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Medical Papers By Ghostwriters Pushed Hormone Therapy
krou writes "The New York Times reports on newly released court documents that show how pharmaceutical company Wyeth paid a medical communications firm to use ghost writers in drafting and publishing 26 papers between 1998 and 2005 backing the usage of hormone replacement therapy in women. The articles appeared in 18 journals, such as The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology. The papers 'emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia,' and the apparent 'medical consensus benefited Wyeth ... as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.' The apparent consensus crumbled after a federal study in 2002 'found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke.'"
Well at least the ones that don't stroke out over the nearly endless possibilities...
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
TFA is unreachable...
When there's something weird
In your study results
Who you gonna call?
Ghostwriters!
Wyeth may have gotten caught, but don't kid yourself that every major pharma company isn't doing the exact same thing.
Socialize medicine now - disincentivize pharmaceutical company abuse.
Well you know companys have to protect their research investment at any cost. Who cares about people? They don't!
Sounds kind of like global warming, where the people screaming most loudly about scientific consensus are also the ones that stand to benefit the most greatly financially. Just look at Al Gore and his carbon trading investments. It all screams conflict of interest.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
The Constant Gardener is a 2001 novel by John le Carré. It tells the story of Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose activist wife is murdered. Believing that there is more behind the murder, he seeks to uncover the truth behind her death, and finds an international conspiracy of corrupt bureaucracy and pharmaceutical money. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constant_Gardener)
Yeah right...
This happens when you trust people who make money when you don't feel well. When will people learn that doctors do not profit from you being healthy? Neither do pharmaceutical companies. Taking medicine in the belief that whoever gave it to you wanted you to feel better is very naive.
It's stuff like this, and many personal experiences, that make me so cynical toward doctors. It's a sad state of things, but there you have it.
Just what we need, drug companies further muddling the waters so not even doctors can tell which treatments are useful or necessary. No wonder we see large movements away from things like vaccinations, which save lives. People are left with too many doubts and questions, fear doesn't lead to good decision making.
1) Make everyone involved from the CEO on down take those drugs daily for 20 years (especially the men).
2) Charge them all with murder, maiming, etc.
Corporations can't be charged with murder (or take drugs), which is why that system is broken. Unless SOMEONE is responsible, no one is.
Can someone compile a list of the authors? It would make it easy for me to reject papers of these authors with extreme prejudice. I mean, they've proven they can't be trusted.
I wonder if there's a list pharmaceutical company CEOs distribute to their immediate families...
Dear Mom, here's a list of medications made by pfeiser that I wouldn't take, even if my doctor recommended them.
Your loving son, Jeff.
That would be a great read on wikileaks.
These types of tactics continue today. Just who do you think is behind every attempt to derail health care reform?
This the just the market correcting itself. Capitalism at it's best.
Well this is very natural! The company is protecting it's investment. Did apple told people that their iphones were going to explode and burn? No! I sure that Wyeth recovered their investment in hormone therapy and apple recovered their investment on the iPhone development. Thay are happy. Wyeth doensn't care about women getting cancer they will need even more medicine. Apple don't care about burnt hands.
In real science, no consensus is required. If you need any such thing, you only admit that you don't know. Either you have hard evidence to convince other scientists, or you are just playing dice with the Universe in hope that your insufficiently substantiated paper is correct.
Ezekiel 23:20
Seriously.
They sold two billion dollars worth of a product (in 2001 alone) that they manipulated into being not only harmless (like tobacco companies), but manufactured evidence that it was healthy and beneficial (something even the tobacco companies didn't stoop to).
Essentially they ran a multi billion dollar scam, caused serious damage to the health of how many people exactly? From 2001 (last year before the sales plummeted) until 2008 they sold a minimum of 210 million prescriptions (from the graph in the article).
And yet, the likelihood of the senior staff (including board members) getting punished is low to non-existent and even if the company is forced to close down its doors, I wouldn't want to lay odds against them not getting some cushy job again.
