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

in my last post, i actually forgot to write more about Petersen’s findings in her book. Here is a compilation of a few of the things I’ve written.

TAke away: while I agree that the thing to do is for people to make decisions based on evidence and research, deciding what will benefit them, weighing costs and benefits, people can’t actually do this because they do not have all the evidence. The pharmaceutical industry has so skewed the research that whatever you think you are reading, it is probably a horrible distortion of scientific method. Worse, 52% of research findings from drug trials are never even published. The ones that aren’t published are the ones that show negative findings or show nothing beneficial. Perhaps even worser, the physicians who are supposedly conducting or leading the research? They are paid consultants of the drug companies who are merely lending their name while the real reearch directors are marketing departments and marketing companies.

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THe evidence Petersen gathers details a world of pharmaceutical research that flips the bird at scientific research. Whatever these people are doing when they do research, it’s more like marketing — not science. They invest millions in r&d on drugs for heartburn and joint pain, modifying only slightly an already existing drug, and then engage in what the pharmaceutical marketing industry calls “blockbuster marketing” in order to create huge demand for something “new” that isn’t new at all, but a slight twist on something that already exists.

meanwhile, their slight twist, something small enough to allow it to bypass patent regulations, can actually prove dangerous. Baycol is an example. It was more dangerous than drugs just like it that were already treating the problem.

Another very interesting aspect to all this is that the claims that drug makers must spend exorbitant amounts on research, which is said to account for the high price of drugs, is horse shit. Basically, a couple of senate hearings have revealed that drug makers consider spending on marketing before a drug has been approved a research cost. So, when they pay doctors to be ‘consultants’ traveling around the contry to pump up a drug that hasn’t been approved yet, this is considered “research”. There are more examples but i have to run off to work!

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Petersen focuses on the need for people to be able to weigh the costs/benefits of all drugs. Drugs change the chemical processes in your body. They will always deliver side effects — beneficial and not. So, the idea is that you need to ask yourself: to get these beneficial side effects, how much should I tolerate these negative side effects.

Among the examples are drugs for bladder control which is a problem that effects a very tiny portion of the population. But marketing agents have made it seem like a much larger group is afflicted, by convincing doctors that it’s a big problem and that more and more people have the problem and, thus, need the medicine.

And yet, the side effects of the medicine can be really bad. But people aren’t given all the information they need to make that judgement.

In the case of antidepressants, she writes about studies of antidepressents found to be only a slight improvement on nothing. But the slight improvement invariably comes with the side effects.

so how do you weigh that?

and then there’s paxil, which the companies own (suppressed) studies showed to have no benefit for adolescent depression. In fact, the studies showed that the drug resulted in suicidal ideation at twice the rate among those teens taking the drug. as we now know, GlaxoSmithKline, as the company’s now known, supressed the findings. Glaxo’s execs sent a letter to sales reps telling that “cutting edge” research demonstrated that paxil had “REMARKABLE efficacy and safety in the treatment of adolescent depression.”

She goes on to demonstrate the same problems with surpressed research and outrageous marketing claims for NSAIDS (pain medication), Propulsid (for heartburn), Zanax, Ambien, Claritin, Celebrex, various statin drugs, etc. and so forth.

All of these drugs were marketed on the basis of highly dubious claims about their efficacy and/or by totally suppressing negative findings. One study found that 50% of pharmaceutical trials are never published.

The thing is, people aren’t able to make a decision weighing costs and benefits because they don’t have all the information. And they can’t trust their doctors to have it, either. It has been well-known since when I was in grad school, based on studies in the 70s and 80s, that physicians lack the basic skills needed to assess research findings and are very easily influenced by advertisements and marketing press packs, and other gimmicks. These days, they are recruited to ostensibly be the representative or lead researcher on a study when, in fact, the study is completely directed by the company’s marketing department. Ghost writers write editorials for the AMA — a practice that was exposed by a physician who was asked if, for a sum of money, he’d say he wrote such an editorial when in fact it was being written f or him by the pharmaceutical company.

i won’t belabor the point. I’m sure this book is scanned to google. :)

so, it’s a great idea to weigh costs/benefits for yourself. the problem is, the entire industry is dead set against you actually having access to the information that would allow you to do that.