drokhole
drokhole's JournalThe drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal
source: The Guardian
(snip)
Sometimes trials are flawed by design. You can compare your new drug with something you know to be rubbish – an existing drug at an inadequate dose, perhaps, or a placebo sugar pill that does almost nothing. You can choose your patients very carefully, so they are more likely to get better on your treatment. You can peek at the results halfway through, and stop your trial early if they look good. But after all these methodological quirks comes one very simple insult to the integrity of the data. Sometimes, drug companies conduct lots of trials, and when they see that the results are unflattering, they simply fail to publish them.
Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? No one can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or has the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it's dangerous? No one can tell. This is a bizarre situation to arise in medicine, a discipline in which everything is supposed to be based on evidence.
And this data is withheld from everyone in medicine, from top to bottom. Nice, for example, is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, created by the British government to conduct careful, unbiased summaries of all the evidence on new treatments. It is unable either to identify or to access data on a drug's effectiveness that's been withheld by researchers or companies: Nice has no more legal right to that data than you or I do, even though it is making decisions about effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness, on behalf of the NHS, for millions of people.
In any sensible world, when researchers are conducting trials on a new tablet for a drug company, for example, we'd expect universal contracts, making it clear that all researchers are obliged to publish their results, and that industry sponsors – which have a huge interest in positive results – must have no control over the data. But, despite everything we know about industry-funded research being systematically biased, this does not happen. In fact, the opposite is true: it is entirely normal for researchers and academics conducting industry-funded trials to sign contracts subjecting them to gagging clauses that forbid them to publish, discuss or analyse data from their trials without the permission of the funder.
(snip)
more at the link
There's a lot more, and the entire article is worth the read. Here's Ben Goldacre (the article's author) giving an excellent TEDMED talk on the same subject (it does an adequate job of summing up his findings, if you don't have the time to read the article):
And two more recent in-depth articles to consider, both from this past month in the Journal Sentinel:
What happened to the poster children of OxyContin?
http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/what-happened-to-the-poster-children-of-oxycontin-r65r0lo-169056206.html|
Report: US health care system wastes $750 billion a year
http://www.jsonline.com/news/usandworld/national/report-us-health-care-system-wastes-750b-a-year647ed6ad22f54c9c90393036c03bb5da.html
Edit to add: Just one more particularly maddening excerpt from the article:
It gets much worse than that. These children weren't simply receiving a drug that the company knew to be ineffective for them; they were also being exposed to side-effects. This should be self-evident, since any effective treatment will have some side-effects, and doctors factor this in, alongside the benefits (which in this case were nonexistent). But nobody knew how bad these side-effects were, because the company didn't tell doctors, or patients, or even the regulator about the worrying safety data from its trials. This was because of a loophole: you have to tell the regulator only about side-effects reported in studies looking at the specific uses for which the drug has a marketing authorisation. Because the use of paroxetine in children was "off-label", GSK had no legal obligation to tell anyone about what it had found.
Kind of reminded me of this...
Metatron's Cube
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatron's_Cube
It supposedly symbolizes "the gridwork of our consciousness and the framework of our Universe. It is the Matrix in which everything is contained in our three dimensional being."
This is an amazing book on the subject:
A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science
http://issuu.com/hunabkuproductions/docs/a-beginner-s-guide-to-constructing-the-universe---/ (available online here in full)
http://amzn.to/SPpXl0 (available here to purchase...well worth it)
Also, there's a fascinating story I read recently about this guy who sees in fractals:
Real ‘Beautiful Mind’: College Dropout Became Mathematical Genius After Mugging
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/04/27/real-beautiful-mind-accidental-genius-draws-complex-math-formulas-photos/
As the title suggests, the guy "developed" his ability after getting beaten up outside a karaoke bar. Anyway, one of his drawings reminded me of the molecule photo:
Here's a gallery of his work:
http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jason-padgett.html
And here's him explaining, in more detail, what he "sees":
Not at all surprising. There was plenty wrong with the "conclusions" to begin with.
First off, it's disgusting how deep Monsanto/Big Agra's tentacles reach into academia:
Monsanto’s college strangehold
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/monsantos_college_strangehold/singleton/
Secondly, the authors of the "meta-analysis" themselves themselves even admitted that they were basing their findings on selective data (and even being selective within that selective data). The authors also admitted to looking "specifically" at vitamins A, C and E. Last I checked, there was a whole freaking host of vitamins and minerals in foods, guess they're just not important. That's not to mention micronutrients, or anti-inflammatory properties, or anti-oxidants, or phytocompounds, or a whole host of other shit that we probably haven't measured, compared, or even thought of yet.
And they conveniently ignored the studies referenced here:
Health Benefits of Grass-Fed Products
http://eatwild.com/healthbenefits.htm
In addition, Mother Earth News collected samples from 14 pastured flocks across the country (some from farmer Joel Salatin) and had them tested at an accredited laboratory. The results were compared to official US Department of Agriculture data for commercial eggs. Results showed the pastured eggs contained:
1/3 less cholesterol than commercial eggs
1/4 less saturated fat
2/3 more vitamin A
2 times more omega-3 fatty acids
7 times more beta carotene
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/2007-10-01/Tests-Reveal-Healthier-Eggs.aspx
http://www.polyfaceyum.com//index.php?main_page=index&cPath=67&zenid=bdebfvjhaqe7eukelvnc56rtn0
Guess that didn't make the cut! Not "scientific" enough, I suppose. Oh, I remember them off-the-cuff mentioning how pastured eggs might have a little more omega-3, but that's all, really. Great due diligence!
Not at all to mention the fact that "conventional" farming - including heavy pesticide use - destroys soil. In the United States alone, it's at a pace of 10x more the replenishing rate:
'Slow, insidious' soil erosion threatens human health
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March06/soil.erosion.threat.ssl.html
And all those synthetic pollutants in the atmosphere, in the soil, and being washed into the waterways does affect our health and make us sicker. So, yes, "organic" foods (though that word covers a broad spectrum of "methods"...the best among them locally-sourced and actively building/growing the soil) do have more health benefits - especially when you look at the greater picture.
Meanwhile, more pesticide resistant superworms and superweeds!
‘Mounting Evidence’ of Bug-Resistant Corn Seen by EPA
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-04/-mounting-evidence-of-bug-resistant-corn-seen-by-epa.html
It's a flawed meta-study (with, apparently, unscrupulous ties to the biotech industry) based on other flawed and selective studies:
5 Ways the Stanford Study Sells Organics Short
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/five-ways-stanford-study-underestimates-organic-food
Initial Reflections on the Annals of Internal Medicine Paper 'Are Organic Foods Safer and Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives?' A Systematic Review
http://www.organicconsumers.org/benbrook_annals_response2012.pdf
(really goes into the misleading statistical "analysis" of pesticide content comparison)
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