Maybe it's time we reintroduced corporal punishment for stuff like this? We can go easy on them. 100 lashes per 'victim' by this to the people directly responsible (including the ghost writers), 10 lashes per 'victim' to those indirectly involved (i.e. board members who merely signed off on the idea or didn't care). That's in addition to the massive fines and compensation the company should be forced to pay.
And if the company goes bankrupt in the process? Tough shit. Profit is not more important than public health. If you think it is, you're not a capitalist, you're a fascist.
Do you really think Al Gore is getting anywhere as much money warning people about global warming as the fossil fuel industries are continuing to earn by telling people there's nothing to worry about?
There's an established paper trail linking oil and coal companies to greenhouse skeptic groups.
Just last week it was revealed that a lobbying group funded by coal companies was writing bogus letters opposing the climate change bill to lawmakers.
those medicines didn't cured those writers, probably will kill you too.
Just what we need, drug companies further muddling the waters so not even doctors can tell which treatments are useful or necessary. No wonder we see large movements away from things like vaccinations, which save lives. People are left with too many doubts and questions, fear doesn't lead to good decision making.
Do you think the operating system world is the only place where a war of words is fought by Microsoft to stay on top? Don't you see that this happens in every other field where dominant players refuse to fight fairly, refuse to let their products speak for themselves and refuse to innovate to stay alive? The market their product and they out market their competition. They're paying for ads in those medical journals, now they've found a new way to advertise.
Are you familiar with the third world being turned into a testing ground by companies like Pfizer where clinical trials aren't that important of a prerequisite? Their questionable ethics don't end there. Doping medical journals with fake studies to get your product to sell sell sell is nothing surprising. My older sister is a nurse and tells me that companies that sell medical supplies basically take the doctors out to get drunk and pay for them to go to conferences and boondoggles all so that the doctor recommends their product. Of course these multi-billion dollar companies are going to toe the line of ethics to keep their revenue source coming in.
And until someone steps up and really puts the hurt on those that get caught, everyone's going to keep doing it.
These people are marketers, they'll stop at nothing. Who cares about the dangers of Acetaminophen-Based Pain Killers, that's their revenue so they'll keep that on the market--Christ can we at least get a warning label not to mix them? The only place a code of ethics exists in big pharmaceuticals is in the bathroom stalls next to the diamond studded golden backscratchers where the CEO can whip their ass with it.
My work here is dung.
And I can tell you frankly that the medical profession is split in two. There are people who are in it for the human aspect - usually the doctors. Then there's the people who are in it for the money: The pharmaceutical companies.
This is not surprising, coming off another recent study done by (and now we learn that it was paid for) and published in a magazine owned by a subsidiary of Merck.
Just the fact that these companies are allowed to advertise on TV directly to patients is disgusting. But ask your doctor if XYZ is right for you, because you don't need it at all, or there's probably some cheaper similar drug whose patent has expired and costs 1/4 the price, but if you waste your doctor's time enough he'll write the prescription just to get you out of his office with a smile on your face. After all if he says "NO", you might not come back.
Just the fact that an HIV patient will literally die bankrupt, at $1000+ per month for the meds. Unless you're very rich, you won't be able to keep THAT up for very long, and when you run out of money - so sorry, we can recommend a hospice for you.
Pharmaceutical companies scream about billions of dollars in research, yet they can afford all that printed material for doctors, 5 star hotels for doctors for "seminars", pens, calculators, TV air time, etc. Yet some companies still make money with Aspirin - yes the name belongs to Bayer, but anyone can make and sell acetyl-salicylic acid - the patent expired years ago.
No, big pharma loves the protections patent law gives them, and if they can completely distort the market and throw actual science out of the window WHO CARES so long as it increases sales.
That's why we have Cochrane studies, where we DOCTORS look back at what we're doing and seeing if it REALLY IS effective. A new study from my country published by a close friend of mine suggests that having your blood pressure at 140/90mmHg gives NO INCREASED RISK of heart disease or stroke. But studies paid for by big pharma INSIST (and they've convinced the American Heart Association) that your blood pressure has to be UNDER 120/80. In fact, they want TEENAGERS to start taking blood pressure medication. Hey, at $100-200 per patient per month, SO WOULD I. But we know full well where the unethical branch of the medical sciences is...
