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The pharmaceutical “disease business” is the largest deception and fraud business in human history.            
--Dr Rath

The Laws of the Pharmaceutical Industry
http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/PHARMACEUTICAL_BUSINESS/laws_of_the_pharmaceutical_industry.htm

http://tinyurl.com/zgmi 

It is not in the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry to prevent or cure common diseases but rather manage them in the most profitable way.

The maintenance and expansion of diseases is a precondition for the financial growth of the pharmaceutical "disease business".

1   The pharmaceutical industry is an investment industry driven by the profits of its shareholders. Improving human health is not the driving force of this industry.

2   The pharmaceutical investment industry was artificially created and strategically developed over an entire century by the same investment groups that control the global petrochemical and chemical industries.

3   The huge profits of the pharmaceutical industry are based on the patenting of new drugs. These patents essentially allow drug manufacturers to arbitrarily define the profits for their products.

4   The marketplace for the pharmaceutical industry is the human body – but only for as long as the body hosts diseases. Thus, maintaining and expanding diseases is a precondition for the growth of the pharmaceutical industry.

5   A key strategy to accomplish this goal is the development of drugs that merely mask symptoms while avoiding the curing or elimination of diseases. This explains why most prescription drugs marketed today have no proven efficacy and merely target symptoms.

6    To further expand their pharmaceutical market, the drug companies are continuously looking for new applications (indications) for the use of drugs they already market. For example, Bayer’s pain pill Aspirin is now taken by 50 million healthy US citizens under the illusion it will prevent heart attacks.

7    Another key strategy to expand pharmaceutical markets is to cause new diseases with drugs. While merely masking symptoms short term, most of the prescription drugs taken by millions of patients today cause a multitude of new diseases as a result of their known long-term side effects. For example, all cholesterol-lowering drugs currently on the market are known to increase the risk of developing cancer – but only after the patient has been taking the drug for several years.

8   The known deadly side effects of prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the industrialized world, surpassed only by the number of deaths from heart attacks, cancer and strokes (Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998). This fact is no surprise either, because drug patents are primarily issued for new synthetic molecules. All synthetic molecules need to be detoxified and eliminated from the body, a system that frequently fails and results in an epidemic of severe and deadly side effects.

9   While the promotion and expansion of diseases increase the market of the pharmaceutical investment industry - prevention and root cause treatment of diseases decrease long-term profitability; therefore, they are avoided or even obstructed by this industry.

10   Worst of all, the eradication of diseases is by its very nature incompatible with and diametrically opposed to the interests of the pharmaceutical investment industry. The eradication of diseases now considered as potential drug markets will destroy billions of investment dollars and eventually will eliminate this entire industry.

11   Vitamins and other effective natural health therapies that optimize cellular metabolism threaten the pharmaceutical "business with disease" because they target the cellular cause of today’s most common diseases - and these natural substances cannot be patented.12

Throughout the more than one hundred year existence of the pharmaceutical industry, vitamins and other essential nutrients, with defined functions as cofactors in cellular metabolism, have been the fiercest competition and the greatest threat to the long-term success of the pharmaceutical investment business.

13   Vitamins and other effective natural health therapies that effectively prevent diseases are incompatible with the very nature of the pharmaceutical "business with disease."14 To protect the strategic development of its investment business against the threat from effective, natural and non-patentable therapies, the pharmaceutical industry has – over an entire century - used the most unscrupulous methods, such as:

15   The pharmaceutical "business with disease" is the largest deception and fraud business in human history. The product "health" promised by drug companies is not delivered to millions of patients. Instead, the "products" most often delivered are the opposite: new diseases and frequently, death. [I think the petroleum industry would have to appear somewhere on the list - i.e., for suppression of free energy.]

16   The survival of the pharmaceutical industry is dependent on the elimination by any means of effective natural health therapies. These natural and non-patentable therapies have become the treatment of choice for millions of people despite the combined economic, political and media opposition of the world’s largest investment industry.

The Pharmaceutical Cartel
http://medicaltruth.com/PharmaCartel/home.htm

The Pharmaceutical companies are certainly NOT "leading the search for cures" but are in fact responsible for "creating" some devastating diseases and squelching any independent research that does discover a cure.

"It used to be that drug companies simply gave grants to academic medical centres for the use of their clinical researchers to do a study and that was it. It was at arm's length. The researcher did a study and he or she published the results, whatever those results would be. Now, it's very, very different. 

"The drug companies increasingly design the studies. They keep the data. They don't even let the researchers see the data. They analyse the data. They decide whether they're going to even publish the data at the end of it. They sign contracts with researchers and with academic medical centres saying that they don't get to publish their work unless they get permission from the drug company. 

