Scientific Fraud, the FDA and Drug Companies

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I was shocked :eek: to read an article in the latest (Feb 2003) Scientific American. The piece is called "Bad Medicine, Why Data from Drug Companies is hard to swallow".

I encourage everyone to read this article. I don't think I can read another medical abstract quite the same way again after this ...

Some key points:

• Companies (even the biggest ones) are massaging data to an unbelievable degree to get their drugs approved. This includes excluding data and misrepresenting data.
• Companies pay the FDA $500,000 for each drug approved. The FDA is therefore approving more and more (useless and sometimes harmful) drugs, even when the studies supporting the drugs are clearly flawed and massaged.

Corporate America is just waaay too involved with government in the US today. We have the best democracy money can buy . A major change in direction is required

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Nearly half of all medical school faculty members who serve on boards designed to protect patients enrolled in clinical studies also serve as paid consultants to drug companies and other sectors of the biomedical industry, new research reports. Read the report here.

Another study a few years ago found that the principal authors of 34% of studies published in the 14 leading medical and scientific journals had financial interests in the drugs or devices they were testing. :sad:

"Studies funded by the private sector tend to produce outcomes that are much more aligned with the financial interests of those sectors than studies funded by the government, etc." said Prof. Sheldon Krimsky, Tufts University, author of the upcoming book: Science in the Private Interest

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Those of you who may in interested in this topic should take a look at this site:

http://www.medicationsense.com

and click on the OVER DOSE link in the left sidebar. This is a book written by Dr. Jay Cohen, who has published numerous articles about the FDA's general failure to protect the public from dangerous drugs.

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Big-Pharma Funding, Medical Journals, and Bias in Pharmaceutical Studies

07 Dec 2012 — Surprise, surprise — studies where the investigators have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry are usually designed to provide confirmation of a predetermined result — that the drug is effective and side effects are minimal, even when one or both of those things is untrue.

Download/listen to podcast (7 minutes)

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