmaceuticals from Canada? Well what if we someday have a military conflict with China, and the Communist leaders of that country decide to attack the American people through their pharmaceuticals? It would be a very simple matter for Chinese authorities to intentionally adulterate the drugs with mildly toxic ingredients or even biological agents (infectious diseases) that would sicken American consumers and start to spread through the population.

Since many drugs manufactured in China are not tested for contaminants, nobody in America would even have a clue! People would just pop their antidepressants, erection drugs, cholesterol drugs, heart medications and other pills, only to find that a few days later they were either sick or dead. With so many “American” drugs manufactured in China, our nation is vulnerable to a massive contamination attack.

Think about that the next time you pop a pill from Big Pharma. Do you really know where that pill came from? Do you really know whether it was ever tested? Chances are, it was made in China or Puerto Rico, under highly unsanitary factory conditions, and was never even tested before you bought it.

Drugs aren’t safe just because they’re not contaminated

You know what’s really hilarious in all this news about contaminated drugs like Heparin? These drugs aren’t even safe when they’re NOT contaminated! Even if you remove all the adulterated chemicals that are killing people, and even if you get rid of all the factory machine parts being found in pills, and the paint and other physical contaminants from the factory floor, then you’re still left with a pill made with synthetic, non-natural chemicals that can kill you anyway!

Blood thinners, for example, are literally made with rat poison. That’s the proper recipe! Yes, rat poison. It’s a chemical that’s been used for over a hundred years to kill rats by causing them to bleed to death internally. Reduce the dosage to a non-fatal amount, pop it into a capsule, then get the FDA to approve the deadly chemical as “safe” and you know have a medication suitable for humans! People who take blood thinners are literally poisoning themselves with rat poison. That is no exaggeration.

So — here’s the funny part — if Big Pharma starts checking its drugs for contaminants, it has to be very careful because even the main ingredients are contaminants! There are certain chemical contaminants that they don’t want in the drugs (chemicals that will kill you overnight), but other chemical contaminants that they DO want in the drugs (chemicals that will keep you in a state of disease for decades). Virtually all pharmaceuticals, technically speaking, are chemical contaminants. If you really remove all the dangerous chemicals from most pharmaceuticals, you’d be left with empty capsules.

The top ten disturbing facts about the pharmaceutical industry’s quality control problem

In summary, be sure to remember these ten facts about the pharmaceutical industry and its quality control failures:

Fact #1: Most pharmaceuticals sold in America are NOT made in America. Drug companies routinely try to hide this fact.

Fact #2: Many brand-name pharmaceuticals are contaminated with adulterated chemicals, metal shavings from factory machine parts, or other undesirables.

Fact #3: Many brand-name drugs are NOT tested for contaminants before being sold to consumers in the U.S., Canada and other countries.
Fact #4: The FDA does not inspect most factories that make drugs outside the U.S. (93% are never inspected)

Fact #5: There is no law requiring drug companies to state their drugs are “Made in China.”

Fact #6: Even when pharmaceuticals are not contaminated with deadly chemicals, they’re still often made with other deadly chemicals that are intentionally part of the recipe!

Fact #7: The FDA’s response to the Heparin contamination discovery reveals the agency to be a pack of bumbling idiots who have no grasp whatsoever on quality control. They only discovered the drug contamination AFTER people started dropping dead.

Fact #8: If you take pharmaceuticals, you are playing a form of Big Pharma’s Russian Roulette with your life. There is no guarantee that any pill you take is safe or that it has ever been tested for contamination.

Fact #9: The pharmaceutical industry has deceived consumers by implying that drugs bought in the U.S. are somehow safer than drugs purchased in Canada, Mexico or elsewhere.

Fact #10: There are fewer inspections required for imported pharmaceuticals than there are for imported orchids!

Remember, too: Nobody in the drug industry — not the FDA, not Big Pharma, nobody! — has ever tested the long-term safety of using multiple prescription drugs in combination. These chemical cocktails of two, five or a dozen prescription drugs are extremely toxic to the liver, kidneys and other organs, and there is zero scientific evidence showing them to be safe for long-term combined consumption by consumers.

