Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

So, continuing, here’s more I wrote about the findings in Petersen’s book, which are pretty disturbing.

1. The science and research behind pharmaceuticals are extremely bad. In my view, it’s a joke to refer to it as science.

2. The marketing tactics used by pharmaceutical companies have gotten worse since when I observed them in the late 80s and early 90s.

3. The drug companies are intent on confusing marketing and research. Indeed, the so called high cost of research is a bullshit claim.

4. The entire industry is dead set against consumers *and* doctors having honest, objective research with which to make their decisions.

Let’s get something important out of the way.

A lot of people will tell you that the cost of medicine is due to the high cost of research. This is horse shit.

First of all, the supposedly independent university center (at Johns Hopkins if I remember correctly) that conducts the widely cited research on pharmaceutical R&D? The institute that is cited over and over again for evidence that the research costs that pharmaceuticals must bear is enormous?

This institute is funded by pharma. Not surprisingly, the research it published about the tragically high costs of research is highly suspect.

Second, when calculating the cost of research, pharmaceutical companies include the costs of producing the drug before it has been approved by the FDA. This means that, when they pay doctors money to tout the so called emerging benefits of some new drug, when the drug is only in phase three of testing, and the doctor is making speeches actually written by the marketing company, those costs are counted as “research” costs — and not marketing costs.

Third, Petersen points out that the most important, most efficacious drugs that have been discovered in the last 25 years were discovered via grants extended to research dollars paid with u.s. tax payer money. Those drugs? Discovered with tax payer money? Pharmaceutical companies use that research to then market drugs for which they didn’t do a lick of research.

fskcers!

And as for the research that companies actually do? The scary thing is, a drug can pass FDA requirements if the pharmaceutical company can cough up two studies that support it’s efficacy. 17 others can demonstrate nothing. Zoloft, for instance, was found to do nothing in 8 studies conducted by Pfizer. When they showed 2 that demonstrated something, the FDA approved it.

Dr Paul Leber participated in the FDA review of Zoloft, expressing concerns, “How do we interpret … two positive results in the context of several more studies that fail to demonstrate that effect?” He asked this question in 1990, as part of the committee considering Zoloft’s approval. He went on to say, “I am not sure I have an answer to that, but I am not sure that the law requires me to have an answer to that — fortunately or unfortunately. That would mean, n a sense, that the sponsor could just do studies until the cows come home until he gets two of them that are statistically significant by chance alone, walks them out and says he had met the criteria.”

Petersen writes,

“And that appears to be what most of the manufacturers of antidepressants have done. In 2002, Dr. Arif Khan, a psychiatrist in Bellevue, WA, reviewed the data from the dozens of clinical trails that companies had performed to prove that Zoloft, Prozax, Paxil, and six other antidepresesants actually worked. .. Dr. Khan and his colleagues found fifty-two completed trials of these drugs, which involved more than ten thousand patients.

In more than half of these studies, the sugar tablet relieved the patients’ depression just as well as, or better than, the antidepressant.”

citations:

Transcript from Stephen S. Hall’s article, “The Claritin Effect: Prescription for Profit,” The New York Times Magaqzine. March 11, 2001

Dr. Paul Leber at FDA Psycholpharmacological Dugs Advisory Committee meeting of Nov 19, 1998

Khan et al., “Are Placebo Controls Necessary to Test New Antidepressants and Anxiolytics?”, International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, Sept 2002.