"So, you can see that the distortion starts even before publication. It starts in determining what's going to be published and what isn't going to be published. This is no longer arm's length. It's treating the researchers and the academic medical centres as though they were hired guns or technicians or something. 

"They just do the work. And the drug company will decide what the data show, what the conclusions are and whether it will even be published."
------ Dr Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Australian Broadcasting Corporation - LATELINE  http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/s160431.htm

Salk & Sabins' Tainted Polio Vaccine?"
http://medicaltruth.com/PharmaCartel/polio.html

The Cancer Cure you'll never get!
http://medicaltruth.com/rife/home.htm

Numerous links on everything about Vaccines & much more
http://www.whale.to/vaccines.html

The Berlin Tribunal (Acrobat Reader file)
http://medicaltruth.com/pdf-files/WEBGB.pdf

Study suggests adverse drug reactions are among the top causes of death in U.S.
http://www.ama-assn.org/sci-pubs/sci-news/1998/snr0415.htm#jma71005

CHICAGO—Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in U.S. hospitals may be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths nationwide each year, making it one of the leading causes of death, according to an article in the April 14 issue of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA).

Bruce H. Pomeranz, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues from the University of Toronto, analyzed 39 studies of ADRs in the United States to estimate the incidence of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions in hospital patients. To obtain overall incidence rates of ADRs in hospitalized patients, the researchers combined the incidence of ADRs in the hospital and the incidence of ADRs causing admission to the hospital.

The authors estimated that 2,216,000 hospital patients experienced a serious ADR and 106,000 deaths were caused by ADRs in the United States. This could account for 4.6 percent of all causes of recorded death in 1994, making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death.

The World Health Organization defines ADRs as any noxious, unintended and undesired effect of a drug, which occurs at doses used in humans for prophylaxis [prevention], diagnosis or therapy. The authors define a serious ADR as one requiring hospitalization prolonging hospitalization, or one that is permanently disabling or results in death.

The researchers found no significant correlation between ADR incidence and year the studies were conducted. They write: "This result seems surprising since great changes have occurred over the last four decades in U.S. hospitals that should have affected the incidence of ADRs. Perhaps, while length of hospital stay is decreasing, the number of drugs per day may be rising to compensate. Therefore, while the actual incidence of ADRs has not changed over the last 32 years, the pattern of their occurrence has, undoubtedly changed," the authors write.

The authors determined that ADRs are one of the leading causes of death by using the highest and lowest possible estimates. Using the higher estimate placed ADRs as the fourth leading cause of death, behind heart disease (743,460 deaths), cancer (529,904 deaths) and stroke (150,108 deaths). Using the lower estimate placed ADRs as the sixth leading cause of death behind those previously mentioned, as well as pulmonary disease (101,077 deaths) and accidents (90,523 deaths). ADRs would then rank ahead of pneumonia and diabetes.

The authors conclude: "While our results must be viewed with some circumspection because of the heterogeneity among the studies and small biases in the sample, these data suggest that ADRs represent an important clinical issue."
(JAMA. 1998;279:1200-1205)

Editorial: How Worried Should We Be?

In an accompanying editorial in the April 15 JAMA, David W. Bates, M.D., M.Sc., of Partners Healthcare Systems, and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass., cautions that there are several concerns about the way the study was done, although the authors adhered to the generally accepted criteria for meta-analyses. "First, an inherent limitation of meta-analysis is that combining the results of small, heterogeneous studies does not necessarily bring one closer to truth, particularly if the processes used to identify and to validate the presence of the events were heterogeneous. Second, the hospitals studied are probably not representative of hospitals at large. Such studies are more likely to be conducted in academic, tertiary care hospitals; these hospitals have sicker patients, and these patients have more ADRs. Another issue is whether the sites of care sampled within the institutions were representative of the institutions."

Dr. Bates adds: "Nonetheless, these data are important, and even if the true incidence of ADRs is somewhat lower than that reported ... it is still high, and much higher than generally recognized."
(JAMA. 1998;279:1216-1217)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1252321,00.html 

More than 10,000 people a year may die from the side-effects of medicines prescribed by their doctors and most of those deaths are unnecessary, says a new study.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal today, finds that one in 16 of all admissions to hospital is caused by the side-effects of a drug. The cost to the NHS of the mostly avoidable treatment of these patients is estimated at £466m a year.

The researchers investigated the reasons why 18,820 patients were admitted to two hospitals in Merseyside during a six-month period. They found that 1,225 were suffering from an adverse drug reaction (ADR). Most patients recovered, but 28 died.

