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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.'"
Wyeth may have gotten caught, but don't kid yourself that every major pharma company isn't doing the exact same thing.
Good! This is one of those cases where the pharmaceutical companies should be held accountable over and above the slap on the wrist the FDA will give them - if that.
Why shouldn't they be sued? They willfully defrauded people into buying their products by lying to them about the risks. Isn't this something they should have to pay retribution to their customers for?
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.
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.
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.
No, no , no, no. You got it all wrong. They should be fined $80,000 for each $1 of product they sold, just like the RIAA got.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I think suing isn't going far enough. I think the person/team behind this and the board of directors should be criminally prosecuted. To fabricate data in pursuit of a few extra dollars while willfully allowing people to die because of the fabrication is wrong on a very fundamental level.
I respectfully disagree; I think corporate death penalty is the appropriate route to go.
All assets of the company are seized by the government, all patents are made public domain, liquid assets (cash and similar instruments) are distributed amongst the victims, the rest is auctioned off to pay for court costs.
Then, the former shareholders of the company can sue the board of directors and anybody else who no longer has corporate immunity, for causing all of their investment to go away because the company committed crimes against humanity.
This would put every single company on notice: You exist to serve the people; you are allowed to eck out a profit insofar that you do not commit crimes against us. Companies are only people on paper, and I have no compunctions about putting them to death for crimes against the people they are supposed to serve.
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!?
That's true, but journals' reputations still do depend on a perception that the studies they publish are generally high-quality and honest. So I could see a case for these journals suing Wyeth for the damage to their reputations that these papers have caused.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is one of those cases where the pharmaceutical companies should be held accountable over and above the slap on the wrist the FDA will give them...
Then there are insurance companies hauling bus loads of loud, fat people to public meetings on health care. Industry busy trying to undermine public discussion and fudge research results. Big oil has been doing the same thing only a lot longer. When I was doing research for DoE they were paying for research later used to undermine the conservation programs put in place in the wake of the '74 oil embargo. And it worked. Between the push by the oil companies and the Saudis increasing production, DoE's direction on oil policy was changing rapidly by '82. Less than 10 years after lines at the gas pump people were buying vehicles the size of a Bangladesh apartment.
There's a fine line between engaging in freedom of speech and manipulation. Actually, it's not all that fine. At some point we're going to need to take a hard look at whether the artificial person that is a corporation has the same right to free speech as an individual. Unless you're fabulously wealthy, corporations have a major advantage in getting their free speech packaged and delivered to market. Then there are efforts, like this one, of deliberate deception. Where are the consequences? Why aren't there stunning, quarterly number tanking, breath-taking fines for this kind of behavior? If one of us got caught doing something similar, we could face fraud charges.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Some the the journals are published by Elsevier, which cropped up here last May for publishing entire bogus journals!
Last time they pimped for Merck, now Wyeth. If anyone needs to be punished, it's Elsevier.
Defrauded. Falsified. Lied. But what does that even mean anymore?
The reality is our society is so mired in exaggeration, misrepresentations, doublespeak, non-denial denials, irrelevant conclusions, marketing lies, cover your ass language and general bullshit that we, as a culture, have probably lost the ability or even the inclination to discriminate truth and lies.
And by discriminate, I don't mean being able to tell one from the other. I mean we have actually lost much of our capacity to actually care whether anyone is telling the truth or lying to us. Truthfulness is no longer rewarded. Indeed it is often punished. Falsehood is conversely rarely, if at all punished and is most often rewarded. This is the culture we live in, so why should people recognize any intrinsic ethic in telling the truth or unethical in lying? Even organizations that are supposed to deal in disclosing the truth are widely recognized and accepted to be mostly peddling lies.
Did Wyeth actually lie? Do you think you would be able to "prove" in a court of law that a single thing they paid to have printed was in fact a lie, rather than a simple massaging of data or a case of being liberal with the truth. The latter won't be enough to secure a conviction as well the Wyeth layers know. And besides, who care if people lie anyway.
Companies don't have honor or morals or ethics. If they break their word, even on a signed contract, no one is going to come after them. There's not going to be a permanent black mark on their reputations. With the world the size it is, the same holds true for people as well. Sure, some of us might get indignant about it all, but most people will never even hear about it, and most of those that do will forget about it by the next morning.
This is the society we, as democracies, have chosen for ourselves. The fruits of our decision should come as no surprise to anyone.
May the Maths Be with you!
I disagree with the idea of fining the perpetrators.
These are white collar RICO Act violations involving fraud by mail and conspiracies that cross state lines. The individuals involved should be identified by the FBI and charged by the US Attorney General. Each one of them has conspired to defraud healthcare providers and bona fide researchers, in a manner that has caused the deaths of some USA citizens and placed many more at high risk of cancer or other diseases.
There is no way in hell that the USA is going to get decent health care, no matter what Congress does, until these kinds of white collar crimes in the healthcare industry are addressed for what they are: felonies that indirectly cause death and suffering to the general public.
Will
I'd like to see murder or similar charges placed against the people involved. If I did anything that indirectly caused the death of any single individual, I doubt anyone would have any problems with charging me with some sort of death related crime. Why are these jackholes immune? Corporate officers gave orders and directions and approval for these acts that ultimately resulted in the deaths of people. Had they not done so, they would not be responsible.
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.