The above comment is my opinion as a 3rd world physician, since I have to watch people die because they can't afford the few medications that DO work as advertised (and are thus even MORE expensive).
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The writers, the people that paid them and the people that made the decisions that brought this about NEED to be prosecuted, not only for the fraud perpetrated here, but for the manslaughter of any women that died as a result of this therapy. Wyeth should lose their right to do business in this country as well.
Now I can see some writer saying "WTF? I just wrote an article!", but that does not excuse the fact they were ghost-writing in a MEDICAL journal. They would have to know that decisions that involve the lives and physical well-being of people are, to some extent, based on these journals and the articles within them.
You can't legislate morality, but you can most certainly prosecute for a lack of it.
What does a Doctor gain by prescribing you a treatment that isn't needed?
Defensive Medicine (CYA for doctors)
Also a Corporate death sentence, forced liquidation with the proceeds going to the government.
Beyond any direct fines or other remedies, just halve the patent times on all their patents across the board for each infraction. Sixteen years of protection left on Xyliklopper? Now it's eight.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Human nature means that all regulatory agencies are taken over by the regulatees. Contrary to most assumptions, big pharma LIKES ever-increasing FDA regulations, as they insulate existing/big companies from competition from foreign or smaller companies. For example, Europe has about 1000 drugs in use which are not available in the US, and no startup drug company can afford to take their product through clinical trials, thus must partner with one of the biggies.
The FDA's regulations make a new drug cost $1B. Thus, no drug can be considered for development unless there is a $2B per year market for that drug.
As there are not many drug markets of that size, the BIG drug companies (Notice how the drug industry looks like the military/intelligence industry ? Same reason, one customer. ) have only a few choices, one of which is to make the markets bigger.
A couple of years ago, there were only 19 new drugs that made it through the FDA's screens. Thus, we Americans don't die of un-safe drugs (well, not so much), we die of too few new drugs.
Cancer is a fine example of where the FDA has halted progress : there are many varieties of cancer, few of which make a 2 $B / year market. Nobody gets excited about that, those are 'natural' deaths, whereas a drug that causes a death, even where the players have been completely honest in their testing, creates a firestorm of publicity and the FDA makes more regulations to protect itself and the big pharma companies from such political problems.
Dumb system : it could easily be replaced with a public database, maintained by Consumers Union or some such. If MDs put ALL of their case info into the DB when using a new drug, and checked statistics in the DB, they would be immune to law suite. They would only use new drugs on the most critical patients, so that the patients with the most to gain would bear most of the risk. Sensible, and what we used to do before medical ethicists got involved.
Except that nobody is really being held accountable, unless you're talking about SERIOUS jail time for the officers and forfeiture of profit + interest (at credit card rate no less.) Let's be honest here, the worse that can be expected is that FDA will slap some fine on the companies, and the companies will just happily pass the cost onto its paying customers (you and I.) There is NO ACCOUNTABILITY.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Pharm companies are doing this kind of stuff all the time, and the FDA just lets them get away with it. Somehow, I don't see criminal charges ever getting filed here. CEOs will pass the buck, and they'll go on with business as usual.
Ya know, the unemployment rate is bad enough right now without ghosts taking jobs from living writers.
But, how would they feel if the living started haunting each other? Turnabout is fair play. Oh wait, we do... it's called stalking.
I'm usually disgusted by the idea of websites tracking criminals or others. But in cases like this people seem to get away with it waay to easily. The legal system doesn't seem to deal with it in a way that is at all in proportion to the crime. It would be great to have a source to search for people involved in companies like this. It would make it easier to point out who they are when they appear in their next cushy job.
Good for you for holding to your sense of ethics (I'm interpreting your comment to mean that you do not work in pharmaceuticals). That takes a lot of guts, and considerable bull-headedness. Maith thú (good on you)!
