Big Pharma: the lies and corruption that promote sales of their Psychotropic Junk

Big Pharma in America: the lies and corruption that promote sales of their psychotropic junk and are damaging the health and happiness of ever-increasing numbers of Americans, most tragically children, in exchange for vast profits. Watch this video that was uploaded onto YouTube earlier this month.

Remember: the idea that depression and other mental health conditions are caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain is a myth invented by drug manufacturers in order to sell their vile products. Say NO! to their costly, chemical crap.

Bribery of doctors and other NHS healthcare staff by pharmaceutical companies may be reduced by the Serious Fraud Office

An Independent on Sunday investigation has revealed that the bribery of doctors and other NHS healthcare staff with lavish hospitality and freebies by pharmaceutical companies may be reduced by the Serious Fraud Office.

"Big drug firms have spent millions of pounds on bankrolling events and trips for NHS staff, an Independent on Sunday investigation of trust records has revealed. The catalogue of freebies includes Pfizer providing hospitality to dozens of doctors attending a meeting at the five-star Gleneagles hotel resort in Scotland, and a dinner meeting between three Eli Lilly staff and two nurses at which 22 alcoholic drinks were consumed.

Healthcare staff, who influence how the £12bn annual NHS drugs budget is spent, insist they are not swayed by hospitality. However, it has emerged that big firms such as Sanofi-Aventis, Napp and Cephalon all feature in reports by the industry's watchdog, the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA), into alleged breaches in the rules on hospitality."

I recommend reading the whole of this damning report, including the Comments beneath the report.

ProPublica is investigating how drug company money reaches physicians

ProPublica is investigating how Pharmaceuticals Industry money reaches physicians, and the credentials and calibre of the physicians it uses. See this article.

Extract: "In 2001, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ordered Pennsylvania doctor James I. McMillen to stop “false or misleading” promotions of the painkiller Celebrex, saying he minimized risks and touted it for unapproved uses. Still, three other leading drug makers paid the rheumatologist $224,163 over 18 months to deliver talks to other physicians about their drugs."

There are many interesting Comments beneath the article.

Drug company financial inducements corrupt doctors and damage the reputations of medical schools

Read about how drug companies corrupt doctors and medical schools with inducements in cash or in freebies to get them to give talks/lectures promoting their company's drugs. And read the Comments beneath the article.

Here is an interesting blog about Ethics, Medicine, and Pharm.

Here's an interesting blog about Ethics, Medicine, and Pharm. It is written by a medical doctor, Howard Brody, M.D., Ph.D., who is an academic and an ethicist. Commendably, he is not ambiguous in his criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry and of their payments to greedy doctors who, for payment, compromise their integrity by lending their names and reputations to recommend drugs and medical devices unworthy of recommendation.

Slippery Statistics: there's something fishy about them!

I've been listening to Radio 4's More or Less programme first broadcast on Dec 31st 2010. If you go to this BBC webpage you too can listen to it using iPlayer. "Tim Harford and the More or Less team explore 2010 in numbers. Contributors include Ben Goldcare, Robert Peston, the National Statistician and the Swedish statistical guru Hans Rosling." - That should be Goldacre, btw, not Goldcare. It's a rare BBC typo...(o:

Anyway the programme includes Gordon Brown, when Prime Minister, being less than honest with statistics while speaking in the House of Commons. You will also hear of the wealth of misleading immigration figures that the British public was fed for years. And Robert Peston explains again about the crisis with the banks and their cash reserves. But the most important item in the programme in my opinion is the complaint by medical doctor and columnist, Ben Goldacre, that 74% of results of drug trials on Reboxetine, a so-called antidepressant drug manufactured by Pfizer, were not published in academic journals and were kept from doctors and patients. - Since the drug is "ineffective and worse than useless", but the actual published data claimed the opposite, Dr Goldacre describes this as "the greatest scandal of modern medicine."

You may, along with me, and along with Dr Goldacre, wonder why drug companies are allowed knowingly to mislead with fraudulent claims about their pharmaceutical junk, and why the medical journals are similarly allowed to skew the evidence by withholding trial results that show the drugs do more harm than good, and why nobody goes to prison for this fraud and for the harm that ensues to patients because of this fraud and for robbing the NHS purse and the British tax-payers by charging them for toxic trash. - The answer, as I'm sure you have worked out for yourself, is that Big Pharma's tainted profits make their way into the pockets of the venal.