And finally, consider this: Big Pharma is now pushing the Supreme Court to grant the industry blanket immunity for all pharmaceuticals, a move that would immediately lift any and all testing requirements and quality control measures since the drug companies would no longer be liable for what’s in their pills! See this story for more details

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About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health researcher and author with a passion for teaching people how to improve their health He has authored and published thousands of articles, interviews, consumers guides, and books on topics like health and the environment, reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and improving personal health around the world. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies’ products. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a maker of energy efficient LED lights that greatly reduce CO2 emissions. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He’s also a veteran of the software technology industry, having founded a personalized mass email software product used to deliver email newsletters to subscribers. Adams is currently the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and practices nature photography, Capoeira, Pilates and organic gardening. He’s also author of numerous health books published by Truth Publishing and is the creator of several consumer-oriented grassroots campaigns, including the Spam. Don’t Buy It! campaign, and the free downloadable Honest Food Guide. He also created the free reference sites HerbReference.com and HealingFoodReference.com. Adams believes in free speech, free access to nutritional supplements and the ending of corporate control over medicines, genes and seeds. Known on the ‘net as ‘the Health Ranger,’ Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at http://www.HealthRanger.org

Pushing the Single-Payer Solution

Source: Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate.

It’s time for the candidates to stop dancing around real health-care reform and get behind a single-payer system.

As the media coverage of the Democratic presidential race continues to focus on lapel pins and pastors, America is ailing. As I travel around the country, I find people are angry and motivated. Like Dr. Rocky White, a physician from a conservative, evangelical background who practices in rural Alamosa, Colo. A tall, gray-haired Westerner in black jeans, a crisp white shirt and a bolo tie, Dr. White is a leading advocate for single-payer health care. He wasn’t always.

He told me in a recent interview: “Here I am, a Republican, thinking about nationalizing health care. It just went against the grain of everything that I stood for. But you have to remember: I didn’t come to those conclusions with lofty ideals of social justice.”

In the early 1990s, his medical group started falling apart. White, a keen student of economics and the business of medicine, determined that it wasn’t just his practice but the system that was broken.

“You’re seeing an ever-increasing number of people starting to support a national health program. In fact, 59 percent of practicing physicians today believe that we need to have a national health program. I mean, that’s unheard of, even 10 years ago. It’s amazing to see a new generation of physicians coming up who are disgusted with our current health-care system. You know, we’re trained to be advocates of patients, we’re trained to save lives, we’re trained to practice medicine. And instead, what we’re doing is we’re practicing Wall Street economics.”

Single-payer is not to be confused with universal coverage, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both support. In fact, in a recent debate, when Clinton raised the issue of single-payer, the audience interrupted with applause. She immediately countered, “I know a lot of people favor [it], but for many reasons [it] is difficult to achieve.”

Why? One of the most powerful industries in the country opposes it — the insurance industry. Under universal coverage, insurance profits are preserved. Under single-payer, they are not. Dr. Rocky White, who now sits on the board of the nonprofit Health Care for All Colorado, has switched his political affiliation. He also has updated and reissued Dr. Robert LeBow’s book on single-payer called Health Care Meltdown: Confronting the Myths and Fixing Our Failing System.

He described possible solutions: “There are a lot of different types of single-payer systems — you could have purely socialized medicine. That’s kind of like what England has. The government owns the hospitals, the government owns the clinics, the government finances all the health care, and all the doctors work for the government. That is truly socialized medicine, as opposed to the Canadian system, where the financing comes through their Medicare program, but all the doctors are in private practice.”

The economics are complex, but this plain-spoken country doctor explains it clearly:

“You know, this industry is a $2-trillion industry, and the profits in the for-profit insurance industry are so huge and it’s so deeply entrenched into Wall Street … but until we move to a single-payer system and get rid of the profit motive in financing of health care, we will not be able to fix the problems that we have.”

What would it take? Dr. White has spent his life dealing with the high winds on the high plains, from Nebraska to Colorado, and describes the challenge the country faces in familiar terms:

“I think that our current presidential candidates understand that ideally single-payer would be the best, but they don’t have the political will to move that forward. Their job is to feel which way the wind is blowing. Our job is to turn that wind.”