Helping my wife deal with her varied health issues over the years (sinusitis, food allergies, asthma, appendicitis, over-prescribed antibiotics, etc.), I've had fun seeing both the Western pharmaceutical machine in action, and traditional Chinese pharmacology as practiced in Japan, California, and now Washington state. Suffice it to say that I have very little faith in the pharmaceutical industry.
One example: For her asthma, the Western medical system prescribed the so-called "hockey puck" regimen of inhaled corticosteroids. Reading around, there seems to be a growing body of evidence that these drugs do well to keep symptoms maintained, but that they may also ultimately worsen the underlying asthmatic condition, such that when an asthma attack *does* happen, it's significantly worse than for people not taking these drugs.
Meanwhile, the Chinese pharmacist we had found (actually a Japanese woman, but trained in the Chinese pharmacological tradition) prescribed changes in diet (avoiding sugars, avoiding fungi including yeast) combined with a custom-mixed powder she compounded in the back during our visit. She explained that the theory is to gradually adjust the body back into a healthier equilibrium, and as such, the medicine would have a slower effect compared to Western drugs, but also ultimately become unneeded. And she was right -- after several months and various changes to the mix, my wife's asthma grew progressively less severe, until our pharmacist judged the medicine unneeded. By now (knock on wood), my wife hasn't had an asthma attack in over a year -- and the last one she had was when she had gone back to eating sugared foods.
Sure, YMMV, anecdotes, and all that, yada yada. Take it for what it's worth. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Comments here and by TFA that discuss the issues of uneducated physicians or suggests tweaks to laws designed to remove the incentive are amazingly blind. This is total system failure, you cannot tweak one or two links in the huge chain required for this kind of deeply f-ed up behaviour. This is a deep cultural issue, quotes such as "everything is allowed in war and business" are bandied around by near everyone not realizing the communal mega hug to reinforce psychopathy they are joining in.
The language is seeping in and its a gateway drug to actual crimes.
I wish there was more study and awareness of the economic idiocy and need for regulation to resolve it, too.
In the UK, the NHS (national health service) cannot afford to treat everyone with certain life-saving drugs because those drugs are too expensive, so they don't, or do so only for a few people.
The drug companies lobby the NHS to include those drugs, and the NHS refuses because the money is better spent on cheaper treatments for more people. Some newspapers and some people side with the drug companies.
Those drug companies justify high prices due to the cost of research, trials and so on, and the patents enable them to maintain the prices.
To be fair, the cost of research etc. is high, and investing in the next drug is needed.
The stupid, awful paradox though, is that if the NHS enforced a lower price, by having the power to override company patents and threaten to make them generically (but only if the company does not agree to sell them at that price itself), then the companies involved could be guaranteed a higher profit for helping more people, while reducing the cost of treatment and care to the NHS.
[All prices in UK pounds - Slashdot does not handle the £ sign properly.]
It's quite simple: Let X be the cost of R&D to the company. Let HP be the high price per person, say 20,000, that the company chooses currently. Let's say 10,000 people choose to use the drug privately. (Revenue = 200 million). Let's say the company believes that strategy makes it's R&D sustainable for future developments. Let's say the marginal cost of production is HP/200 = 100 - after all they say it's dominated by the cost of R&D. (Production cost = 1 million, leaving 199 million for R&D and profits).
Clearly if the NHS agrees to take 1,000,000 person's worth of the drug while enforcing a far lower price of LP = HP/100 = 299 (very affordable per person), then the company will make exactly the same profit, and that's not counting the benefit of scaling up production.
If the NFS takes 1,000,000 person's worth while enforcing a price of 498 (still very affordable compared with 20,000), the company will make guaranteed at least twice the profit, at the same time as helping 100 times as many people.
(* - It's "at least twice" because it's between two and infinity times the profit, depending on the cost of R&D which is somewhere between zero and 199 million, established earlier).