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, follow the money: venal politicians, slick lawyers, publishers, share-dealers, drug reps, shady doctors, shady members of drug regulation panels, etc. Which of them join in the dance of of the dodgy drugs, and rake in their shares of the ill-gotten gains?

Medical Journals Complicit in Corruption

"A growing number of prominent physician-scientists, including several former journal editors, and New York Times columnists, have written sobering critiques about the corrupting impact pharmaceutical industry influence has had on medicine. That influence has debased the integrity of medical research, clinical practice and medicine's institutions."
Read article on the website of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (USA)

CEOs should be prosecuted when pharmaceutical companies break the law

CEOs should be prosecuted when pharmaceutical companies break the law.

See this NewScientist article by Paul Thacker, an investigator at the Project On Government Oversight, a non-profit organisation exposing waste, fraud and abuse in federal government.

Medical Research Deception

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found over 40 percent of the best designed, peer-reviewed scientific papers published in the world's top medical journals misrepresented the actual findings of the research. The "spin doctors" writing the papers found a way to show treatments worked, when in fact, they didn't.
Read article in The Huffington Post (USA)
Comment: As this article points out, academic medical research has become corrupted by drug industry money and special interests. Similarly, government regulators, rather than dealing with this problem, see the interests of corporate multinationals as being more important than those of the public.

Big Pharma's donations buy political influence and influence drug-prescribing habits in Australia.

Big Pharma spends millions every year buying influence in Canberra. Adele Ferguson and Eric Johnston investigate the ruthless tactics, the money and the spindoctors behind the scenes.

Read article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

Remember:

1) Pharmaceutical drugs have adverse side-effects that are frequently worse than the problem for which they are prescribed.

2) Good nutrition is the best medicine and has no adverse side-effects.

3) Cutting down on salt and salty food benefits your health in a multitude of ways.

Mysterious, murky use of UK taxpayers' money in 'climate-related' projects

Cui bono? See Christopher Booker's excellent article in The Telegraph.

Why all the secrecy and obfuscation? Science is being perverted and her acolytes corrupted. Why is taxpayers' money being used to distort facts and deceive?

PACE to hold hearings on 'falsified' swine flu pandemic

PACE is to hold hearings on pharmaceutical companies' possible influence on the global swine flu campaign and on the World Health Organization, a Russian daily reported. "The 47-nation Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is conducting an inquiry into an alleged conspiracy between the WHO, the pharmaceutical industry and scientists which could "expose millions of healthy people to the risk of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines," caused damage to public budgets and to health agencies' credibility, according to a PACE resolution. The motion was introduced by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, head of the health committee, former German lawmaker and a specialist in lung disease, who called the current pandemic "one of the greatest medical scandals of the century." WHO declared the pandemic in June 2009 on the advice of a group of experts many of whom are believed to have financial ties with pharmaceutical giants like GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, and benefited from the production of drugs and H1N1 vaccines."
Read article on the RIA Novosti website (Russia)
Comment: Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, has apparently said that Russia should withdraw from the WHO if the corruption suspicions are proven.

Swedish Officials Investigating Nobel Prize Board

Swedish Officials Investigating Nobel Prize Board - news published
Friday, December 12, 2008 7:18 PM:

The Nobel Prize Committee is facing criminal investigation of bribery and corruption after allegedly taking huge payments from a pharmaceutical company that directly benefits from the work of this year's Nobel Prize winner in medicine. The astonishing scandal, being reported in the European trade press and conspicuously absent from Sweden's major daily newspapers, surfaced just days before the internationally renowned awards were presented in Stockholm on Wednesday. According to Swedish trade journal Dagens Medicin, two Nobel-affiliated corporations – Nobel Media and Nobel Webb – are accused of taking "many millions" of dollars from Swedish-American pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.
Read article here.

Drug licences for cash scandal unfolds in Italy

The director of Italy's medicines regulatory agency has been suspended along with another top official, as the drug licences-for-cash scandal surrounding the organisation continues to unfold. Nello Martini, director of Aifa (the Italian Agency for Pharmaceuticals), has been suspended along with Caterina Gualano, head of medicines registration for the agency. The development follows a two-year investigation in which police found evidence that money had changed hands in return for the falsification of clinical data required for drug licences.
Read article at pharmatimes.com

UK and Irish Politicians Denounce Canadian Government Agent’s Dirty Tricks over GM crops

UK and Irish Politicians Denounce Canadian Government Agent’s Dirty Tricks over GMOs