bogus Where trial meets error The Guardian, November 2004 02.18 GMT "Somewhere in Rayong or Chon Buri on the coast of Thailand, a young woman may at this very moment be baring her arm for a shot of an experimental Aids vaccine that many of the leading scientists in the field say categorically has no hope at all of working. She will be one of 16,000 volunteers recruited for the second large-scale Aids vaccine trial, a $119m exercise many scientists believe is a farce." bones Big Pharma Shamelessly Shills Dangerous Bone Drugs You Don't Need Drugs meant to strengthen bones may not work -- and many have a slew of harmful side-effects like a higher cancer risk, irregular heart rate, and stomach bleeding. By Martha Rosenberg / AlterNet November 10, 2010, ethics Ethical dilemma at Harvard Medical School New York Times, March 2, 2009 Sometimes doctors, scientists and even the entire first year class at Harvard medical school balk at the abject lack of ethics in the pharmaceutical industry. See also Pfizer Worker Photographed Protesters at Harvard published on the same day. fda Are Your Medications Safe? Slate Feb 9, 2015 The FDA buries evidence of fraud in medical trials. My students and I dug it up. By Charles Seife "For more than a decade, the FDA has shown a pattern of burying the details of misconduct. As a result, nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses." "...Faked X-ray reports. Forged retinal scans. Phony lab tests. Secretly amputated limbs. All done in the name of science when researchers thought that nobody was watching. That misconduct happens isn’t shocking. What is: When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn’t notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted. On the contrary. For more than a decade, the FDA has shown a pattern of burying the details of misconduct. As a result, nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses. The FDA has repeatedly hidden evidence of scientific fraud not just from the public, but also from its most trusted scientific advisers, even as they were deciding whether or not a new drug should be allowed on the market. Even a congressional panel investigating a case of fraud regarding a dangerous drug couldn't get forthright answers. For an agency devoted to protecting the public from bogus medical science, the FDA seems to be spending an awful lot of effort protecting the perpetrators of bogus science from the public. Much of my research has to do with follies, foibles, and fraud in science, and I knew that the FDA wasn’t exactly bending over backward to correct the scientific record when its inspectors found problems during clinical trials. So as part of my investigative reporting class at New York University, my students and I set out to find out just how bad the problem was—and how much important information the FDA was keeping under wraps." placebos When is a placebo not a placebo? Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2010 A placebo is a placebo is a placebo ... or maybe not, a new study suggests When is a placebo not a placebo? When it's not and affects the outcome of a double blind study. See also: pubmed/20956710 secret Revealed: secret plan to push 'happy' pills The Guardian, 7 November 2004 MPs probe drugs giant's bid to boost Seroxat Fears over new targets for anti-depressant Happy pills only make the producer of them happy. A recent Duke university study showed exercise works as well as if not better than anti-depressants; furthermore anti-depressants only mask the symptom by great accelerating the serotonin levels. The proper treatment is to displace animal and trans fats in cellular membranes with the phospholipids that are supposed to be there: various short chain fatty acids in the omega 3 family: ALA, DHA, EPA and GLA; this allows the neurotransmitter receptors to function properly and not "ignore" the already correct level of serotonin in your body. ties The corrupt business of medicine The New York Times Review of Books, Jan 15, 2009. Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial by Alison Bass Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 260 pp., $24.95 Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs by Melody Petersen Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $26.00 Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50; $18.00 (paper) Financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs.

tricks Stupid Pharma Tricks Alternet, December 22, 2010 15 Dirty Big Pharma Tricks That Rip You Off and Risk Your Health for Profit. atlantic The Atantic flu Does the Vaccine Matter? lies Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science sick Living Sick and Dying Young in Rich America Chronic illness is the new first-world problem. The Atlantic has done a credible job reporting on this issue. childbirth U.S. is the most dangerous place to give birth in the developed world According to the CDC, at least 700 women die every year from pregnancy or childbirth and 60% of childbirth related deaths are preventable. July 26, 2018 2019 SMH 'Cannot be trusted ... causing harm': Top medical journal takes on big pharma By Liam Mannix December 4, 2019 — 12.01am A leading medical journal is launching a global campaign to separate medicine from big pharma, linking industry influence to the pelvic mesh scandal that injured hundreds of women. The BMJ says doctors are being unduly influenced by industry-sponsored education events and industry-funded trials for major drugs. Those trials cannot be trusted, the journal's editor and a team of global healthcare leaders write in a scathing editorial published on Wednesday. See also: "Researchers Call to End Financial Conflicts in Medicine - BMJ paper outlines path forward for achieving financial independence" 2019 CNN CNN Lays off Pharma division “CNN’s Southeast Bureau in Atlanta, CNN Health and CNN Climate will now be under one leadership, something that was not the case before,” “As part of the normal course of business, our newsgathering team made a small restructure earlier this week that ultimately impacts 6-7 employees within CNN’s Health Unit,” a CNN spokesperson told TVNewser’s A.J. Katz. 2019-Finance Financialization of the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry Posted on December 7, 2019 by Yves Smith Yves here. This article is a bit geeky but very much worth your attention. It shows how pharmaceutical companies are flat out lying when they say they need higher drug prices to support R&D. Their profits go almost entirely to buybacks and dividends. And this analysis does not incorporate another unflattering fact: that Big Pharma spends more on marketing than research. It also describes how government funding of drug research has increased more than three times in real terms since the 1980….as executives have lined their pockets. The authors make a short set of recommendations at the end, starting with regulating drug prices. By William Lazonick, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Öner Tulum, Postdoctoral Research Associate, SOAS University of London, Matt Hopkins, Senior Researcher, The Academic-Industry Research Network, Mustafa Erdem Sakinç, Professor of Economics, Paris 13 University, and Ken Jacobson, Director of Communications, The Academic Industry Research Network. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Pharmaceutical drugs are often a matter of life or death. It should be a prime objective of government policy to rid the industry of financialization. You can download this study as a pdf here. Distributions to Shareholders The performance of the U.S. economy depends heavily on the resource-allocation decisions of very large corporations. In 2016, 2,102 companies had 5,000 or more employees in the United States, with an average of almost 21,000 per firm.[1] These enterprises were only about one-third of 1% of all firms in the U.S. economy, but they had 35% of all business-sector employees, 40% of payrolls, and an estimated 46% of revenues. Many of the largest companies in the United States are highly financialized, distributing almost all, and often more, of their profits to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks and cash dividends...