"I’m as big a fan of the 1st Amendment as anyone, but this decision strikes me as fundamentally flawed. We’re not talking about a right to express yourself. We’re talking about selling stuff — stuff that could harm or even kill you if used improperly." David Lazarus, LA Times
A Serious Drug Problem – The Medicare Prescription Bill of 2003 – Krugman Fri, 6 May 2005 New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, hits the nail on the head when he points out who the beneficiaries of the Medicare law really are: Why it’s Big Pharma and those this industry…
UK: Drugs firms ‘creating ills for every pill / US ‘Bioshield’ Drug-Patent Plan Draws Fire Mon, 04 Apr 2005 Following the public revelations about the concealed safety hazards of antidepressant drugs whose risks of violence, drug dependency, and suicide, were hidden from physicians and the public, a committee of Parliament…
Marketing Drugs by Marketing Sex–Cheerleader Sales Reps Mon, 28 Nov 2005 Readers, but not the medical community, may be shocked by a front page story in The New York Times that sheds light on yet another unseemly pharmaceutical industry strategy for pushing brand name drugs. The industry’s most effective drug…
Selling Sickness: Pharma Industry Turning Us All Into Patients Mon, 12 Sep 2005 Related Link: Selling Sickness Prologue Selling Sickness: How the World’s Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients, by Ray Moynihan, an international health journalist, and Alan Cassels, a pharmaceutical policy researcher, is likely to become a…
Prologue Selling sickness by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels Thirty years ago the head of one of the world’s best-known drug companies made some very candid comments. Close to retirement at the time, Merck’s aggressive chief executive Henry Gadsden told Fortune magazine of his distress that the company’s potential markets…
UK reports the FDA Conceals Vital Data on Prescription Drugs – Independent Sun, 12 Jun 2005 The entire world has trusted the FDA to ensure that only safe and effective drugs are approved for marketing–other agencies, lacking the necessary resources often followed FDA’s lead. However, such deferrence is no longer…
Whistleblowers: Dangerous Pursuit for Profits at the Expense of Patients’ Lives Sat, 12 Mar 2005 Several prescription drug sales reps have come out of the shadows. They’re blowing the whistle on the pharmaceutical industry’s corrupt practices’ sales reps view doctors’ offices as the trenches. Pfizer drug rep, Jamie Reidy, has…
Recycled drugs: failed antidepressants– Stratera marketed for ADHD; Cymbalta for incontinence Mon, 26 Apr 2004 A front page article in The Wall Street Journal (excerpt below) provides a roadmap of failed Eli Lilly drugs which the company repackaged for a different condition than the one for which the drugs had…
How Health Care in America Became Big Business–And Bad Medicine – OpEd NYT Zoloft NYT Ad Fails to Disclose Suicide risk Mon, 25 Oct 2004 An Op-Ed in Sunday’ New York Times by Time magazine editors, Donald Barlett and James Steele, is a MUST READ assessment of what ails America’s…
Once again, the New England Journal of Medicine (July 13, 2006) has had to eat crow after it published false and misleading clinical trial findings.
The following confirms to us that the U.S. government (specifically, in this case, the FDA) and licensed academic and/or commercial laboratories that test drugs in human subjects have descended into a moral abyss.