The authors, Munir Pirmohamed, professor of clinical pharmacology at Liverpool University, and colleagues, say that their figures suggest that drug side-effects caused the deaths of about 5,700 patients.

They say that at any one time "the equivalent of up to seven 800-bed hospitals may be occupied by patients admitted with ADRs ... Measures are urgently needed to reduce the burden on the NHS".

Drug giant accused of false claims 
Whistleblower alleges illegal encouragement of off-label use
http://www.msnbc.com/news/937302.asp?0ct=-30h#BODY

Scientist David Franklin says he became part of a broad mission at pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert to deceive, even entice doctors to prescribe drugs to patients whether it was scientifically justified or not.

July 11 [2003] — The questions began with the confession of an insider at one of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical firms. He says his former company deliberately distorted information about one of its drugs, possibly putting lives at risk, and costing patients and taxpayers millions of dollars. "Dateline" went looking for some answers and has the results of a year-long investigation into what may be one of the biggest medical deceptions in history. NBC’s John Hockenberry reports.

DAVID FRANKLIN: "I was trained to deceive, to lie to doctors."

John Hockenberry: "So these doctors were completely misled?"

Franklin: "Absolutely."
Who would train and then pay someone to mislead doctors? Scientist David Franklin says pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert paid him to do that back in 1996.

Franklin: "It was my responsibility to leverage the trust that physicians had with pharmaceutical companies to corrupt the relationship between the physician and the patient."

John Hockenberry: "Your job was to find trust, and exploit it, to produce more sales for Warner-Lambert."

Franklin: "Absolutely."
Since he was a little boy growing up in Rhode Island, Franklin says, he wanted to be a scientist. But he wanted to use that science to help people, doing medical research to cure disease. So Franklin got his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Rhode Island and from there became a researcher at the prestigious Dana Farber Cancer Institute. After more than three years as a researcher, Franklin wanted to get out of the lab. He found a job at Parke-Davis, a division of Warner-Lambert. He would be a medical liaison, using his scientific expertise to explain the scientific merits of drugs to doctors.

Franklin: "The medical liaison was supposed to be fair and balanced, where the physician could trust what the medical liaison was telling them."

Hockenberry: "So, doctors wouldn’t necessarily see you as a company guy, as much as they would see you as a scientist. As as a medical doctor, like them in a way."

Franklin: "Exactly. A person whose primary responsibility is to care of the patients, making sure that the doctor, to enable the doctor to practice the best possible medicine that science would allow at this point in time."

Hockenberry: "So, a doctor needs more drugs for their practice. They call the salesman. But if they have questions about the medical use of that drug, they call you."

Franklin: "Exactly."
But almost immediately, Franklin says, he became little more than a salesman. The job he thought would be about caring for people turned out to be little more than caring for the company’s bottom line. With his Ph.D. and the title of doctor, Franklin says he became part of a broad mission to deceive, even entice doctors to prescribe drugs to patients whether it was scientifically justified or not.

Franklin: "It was a matter of leveraging, corrupting, if you would, perverting the science, to greatly increase sales and profitability."
This corporate whistleblower, telling his story to "Dateline" in his first broadcast interview, has rocked the pharmaceutical industry to its core. Pieced together with confidential documents and taped voicemails, you’ll see a portrait of sales over science.

But mostly this is the story of how David Franklin helped one little drug become a star: Gabapentin, one of the drugs Franklin was responsible for, which goes by the brand name Neurontin. Neurontin is a useful and generally safe drug. The Food and Drug Administration approved it in 1993, but for only one use — to help control epileptic seizures and only if taken in conjunction with another drug.
But Franklin says he soon learned that Warner-Lambert had plans for Neurontin, the little epilepsy drug, a plan to go directly to doctors and get them to prescribe Neurontin for all kinds of uses the FDA hadn’t approved, called "off-label" uses.

Hockenberry: "Warner-Lambert basically told you, ‘The FDA says, scientifically, Neurontin treats epilepsy. But we can convince doctors. And here’s how you’ll do it, to use Neurontin for a dozen other things."

Franklin: "Absolutely. This was holding their hands and pushing them into to using Neurontin off-label."
And according to Franklin, the list of off-label uses was long, everything from attention deficit disorder to alcohol and drug withdrawal.
Now, off-label uses are nothing new. Doctors have been observing surprising new uses for drugs throughout history. Some of their discoveries become medical breakthroughs. One of the best-known examples is aspirin, once thought only good for pain, was found by doctors to increase blood circulation and prevent heart attacks.

