|
|
|
Health and Medical Advice on the Internet: Use It Wisely
Health and medical advice on the Internet: Use it wisely to overcome illness and find more happiness in your life.
I’ve got a bit of a problem with depression and anxiety. I’ve been tackling these problems for several years without the use of...
Six Tips to Keep Up Your Exercise Motivation
The next time you start to slide with your exercise program, stop! On again off again exercise will never get you the results you want. Instead, use these six tips to stay on track and achieve and achieve your desired fitness goals: 1.Don’t beat...
Treating AIDS with Acupuncture and Herbs
AIDS Symptoms and Related Diseases AIDS has many different kinds of symptoms. The average time between HIV infection and the manifestation of symptoms is 10 years. Then a combination of non-specific symptoms show up. Symptoms can be subgrouped...
Understanding Thyroid Hair Loss
Most people who are suffering from hair loss should make sure
that they are not suffering from thyroid hair loss. Whenever
your body requires extra energy, which might be due to stress or
other illness, the hair cells get shut down automatically...
Vitamin B-1
Did you know that vitamin B-1 has two other widely used names? Thiamine is a name used in the US and Aneurin is the popular name in Europe. Thiamin (without the e) is also used to refer to B-1. Vitamin B-1 is important to your body’s health. You...
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
How Drug Companies Deceive Doctors
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in
print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included. This
article is courtesy of Health Myths Exposed, Box 31729 Dept.
802, Santa Fe NM 87595-1729. Phone: (505) 310-2454. Contact:
service@healthmyths.net. A courtesy copy of your publication
would be greatly appreciated. Editing is available upon
contacting author.
How Drug Companies Deceive Doctors
By Shane Ellison, M.Sc. Health Myths Exposed © 2005
Following doctor's orders has become synonymous with danger.
Every year, FDA approved drugs kill twice as many people as the
total number of U.S. deaths from the Vietnam War.[1] Death by
medicine flourishes because deceit, not science, governs a
doctor's prescribing habits. As an ex-drug chemist, I witnessed
this first-hand.
This deceit comes in many forms. Medical ghostwriting and
checkbook science are the most prominent.
Doctors rely on peer-reviewed medical journals to learn about
prescription drugs. These journals include the Lancet, British
Medical Journal, New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal
of the American Medical Association. It is assumed that these
professional journals offer the hard science behind any given
drug. This assumption is wrong. Medical journals can't be
trusted thanks to medical ghost writing.
Medical ghostwriting is the practice of hiring PhD's to crank
out drug reports that hype benefits and hide negative side
effects. Once complete, drug companies recruit doctor's to put
their name on the report as authors. These reports are then
published in the above mentioned medical journals.[2] The carrot
for this deceitful practice is money and prestige. Ghostwriters
can receive up to $20,000 per report. Doctors receive prestige
from having been published. Ultimately, patients get bad drugs
disguised as good medicine.
As deplorable as medical ghostwriting sounds, it is more common
than you think. The world's most influential medical journal,
the New England Journal of Medicine, has admitted that 50% of
their drug articles are ghostwritten.
The editor of the British Journal of Medicine has acknowledged
that medical ghostwriting has become a serious problem for his
publication: "We are being hoodwinked by the drug companies. The
articles come in with doctors' names on them and we often find
some of them have little or no idea about what they have
written."[3]
Consider the testimony from deputy editor of The Journal of the
American Medical Association: "This [journal articles] is all
about bypassing science. Medicine is becoming a sort of Cloud
Cuckoo Land, where doctors don't know what papers they can trust
in the journals, and the public doesn't want to believe."[4]
Other weapons of mass deception exist - checkbook science. As
defined by Diana Zuckerman, PhD, checkbook science is research
intended not to expand knowledge or to benefit humanity, but
instead to sell drugs. It has stolen the very soul of University
research, scientific method, and the patients who serve as human
subjects.[5]
Drug companies use checkbook science to sponsor their own drug
research via the halls of academia and government institutions.
Money is used to
design their own studies, interpret the
results, and stuff negative data under the drug-rug. The
drug-rug is a behemoth rug. It has to be. A myriad of negative
drug data exists.
Like medical ghostwriting, checkbook science is more common than
you think. A third of academic professors have personal
financial ties to drug makers.[6] Called the "Stealth Merger" by
the LA Times, top scientists at the National Institutes of
Health also collect paychecks and stock options from the drug
industry.[7] This has been going on for over 20 years.[8] Known
as the Bayh-Dole Act, U.S law was amended in 1980 to allow for
these flagrant conflicts of interest.[4]
This calculated deceit is scandalous. Hopefully the line at the
pharmaceutical trough gets shorter as this scandal becomes
public. Though, drug makers have an insurance policy for this -
Direct-to-Consumer advertising. The oft repeated "ask your
doctor" ensures that the herd instinctively embraces drugs,
drugs and more drugs.
Understanding medical ghost writing and checkbook science
explains why medical doctors have been hypnotized into drug
worship - they only see the positive. It also explains why
modern medicine is more deadly and lucrative than war - the
danger has been silenced with the pen and money.
