washingtonmonthly.com0404.brownlee.htmlOpen ↗
quote:
For the past two decades, medical research has been quietly
corrupted by cash from private industry. Most doctors and
academic researchers aren't corrupt in the sense of
intending to defraud the public or harm patients, but
rather, more insidiously, guilty of allowing the
pharmaceutical and biotech industries to manipulate medical
science through financial relationships, in effect tainting
the system that is supposed to further the understanding of
disease and protect patients from ineffective or dangerous
drugs. More than 60 percent of clinical studies--those
involving human subjects--are now funded not by the federal
government, but by the pharmaceutical and biotech
industries. That means that the studies published in
scientific journals like Nature and The New England Journal
of Medicine--those critical reference points for thousands
of clinicians deciding what drugs to prescribe patients, as
well as for individuals trying to educate themselves about
conditions and science reporters from the popular media who
will publicize the findings--are increasingly likely to be
designed, controlled, and sometimes even ghost-written by
marketing departments, rather than academic scientists.
Companies routinely delay or prevent the publication of data
that show their drugs are ineffective. The majority of
studies that found such popular antidepressants as Prozac
and Zoloft to be no better than placebos, for instance,
never saw print in medical journals, a fact that is coming
to light only now that the Food and Drug Administration has
launched a reexamination of those drugs.
Today, private industry has unprecedented leverage to
dictate what doctors and patients know--and don't know--
about the $160 billion worth of pharmaceuticals Americans
consume each year. This is an unsettling charge that many
(if not a majority) of doctors and academic researchers
don't want to acknowledge. Once grasped, however, the full
scope and consequences of medical conflict of interest beget
grave doubts about the veracity of wide swaths of medical
science. As
Dr. Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of The Journal of the
American Medical Association (JAMA), puts it, "This is
all about bypassing science. Medicine is becoming a sort
of Cloud Cuckoo Land, where doctors don't know what
papers they can trust in the journals, and the public
doesn't know what to believe."
unquote
another quote:
What's in it for the pharmaceutical companies? Simple
economics. It's Marketing 101. By penetrating the wall that
once existed around academic researchers, drug companies
have gained access to the "thought leaders" in medicine, the
big names whose good opinion of an idea or a product carries
enormous weight with other physicians. Companies target
academic KOLs, or Key Opinion Leaders, in the lexicon of
marketing, and woo them with invitations to sit on
scientific advisory committees, or to serve as members of
speakers' bureaus, which offer hefty fees for lending their
prestige to a company and touting its products at scientific
meetings and continuing medical education conferences.
unquote
American "science" has no credibility whatsoever. It is a
joke. If it wasn't so tragic to the millions suffering from
disease and medications it would be laughable.
TC