The point made in Rigor
Mortis: how sloppy science creates
worthless cures, crushes hope, and wastes billions is that industry
funded studies in medicine favor industry because of various forms of
scientific fraud. Fraudulent results are
obtained by messaging the data; wash out period,[1]
last observation carried forward, surrogate end-points that don’t translate
into health benefits, and many other ways.
Since pharma owns the raw data and won’t submit it with the article for
journal publication, there is no effective way for the reviewers to spot the
fraud, and thus peer review by a medical journal is a sham. A NEJM study done
by 4 professors 7 years ago
using the raw data obtained from the FDA by the Freedom of Information Act found
the average positive distortion in all
74 journal articles on neuroleptic drugs was 32%; the range was 11 to 64%, at http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/3/252 or my website for abridged version at http://healthfully.org/index/id9.html.
This is the business norm, fraud; I call it tobacco science. Beware
of your well-meaning doctor, he has
been duped. We are all harmed because of
this—for
why doctors. ,
An Even better book full of examples is Deadly
Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare,
by Prof. Peter C. Gotzsche MD. It won a
best book of the year award 2013 by the British Medical Association (equivalent
to the AMA), and has two forwards, one by the former editor of the British
Medical Journal, the other by the Deputy Editor of the Journal of the American
Medical Association—of course as forwards they praise the book, and these two
editors are in a position to know that frauds is always used by pharma in
medical trials. There is a fundamental
conflict between science and business goals.
The purpose of studies and the advertising it generates is to market a
product, and the information supplied distorts the evidence base. It is all
about marketing.
Gotzsche’s book is an
academic work designed to let the evidence do the talking, Harris’s book is by
a science writer, it is full of interesting facts, interviews, and thus is
better reading with the cost of weaker and less examples per page. Moreover,
Harris works for NPR, and thus
softens the blame for the role of pharma, and their use of scientists for hire
(KOLS, key opinion leaders) who are contracted to do the trials, write the
medical text books and sign off on ghost written journal articles. Yes, there
is an industry of companies that
specialize in writing journal articles, textbooks, new articles for pharma, and
there is another industry that runs the trials.
Thus, pharma seems to be removed from the process; they aren’t.
Another worthy book is By
Prof. at Harvard Marcia Angell, MD, The Truth
About the Drug Companies: How they deceive us and what to do about it. You can hear her President’s Lecture based
on this book on YouTube. As the title
suggest it
blames industry, unlike Rigor Mortis and while for the general public it follows the form of a
university book by using extensive citations.
On point is the statement by
Dr. Evens in The Guardian: “The
pharmaceutical industry is the most
lucrative, the most cynical and the least ethical of all the industries. It is
like an octopus with tentacles that has infiltrated all the decision-making
bodies: World Health Organizations,
government agencies, parliaments, high administrations in health and hospitals
and the medical profession." He is the author of "The Guide to the 4,000
Useful, Useless or Dangerous Medicines" (Sept 2012), with Dr. Bernard
Debre is director of the prestigious
Necker Institute, Dr. Philippe Even is a member of the
French Parliament. F. Pharma.
An attempt to fix that problems has been
started, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllTrials. If it succeeds, it would be the first step
towards replacing marketing with medical science. There
are a number of major corporate backers. There you will find a link to Prof.
Ben
Goldacre’s MD Bad Pharma. I have read
and own this, Prof. Angell’s and Prof. Gotzsche’s books (his other is
Deadly
Psychiatry and Organized Death.) Unfortunately we are still in the era
of snake oil: “any of various liquid
concoctions of questionable medical value sold as an all- purpose curative, especially by traveling hucksters”
(Dictionary.com), only today we
have a government watchdog, the FDA, ran for the purpose of promoting snake oil. You would be shocked at the degree of
deception; go to http://healthfully.org/rep/
for a few of the journal articles exposing bad pharma.
Take the
time to learn about the state of medicine.
We should in most cases avoid the weird, dangerous chemical prescribed; go
to my website, and also learn what you should do to be healthy--like the
aborigines. It is my labor of love.
[1]
Giving the drug for several weeks, then based on the results dropping out
volunteers from the trail because of adverse reactions and/or failure to have
positive results,. Then Pharma starts
the trial after culling out process.
This standard practice designed to favor the drug is never mentioned in
the material submitted to the medical journal.
With last observation carried
forward, typically the volunteer drops out because of side effects. Pharma doesn’t
call him up to find out
why. Thus that volunteer’s side effects
aren’t record, and he is counted as one who completed the study—last
observation carried forward. High
cholesterol a surrogate endpoint for heart attacks; the lowering of cholesterol
doesn’t result in fewer heart attacks when an honest study is done. For example
the Framingham population stud--ran over 50 years--found that the elderly with
highest cholesterol lived longer. There
is a large chorus of professors who have exposed the cholesterol myth; but you
won’t hear of them in our corporate media.