Drug companies do not take responsibility for the wonton
prescription drug deceit. Instead, victims have been made
invisible - dehumanized. They are not recognized as children, or
men with significant contribution to society. Their deaths are
simply shrugged off and attributed to sickness or aging.
Those who profit from prescription drugs should hold some sort
of record for the having the most reckless disregard for human
life. If the deceit continues the prescription drug leviathan
will silently kill more people than Napalm dropped on Vietnamese
villages.
References
[1] Approximately 58,000 American's died in Vietnam. FDA
approved drugs kill 106 - 125,000 people per year when used as
prescribed.
[2] Source: CBC's Marketplace. Aired March 25, 2003. Researcher
Colman Jones.
[3]
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1101680,00.ht
ml
[4] Shannon Brownlee. Doctors Without Borders. Why you can't
trust medical journals anymore. Washington Monthly. April 2003.
[5] Zuckerman, D. Hype in health reporting: "checkbook science"
buys distortion of medical news. International Journal of Health
Services. 2003;33(2).
[6] Bekelman, J.E., Li, Y. and Gross, C. P. Scope and impact of
financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research. Journal
of the American Medical Association. 289: 454-465.
[7] Willman D. Stealth merger: drug companies and government
medical research. Los Angeles Times. 2003 Dec 7;:A1, A32-3.
[8]http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0404.brownlee.h
tml#byline
About the author:
Shane holds a Master's degree in organic chemistry and has first
hand experience in drug design. Specializing in therapeutic
nutrition, he has made it his mission to introduce healthy
lifestyle and nutrition habits to the general public. He is
author of Health Myths Exposed. His books and FREE offers can be
found at www.healthmyths.net.
|
|
|
|
|
| National Library of Medicine - National Institutes of Health |
| Part of the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine offers access to health information for consumer, patient, and physicians ... |
| www.nlm.nih.gov |
|
| Health and Medical Information produced by doctors - MedicineNet.com |
| Doctor-produced health and medical information written for you to make informed decisions about your health concerns. |
| www.medicinenet.com |
|
| Medicine in the Yahoo! Directory |
| Collection of sites for health professionals, with sections on specific disciplines, organizations, continuing education, conferences, publications, ... |
| dir.yahoo.com |
|
| MedlinePlus Health Information from the National Library of Medicine |
| Health information from the National Library of Medicine. Easy access to Medline and Health topics, medical dictionaries, directories and publications. |
| medlineplus.gov |
|
| Medicine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| Medicine is a branch of health science and the sector of public life ... The practice of medicine combines both science as the evidence base and art in the ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
|
| Journal Home - Nature Medicine |
| Nature Medicine has a vacancy for a Locum Assistant Editor for six months. The position involves working in all aspects of the editorial process, ... |
| www.nature.com |
|
| The New England Journal of Medicine: Research & Review Articles on ... |
| The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is a weekly general medical journal that publishes new medical research findings, review articles, and editorial ... |
| content.nejm.org |
|
| eMedicine Clinical Knowledge Base |
| eMedicine features up-to-date, searchable, peer-reviewed medical journals, online physician reference textbooks, and a full-text article database in 62 ... |
| www.emedicine.com |
|
| Open Directory - Health: Medicine |
| the entire directory, only in Health/Medicine. Top: Health: Medicine (11429). Description · Medical Specialties (4888); Surgery (2265) ... |
| dmoz.org |
|
| the www virtual library biosciences medicine |
| www.ohsu.edu/cliniweb/wwwvl/ - Similar pages |
|
|
| Medicine - home |
| Bimonthly journal covering the latest results in clinical investigation relevant to hospital and office practice. |
| www.md-journal.com |
|
| Institute of Medicine |
| The Institute of Medicine serves as adviser to the nation to improve health. |
| www.iom.edu |
|
| ScienceDaily: Health & Medicine News |
| Medical Research News. Health news on everything from cancer to nutrition. Full-text, images, updated daily. |
| www.sciencedaily.com |
|
| Google Directory - Health > Medicine |
| Search only in Medicine Search the Web. Medicine. Health > Medicine, Go to Directory Home. Categories. Alternative Medicine (6308) Basic Sciences (66) ... |
| www.google.com |
|
| the world wide web virtual library biosciences medicine |
| www.mcb.harvard.edu/biopages/medicine.html - Similar pages |
|
|
| PLoS Medicine - A Peer-Reviewed Open-Access Journal |
| PLoS Medicine is a peer-reviewed, international, open-access journal published ... Every issue of PLoS Medicine contains a selection of readers' responses. ... |
| medicine.plosjournals.org |
|
| Medicine On-Line - Medicine Online -The International Medical Journal |
| Medicine Online - independent and peer reviewed journal published by Priory Medical Journals - priory.com. |
| www.priory.com |
|
| Entrez PubMed |
| PubMed is a service of the US National Library of Medicine that includes over 16 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for ... |
| www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov |
|
| Stanford University School of Medicine |
| Home Page of the Stanford University School of Medicine. |
| med.stanford.edu |
|
| Medicine OnLine |
| Meds.com offers medical information and education on cancer (lung cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, leukemia) and HIV / AIDS for patients, ... |
| www.meds.com |
|
|