Accused of Hiding Drug Dangers Again, Big Pharma Starts 2008 Defending Itself

[babylonsister]

Accused of Hiding Drug Dangers Again, Big Pharma Starts 2008 Defending Itself
by Martha Rosenberg


If Hillary and Obama think the press is picking on them, they should look at Big Pharma.

The ink isn’t even dry on the massive Vioxx settlement and already Big Pharma’s been accused of burying clinical data, spinning journal articles and selling drugs that cause the conditions they’re supposed to fix. Sound familiar?

Merck and Schering-Plough, it turns out, were sitting on the ENHANCE clinical trial results of cholesterol lowering drug, Vytorin for a reason. Rather than reducing the growth of fatty plaque in the arteries, Vytorin, a combination of Zetia and Zocor, almost doubled the growth in the trials.

Not only did it take a Congressional committee to pry the truth out of the Big Pharma giants, their response to the clinical belly flop was that they “would be changing the ENHANCE study’s endpoint”–the actual result the study was meant to measure. In other words, the sun was in their eyes.

Nor was it just TV that Big Pharma is accused of using in service to half truths like “Vytorin treats cholesterol from two sources: food and family.”

Ninety-four percent of positive studies about antidepressants found their way into medical journals versus 14 percent of negative ones says an article in the January 17, 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine called Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy.

Publishing only pro drug articles deprives researchers of accurate data, wastes resources, squanders the contributions of investigators and patients and misleads doctors says lead author Erick Turner, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/20/6489/

[Celebration]

1. Sigh...............

Yes, it sounds familiar.

BTW, I love the phrase "clinical belly flop."

[Stevepol]

2. IMO, in most cases, natural methods are far preferable to drugs.

These drugs are largely the by-product of a big business, competition-cures-everything kind of mentality with regard to the health care system that is downright destructive of health. About 90% of the new drugs either don't do well what they're supposed to do (at least not much better than the placebo effect would lead you to expect) or they actually do damage that it takes a few years to find out about before a new drug takes their place. The new drugs remedy the particular side effects of the previous drug but secretly carry with them their own portfolio of side effects.

Surgery, when it's required, is another animal altogether. But frequently the surgeries aren't really required and a less intrusive modality of treatment would be preferable.

[Evoman]

3. Where did you get 90%?

Do you have a link?

[trotsky]

4. I, too, would like to see documentation of this "90%" claim. n/t

[chicagomd]

5. Since you already questioned on the 90%,

how about you back up that statement about surgeries that are not "really required".

An example would be good, or perhaps a link?

[Stevepol]

6. 90% entirely IMO.

I'm not proseltyzing, just saying what I think. The figure has got to be high or we'd be soon buried in new drugs. I'd be interested to find out myself. I read an article in Mother Jones a few years back about how the drugs for depression, when the clinical studies were looked at didn't do much better than the placebo did, and the small difference cd be explained by the fact that the drugs caused people to sleep more so they generally self-reported less depression (on whatever scale was used, not the Beck scale in this case I think) since when people sleep more they report less depression in general.

And that was every one of the top 6 anti-depression drugs.

I saw a recent repeat of the same study of anti-depressants with apparently a similar result.

Here's a link to just one of these studies: http://www.mercola.com/2002/jul/31/antidepressants.htm

I'm sure you could find many more in a google search of your own.

Pharma of course will deny this and offer some other figures. In the end, whatever you think helps you, helps you.

Surgery: I was thinking of having seen also several studies that indicated that too many heart bypasses are done.

Here's a link for the heart bypasses: http://www.whale.to/m/quotes20.html

Again, I'm sure you could find a lot more with a google search.

And I saw recently (twice in fact) a book reading and discussion and Q&A on C-Span by the author of a book called "Overtreated" about how the best results in medicine are generally produced by smaller slalaried clinics where the doctors help each other and focus on the patient and aren't specialists vying to use whatever surgical intervention they are best trained in or anxious to use whatever newfangled diagnostic tool they've just spent a gazillion dollars on. According to the author, in the US, the Mayo clinic is a good example of the right level and quality of treatment with good outcomes, and UCLA Medical Ctr came in close to the bottom, even tho (and maybe because) it had the highest quality, ultra-sophisticated diagnostic equipment and many specialists on staff, each one highly qualified and thus rightly charging an arm and a leg for their services. The author said the best (most effective plus least costly) approaches in Europe and probably the world were in Sweden and France. Sweden profits by its ability to systematize the thing better, while France is more like the US in that there's more variety, etc.

Here's a link for the book: http://www.amazon.com/Overtreated-Medicine-Making-Sicker-Poorer/dp/1582345805

Excellent talk by the way. If it comes back on C-Span, try to catch it if you're interested in this stuff.

In any case, take the 90% as pure speculation, and remember 71.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot anyway. It's very hard to quantify health figures anyway. You may have to make up your own mind about it and then come up with your own statistics.

Later, I talked to a doctor friend here and asked him about the thesis of the book "Overtreated," and he confirmed that in the hospital where he worked when the machines are there, they will be used, whether they're actually called for in the specific case or not. It's the principle, if you build it they will come.

If I could add one more thing: I think you can take it as a rule of thumb that when you have free enterprize and health care bedding down together, you're not going to get very good medicine overall. Again, that's just IMO, but I think it would be well supported by statistics from countries which have variations of nationalized health care systems compared with the US in terms of treatment outcomes.

[lizerdbits]

7. I can't believe anyone

is still trying to use mercola and whale.to to support their argument. :rofl:

[Stevepol]

8. Here are some more citations.

For Heart bypasses and other heart interventions often unnecessary:

NYT: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE7DB1F30F934A1575AC0A961948260

Science Mag: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/222/4624/605

CBS News: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/13/60minutes/main540589.shtml

MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17800298/

For anti-depressant studies:

Naturally, there are a lot of studies that claim that the meds are better than the placebo, more long-lasting effects, etc., which is probably true, but again I'm not sure the difference can't be explained by tangential effects produced by the drugs, not directly related to the depression. And who's measuring the long-term effects of drug use on other systems in the body?

A recent study (Mar 07): http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/BipolarDisorder/tb/5354

JAMA (but you'll have to pay to see it evidently):
"Increasing power of Placebos in Trials of Antidepressants"
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/288/4/449

Google book site:
http://books.google.com/books?id=iR_7DZ35G5EC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=%22anti+depressants%22+placebo+equal&source=web&ots=mx07auWwj5&sig=o9_FUpqAzJOr9MQ8sjEKaOQT9jI

Flower-power remedy proves equal of anti-depressant drugs
Independent, The (London), Aug 2, 1996 by LIZ HUNT Health Editor
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19960802/ai_n14070698

etc.

Do the search yourself. You'll find plenty of articles on both sides. The better financed (pharma financed) studies generally find a definite positive difference between placebo and drug. Where the studies control for a lot of other factors, the differences are not nearly as great and almost negligible.

This took me maybe 5 minutes. If you're that interested in it, do the work yourself. Prove my thesis wrong, but give me the facts. I'm just giving an opinion. Maybe you have personal experience to rely on. That's more interesting to me in most cases than these studies which are so easily cooked, esp where large sums of lab experiment money are being thrown around.

Cheers.

[lizerdbits]

9. Thanks for clarifying 90% is your opinion. NT