Widespread Ghostwriting of Drug Trials Means “Scientific” Credibility of Pharmaceutical Industry is a Sham

Mike Adams, NaturalNews:

The discovery that drug companies have been ghostwriting scientific studies using in-house writers, then paying (bribing) doctors and high-level academics to pretend they were the author of the article is making shockwaves across conventional medicine. This latest revelation of scientific fraud exposes a massive, widespread system of fraud involving not only the drug companies, but also hundreds of different peer-reviewed, “scientific” medical journals that have published these ghostwritten articles. This scam is the latest embarrassment to conventional medicine; a system built on such a foundation of scientific fraud that the admission of dishonesty no longer surprises anyone. The pharmaceutical industry, it seems, is now supported almost entirely by fraudulent science fabricated by marketing personnel.

Remember, it is these studies — the very ones now discovered to be ghostwritten by Big Pharma’s in-house authors — that the FDA uses to approve these drugs, unleashing them onto the public where potentially hundreds of millions of doses of the drug may be sold in just the first few years of its approval. But what we’re learning now is that the whole system is an elaborate scam. For these studies, there’s no real science involved at all.

To back this up, let me explain how this scam works in seven simple steps:

Step 1:

A drug company runs an in-house study (using fraudulent study design from the start) to “prove” that their drug is both safe and effective. If the study produces negative results, it is thrown out. If it produces positive results, proceed to step 2.

Step 2:

That same drug company uses in-house writers (“ghost writers”) to write up the results of the study in a favorable light by discarding any data that doesn’t fit the desired outcome. Note that these in-house writers are marketing people, not doctors or scientists, and they are on Big Pharma’s payroll!

Step 3:

The drug company contacts a noted doctor or academic and offers to pay them a bribe (a “writing fee”) to put their name on the paper as if they were the original author. In reality, the paper has already been completely written and the doctor needs to write nothing.

Step 4:

The paper is submitted to peer-reviewed academic journals (such as JAMA) for publication. Since the paper appears to have been independently written by an outside scientist or doctor, the journal is far more likely to consider it credible. Thus, it gets more easily published. The drug company reveals nothing about the true origins of the paper.

Step 5:

The drug company that sponsored all this forwards the peer-reviewed, published study to the FDA, claiming this is now “scientific fact” that proves their drug is both safe and effective. Since the study was published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, it must be true, right?

Step 6:

The FDA, which conducts no drug safety studies of its own, automatically believes the conclusions of the study (since it was published in a credible journal, after all), and therefore approves the drug for sale! From there, the FDA claims its decisions are based on the “gold standard of evidence-based medicine!”

Step 7:

Once the drug is approved by the FDA, the drug company then claims the drug has been declared safe and effective by an independent government agency, and therefore the drug must indeed be both safe and effective. In other words, even though the drug company fabricated much of the evidence used by the FDA to make their approval decision, the drug company still claims that the FDA’s decision is an independent, science-based approval of their drug! Furthermore, the drug companies are now arguing that FDA approval should immunize them from any lawsuits or claims of harm stemming from their drugs. Amazing, huh?

From here, doctors are medical personnel are taught that the drug is backed by good science and that the FDA has independently reviewed the evidence and approved the drug. Therefore, it’s safe to prescribe to patients. What nobody has been told, however, is that the entire process — from the drug studies to drug approvals — was fabricated!

Or, put another way, as long as ghostwriting is tolerated in conventional medicine, the pharmaceutical industry has lost all credibility and is now clearly based on science fraud and marketing gimmicks, not genuine evidence. And remember, ghostwriting is not a new issue. It’s been going on for decades. The only thing new about this issue is that it has been exposed in once-secret court documents that just happened to come out during a recent Merck trial.

Medical Journals Should Retract All Ghostwritten Articles

NaturalNews is now calling for all peer-reviewed medical journals to determine the true authorship of all scientific articles they’ve published over the last ten years and retract all ghostwritten articles.