Hockenberry: "So it’s legal for doctors to say, ‘You know what? I think this drug that is approved for your ear might be good for your throat.’"

Franklin: "Not only is it legal, but it’s good medical practice."
But what is not legal is for a drug company to promote such unapproved, off-label uses or to exaggerate or report unproven breakthroughs to doctors as a way to get them to prescribe their drugs. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Sheehan, one of the country’s leading prosecutors of health care fraud, says such regulation exists because off-label use can be unsafe.

Sheehan: "Every prescription drug is an inherently dangerous product with the potential to kill people as well as cure them. That’s why we have very strict regulation, that’s why we have rules about what marketing and promotion they can do. That’s why we have rules about what they can produce and how they produce it."
Franklin says the rules went out the window from the moment he arrived on the job. For instance, he was told not simply to wait for doctors to ask him for his scientific opinions, but to instead target doctors and convince them to prescribe Neurontin, even though he knew that there was no FDA approval for its off-label uses.
Franklin says he was actually "cold calling" doctors, showing up like a salesman unannounced, and he found one thing about him opened a lot of doors.

Franklin: "If I were to show up at a doctor’s office and say, ‘Dr. Franklin is here to speak to Dr. Smith,’ Dr. Smith is much more likely to respond, as opposed to his receptionist calling him in his office, and saying, ‘The Warner-Lambert sales rep is here to talk to you.’"
Franklin didn’t say that he wasn’t a medical doctor. Simply having the title of doctor, the Ph.D. he was so proud of, was all that mattered, Franklin says, and Dr. Franklin, it turns out, wore lots of hats, depending on whom he was visiting.

Hockenberry: "So, you could have had a Ph.D. in economics or metallurgy, and it would have been just as fine?"

Franklin: "As long as it granted me the title of Dr. Franklin."

Hockenberry: "What were you told to tell doctors about your background?"

Franklin: "We actually trained the sales representatives to introduce me as an expert in cardiovascular medicine."

Hockenberry: "Were you?"

Franklin: "Absolutely not. My Ph.D. was in microbiology. At 9 in the morning I was an expert in cardiovascular medicine. At 10 when we walked across the street to a neurologist office, I was an expert in neurology."

Was there a risk? Adams’ dosage was tripled. Neurontin is known to have few if any side effects, one of its big selling points. But Neurontin was now Adams’ only treatment for bipolar disorder, which was very risky because Neurontin, it turns out, does essentially nothing for bipolar disorder — and that’s a scientific fact.

Dr. Gary Sachs: "Neurontin’s a drug that has been studied under double-blind conditions twice. And in neither case did it prove to have any efficacy at all."

Hockenberry: "In neither case?"

Sachs: "In neither case."
Dr. Gary Sachs runs the Bipolar Treatment Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Hockenberry: "So, based on the science, someone with bipolar who’s only taking Neurontin is essentially untreated."

Sachs: "I think that’s a fair assumption."
And for a bipolar patient like Adams, being untreated can be life-threatening. On Neurontin, Adams’ manic behavior became uncontrollable. She says she tried to kill herself. She ended up in the hospital.

Hockenberry: "If your doctor gives you something, your assumption is that it works, and that somebody’s shown that it works, right?"

Adams: "Right."

Hockenberry: "In the case of Neurontin, was any of that true?"

Adams: "Not for me."
We tried to talk to Adams’ doctor at Meridian Behavioral Healthcare in Gainesville, Fla. — and Adams said she had no problem allowing us see her medical records. But the company refused our request, issuing only a statement from her doctor acknowledging that Adams was treated with Neurontin but that the drug was discontinued when she "experienced a manic episode."
Adams is back on her old medication and doing fine.

Hockenberry: "What do you have to say to the drug company that might have been very interested in doctors’ prescribing their medication?"

Adams: "I think that they’re greedy, and they just are after money. And they don’t really care about the person who takes the medicine, obviously."
David Franklin says he was surprised how easy it was for him to get doctors to switch to Neurontin or to raise dosages.

Hockenberry: "And would they do it?"

Franklin: "It’s remarkable the high percentage of physicians that would do this."

Hockenberry: "How did you feel?"

Franklin: "I would leave a physician’s office in pain. There was no other way of describing it. This is — I was in — a combination of embarrassed by what I had just done, felt responsibility to the patient, to the doctor and the patient, that I had just misled this individual. And that some third party that wasn’t even in the room, some patient, may actually be impacted by it."
Parke-Davis’ own internal documents obtained by "Dateline" show the company couldn’t have been more excited about: "new indications for Neurontin," especially for people like Adams with bipolar disorder: "Bipolar disorders offer the greatest expected return on investment ... as much as $55 million."
Even though the 1995 memo later states "there is no pre-clinical evidence of efficacy in bipolar disorders." In other words, no real scientific evidence that it would work. Franklin says the company’s enthusiasm about off-label prescriptions translated into real pressure on the job — pressure, he says, to sell.

