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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.
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.
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.
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.
Or the ones who scream that there isn't are almost always getting the funding for their research from oil companies.
Just look at Al Gore and his carbon trading investments.
What a fucking red herring. What Al Gore and other non-scientists do or don't do have no bearing on the veracity of the research done by the actual climate scientists.
It all screams conflict of interest.
But having your funding come from someone like Exxon isn't?
This isn't consensus.
It's people signing of on biased meta-studies.
No, the people screaming the loudest don't have the most to gain from global warming.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You could say the opposing side has a lot to gain from AGW not being true. After all, the cost of reducing carbon emissions is significant to those who produce the most CO2. The difference between AGW and this nonsense is that *climatologists would have to be wrong [climate models and ice cores etc.] *physicists would have to be wrong [infared absorbsion spectrum of CO2] etc. In short, there would need to be a massive conspiracy of thousands of scientists all in on it.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
On April 29, 2008, environmental journalist Richard Littlemore revealed that a list of "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares"[26] distributed by the Heartland Institute included at least 45 scientists who neither knew of their inclusion as "coauthors" of the article, nor agreed with its contents.[27] Many of the scientists asked the Heartland Institute to remove their names from the list.
From here.
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.
It's odd that the anti-climate change crowd will essentially assert that climatologists are part of some even cabal to destroy the economy, and yet essentially are siding with a group of multinational corporations whose vested interest is in keeping everyone vomiting as much CO2 into the atmosphere for as long as possible.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Here are few links:
Philadelphia Inquirer,
UPI (Two quotes: "Ghostwriters paid by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Wyeth worked on dozens of articles published in medical journals under doctors' names, court documents indicate." and "A Wyeth spokesman said the ghostwritten articles were scientifically sound and subject to peer review by the journals that published them.")
NYT
But the law should, and should make the *criminal* and *civil* penalties so utterly destructive to any business that they don't dare do it. I'm talking life imprisonment, seizure of assets, massive awards for those injured, and so forth. I mean, basically make such behavior a recipe for extinction of the company, utter destruction of share value, imprisonment of researchers who colluded, seizures of every asset of every member of the board, every officer of the company, and so forth.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
What does a Doctor gain by prescribing you a treatment that isn't needed?
Defensive Medicine (CYA for doctors)
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.
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!?
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 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...
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
It's not "fuck the investors over" - it is "ensure that the pressure is towards behaving ethically". With anything like decent risk management, you shouldn't have more than some low, single digit percentage in this anyway; investors often lose all their investment when a company goes bankrupt.
I'm also somewhat disturbed that you feel that what you should be thinking about after you find you've invested in murdering people is "What's going to happen to my money?"
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.