That would be quite a list, likely involving tens of thousands of published studies. The medical journals, of course, won’t bother with that process. You know why? Because just like the drug companies, they’d rather sweep their scientific fraud under the rug than admit they’ve been played by Big Pharma or participated in a massive campaign of scientific fraud that now calls into question the credibility of virtually all medical journals (except for PLoS Medicine, of course, which remains independent and honest).

You see, all the big players were in on this scam: The drug companies, the medical journals, the FDA, the researchers and even the doctors and academics who accepted as much as $25,000 per study to slap their name on a paper already written by Big Pharma’s in-house marketing writers. I guess credibility is cheap in conventional medicine. The entire reputation of a doctor can be purchased for as little as $10,000. Similarly, the integrity of the entire industry can be bought with Big Pharma’s dollars. There’s nothing in modern pharmaceutical medicine that isn’t for sale… not even scientific credibility.

The FDA Should Retract its Approval of All Drugs Based on Ghostwritten Studies

Think about this: The evidence used by the FDA to approve drugs is now known to be tainted. If this were a state or federal court, that evidence would be thrown out as being “inadmissible.” But at the FDA, there’s no such thing as pro-drug evidence that’s too tainted to accept as fact. (There are truly zero standards for scientific evidence at the FDA, at least with the top decision makers. They can accept any piece of fraudulent evidence as fact, no matter how “poisoned” the evidence might be.)

Based on what we now know, the FDA needs to retract its approval of numerous drugs that were approved based on ghostwritten papers. In other words, if the FDA’s original approval of these drugs was based on scientific fraud, then the FDA needs to rectify the situation and withdraw the approval of those drugs until proper studies can be conducted.

Will the FDA engage in such retractions? Of course not. There’s not motivation to do so. The FDA isn’t interested in good science or protecting the public. It’s only interested in boosting Big Pharma’s profits using whatever methods of collusion, corruption and scientific fraud it can get away with.

I say that if the FDA refuses to retract the approvals of drugs based on ghostwritten studies, the FDA has zero remaining credibility and has abandoned anything resembling “evidence-based medicine.” In other words, the FDA is a willing partner in this widespread campaign of scientific fraud, and even when the fraud is discovered, the FDA does nothing to attempt to reestablish scientific credibility. Real science, it seems, has zero priority at the FDA.

The Pharmaceutical Racket

So now we have Big Pharma, the FDA and the top medical journals all engaged in a massive conspiracy to deceive the public, to win approval for dangerous drugs, and to prop up the pharmaceutical industry with fabricated evidence on drug safety that was actually written by Big Pharma’s in-house marketing writers. This is clearly a grand pharmaceutical racket, operated much like a system of organized crime. Except these criminals, it seems, have not yet been arrested and charged with any crimes. (That day is coming, however…)

Now I ask you this: How stupid are doctors if they still believe in all this fabricated evidence? Because I’ve met a lot of M.D.s who believe so strongly in the “evidence” behind pharmaceuticals that they’ll argue your ears off about the science of pharmaceuticals vs. the “wishful thinking” of nutritional supplements. It makes you wonder just how gullible doctors really are. (In truth, they’re incredibly gullible. All it takes is a visit by a young, bubbly drug rep wearing a push-up bra to radically alter the brand-name drug prescribing habits of a typical M.D.)

And how gullible are patients who believe Big Pharma or the FDA? To believe in this system of fraudulent “junk” science and manipulated clinical trials is downright foolish. And yet hundreds of millions of Americans take pharmaceuticals every single day — drugs that make them no healthier and that, in fact, may harm them or kill them.

Folks, it is time for the United States of America to wake up and realize we’ve all been conned by Big Pharma. We’ve been hoodwinked by a band of clever hucksters sporting academic degrees and authoritative-sounding titles. We’ve been had. Let us now end this foolishness by retracting all published studies based on fraudulent ghostwriting, retracting all FDA-approved drugs based on these fraudulent studies, and prosecuting the top pharmaceutical companies for the widespread fraud they have so cleverly designed and unleashed in pursuit of the almighty dollar. It is time to invoke established federal anti-trust laws and go after these companies, putting them out of business once and for all and thereby saving countless American children, adults and senior citizens from death by dangerous pharmaceuticals.