Now will someone explain to me why helping 100 times as many people, while making more profit and/or doing more research, doing more business, with guaranteed long-term business, getting a better reputation and becoming more well known, and yes the individual reps, executives and shareholders can all reap rewards... Why is this something the drug companies negotiate against??!
Simple greed cannot explain it, because everyone in the company stands to benefit personally in the scenario where drugs are cheaper and given to more people, if done properly.
I believe the scenario we're currently seeing is not a result of "evil" corporations and/or individuals in them, nor a result of rational collective greed, but instead is a result of systemic idiocy...
I wonder if any of these people have read a medical code of ethics... Unfortunately, stuff like this happens way more than we find out about.
Who had these drugs pushed at her with a great deal of pressure to take them. She finally said, "I'm almost seventy, for chrissake. I'm SUPPOSED to be old. She also clued me in as to how these drugs are harvested or manufactured or whatever you would call it. They're extracted from the urine of pregnant mares. In order to do that, the horses are made pregnant. Then they are confined to their stalls, 24/7, so that the urine can be collected. They're never allowed outside, never allowed even to move around in the stalls--just made to stand there without a break for their rather lengthy gestation terms. When the foals are born, they are taken away from the mothers immediately and are often slaughtered. That kind of confinement would be torture for any animal--it is doubly so for a horse which needs to be able to move about and use its legs.
A few wrinkles in the fullness of time were much preferable to her, and so they will be to me.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Hate to break it to you, but the link the summary is pointing to is actually the 7th, not first result returned.
It's going to be hard to hold anybody accountable if we can't even talk about this honestly. Take the article summary for example. The appropriate term here isn't "apparent consensus" it's "manufactured consensus brought to us by [corporate sponsors here]".
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
From TFTA:
The ghostwritten papers were typically review articles, in which an author weighs a large body of medical research and offers a bottom-line judgment about how to treat a particular ailment. The articles appeared in 18 medical journals, including The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology.
This did not happen at the level research reported in journals. This was at another level where a doctor not reading the original articles would look at the state-of-the-art and the friendly pharma company's medical communication guys interpret it for you. Surely a case of biased/selective reporting of happenings in the field. I have myself often wondered at (seemingly) contradictory results getting reported in newspapers. Things like "wine found good for heart patients" and "wine linked to complications in heart conditions" at an interval of a few months or a year. The reporters in this case would perhaps be reading summaries of some kind or getting briefed by the researchers of the study being reported which IS news.
Research by different groups can lead to different conlusions and this fact was perhaps being used by these guys.
I agree with your points however, be careful not to make the claim that just because big oil funds research means it is biased somehow makes federally funded research unbiased.
Sure, which is why one needs to look at the research - just a little bit. Follow the references. FUD falls on its face really quickly when you follow the references. The FUD works precisely because 99.9% of people can be relied upon not to bother, and fall back on the plausible assumption that *both* sides aren't listening to each other, and the truth must therefore be in the middle. Marketing firms worked that out a long time ago - they know how to get what they want, and it works. Sadly.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
He's not an idiot, he's jaded from his own personal experience.
Don't be so rude so quickly.
Here's a counter-example for you.
My wife got ill, went to the local "experienced" western-medicine doctor.
He promptly prescribed her anti-biotics.
Holding the prescription, she asked: "Shouldn't we test for a virus first?"
His nurse says that sounds like a good idea, turns out my wife has a virus,
and the doctor withdrew the prescription.
This effectively amounts to malpractice, and there's NOTHING the patient can do about it.
ZIP.
Perhaps your doctor friends are impeccably accurate and well-organised.
We figured this guy just didn't care, and only wanted to bill my wife for the visit and
prescription, move along, DING ! next please.
He single-handedly answered your question: he gained another invoice billing for
doing NOTHING of any use at all, prescribed a treatment that wasn't needed for
a "condition" that is common as muck, and got her out the door so he could "process"
another client, er..., sucker, er...., consumer, er...., 'scuse me, patient.
On the other hand, we've run into some "alternative caregivers" that you like to
widely disparage, and without exception, every one appears to genuinely want
their patients to get better.
Might well be to finally pump up their fragile egos or help flog off some esoteric
blend of tea, but there have been many who don't "prescribe" anything special at
all, unless wisdom from experience is something you consider "special".
He's not an idiot - please, say sorry - and then go back to your drinks on the terrace with
all your nice doctor friends.
The extrem majority of doctor want you to be healthy when you leave them. Some crook might see short term benefit to fraud everybody, but as seen above, it comes to bite them back. That is not the first example will not be the last. but condemning a WHOLE profession for a few crook, let me tell you another way to say it "there are a few mafia hacker making botnet, so all IT programmer and open source proponent are mafia asshole which want to botnet your PC, steal your CC, and laugh all the way to the bank, rape your kitty". This is the same type of fallacy you are doing. I am not saying pharma company are angels, but they certainly as a whole don't make up cure with the intention to make you stay ill and "hooked".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I read this summary this summary to my OB/GYN (Dr) wife and she pointed out that the studies misrepresented the risks to be bad outcomes in 30 out of 10,000 women, when the real risks were bad outcomes in 38 out of 10,000 women. You can provide your own speculations on the implications of this data.
This is par for the course for this industry. Money before all else same as the banks, MP's etc.
I am a retired pharmacist who practised in Southern Africa and can assure everyone that the effects of this scam are global and not merely restricted to the USA..
The real scam perpetrated was 2 fold;.
1. Premarin (oestrogen) is derived from animal sources and was pushed by Wyeth because they claimed that this decreased the life threatening embolism when compared to synthetic oestrogen.
2. The main selling point was not cosmetic (ageing etc) but osteoporosis (thining of the bone). Roughly a third of post menopausal women suffer this terrible condition. Since there is no method to determine whether a woman is a candidate apart from familial history, they hit on the idea that every woman should receive hormone supplements indefinitely to preclude this. Their main selling point was; use Premarin because statistically it is less likely to cause an embolism. There is also evidence that women are less likely to suffer embolism related diseases than their male counterparts pre-menopause and they presented evidence (along with others) that endogenous hormones (oestrogen/progesterone) impart a natural protection. They of course quietly ignored the fact that in the '70's they manufactured a high dose premarin injectable for use in cases of severe haemorrhage.
Way back in the 50's when these companies were starting out many countries insisted (some still do) that the Managing Director was a registered Pharmacist. As such that professional is subject to disciplinary action for acts that are harmful to his patient. Throughout the West the Pharma's persuaded Governments that this is not necessary and they are responsible people.
As many have said it's time to start criminal proceedings against the people responsible. There will be hundreds of women out there who have died as a result of this scam. It's time for Governments to demonstrate to these thieves and crooks that there are consequences for this behaviour and see that they are dealt with by the Courts. So those of you that live in the USA it's time to contact your political reps and show them that its time to care.
It was better in the 1800s, when at least there was either alcohol or cocaine in it.
1. Dismantle the company.
2. Bring charges against the company's execs.
3. Public executions.
I realize the last point may be controversial, but imagine if the next time a CEO considered recklessly endangering people to make a few bucks, he could look out the window and see the hanging corpse of a former Wyeth executive. It's worth a shot. Write congress now.
ghostwritethewhip
I agree. While I see the benefits of a free market economy and Capitalism in general, I think that Corporations being made the equivalent of a citizen (only superior as it turns out) is wrong - primarily because nothing about Capitalism encourages any ethics of any sort - in fact acting unethically is evidently quite rewarding.
We need a counter to that, and making those in charge *personally* responsible for the actions of the company is just fine with me.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
that this isn't going to lead to much? And isn't it scary how long something like this can go on before anyone realizes "hey, maybe these drugs are actually hurting more people than they help?" The pharm industry has so much backbone that they make worldwide internet access look like a toothpick. And, unfortunately, we get to be the real testing group for new drugs and treatments, since the "tests" published in "journals" said that what we're taking is perfectly fine - if not downright AMAZING!