Franklin: "I was pressured to fill the gap that the sales team, the actual sales representatives weren’t filling. That the sales representatives weren’t as effective as medical liaisons. And that we had to, I think the quote was, to take the ball and run with it."
And Franklin let "Dateline" experience this sales pressure just as he did, through this recorded voicemail from his boss.

"You know there’s a Neurontin push that’s supposed to be on.... So what we need to do is focus on Neurontin, when we get out there - we want to kick some ass on Neurontin - we want to sell Neurontin on pain all right? And monotherapy...I don’t know if you guys are embarrassed, but I’m embarrassed with where we are with Neurontin."

Franklin saved this voicemail because he could barely believe what his boss was saying: sell Neurontin expressly for uses not approved by the FDA. Franklin was frightened. What he was being asked to do, he believed, was illegal. So he began to tape more conversations and messages from company officials. Here’s a quote from a senior Warner-Lambert executive on a conference call:

"I want you out there every day selling Neurontin... holding their hand, whispering in their ear — Neurontin for pain, Neurontin for monotherapy, Neurontin for bipolar, Neurontin for everything.... I don’t want to see a single patient coming off Neurontin before they’ve been up to at least 4,800 milligrams a day."

And then he said this:

"I don’t want to hear that safety crap either.... It’s a great drug"

We showed Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Sheehan that colorful quote.
Sheehan: "It would seem to me that’s a pretty clear advocacy for off-label use by the company. And therefore a violation of the FDA’s rules."

Hockenberry: "You know, I don’t know if I’d use the word advocacy. I might use, like, threat."

Sheehan: "When I look at this, Neurontin not for pain, not an on-label use, Neurontin for bipolar, not approved, no application for that either. Neurontin for everything, well, that’s pretty obvious."
And company sales people got to make this pitch right in the inner sanctum of doctors’ offices. Franklin would tell doctors they could get paid to let company sales reps go over patient medical records and to actually be there in the examining room while patients were being treated.

Franklin: "If you are willing to allow a sales representative to spend a day with you as you see patients, we’ll compensate you for that. We’ll pay you for it."
This is a voicemail Franklin recorded, in which a salesman boasts about his success after a day spent with a doctor and his patients:

"The doctor would review the chart of each patient with me in a one-on-one fashion. Then we would go meet the patient, the patient would be examined. I saw the actual prescription generated in front of me... that was certainly nice. I certainly felt that me being there, I had some influence on that medical decision."

Medical decisions that were very good business. From its introduction in 1993, Neurontin the little epilepsy drug, has rocketed to the top of the sales charts. Today it’s a more than $2 billion drug, outselling even blockbuster Viagra, and more than three-quarters of Neurontin’s sales, by the parent company’s own estimate, are from off-label uses.
But Franklin was having serious doubts about the safety of off-label use, about his job and about what kind of legal trouble he might be in. He would not make it through his first year at Parke-Davis. In the summer of 1996, he decided he’d had enough.

GOING PUBLIC
By the early summer of 1996, after four months working as a medical liaison for Warner-Lambert, David Franklin began to realize it was time to get out. He believed what he was doing was wrong and feared what would happen if he stayed.

Franklin: "I knew that in the period of time that I had been there, my own personal behavior was illegal, that I had done things that were simply illegal."
His biggest worry was that he was aiding and abetting a medical fraud. The scientist who reluctantly became a salesman now wondered if he had what it took to blow the whistle on a drug company worth billions.

Franklin: ""Either I needed to own up to this now and put it behind me, or at some point in the future, this could come back, and I’d find myself on the wrong side of this investigation. I did believe, when I left, that they were so aggressively ramping this up, that at some point, someone would expose what was going on there. And therefore, I would find myself in the equally, or even more difficult, position of trying to explain why I ignored an obvious illegal and immoral activity within the company."

So on July 29, he drove to a co-worker’s home, dropped off his office keys and company car and turned his back on Parke-Davis for good. Next stop? Greene and Hoffman attorneys at law.

Franklin: "I showed up to their office saying, I’ve— I’m in trouble. And I need some help out of this."
Franklin filed a lawsuit against Warner-Lambert and its Parke-Davis division charging the company with violations of the U.S. False Claims Act. He says he was not motivated by the fact that he stands to be in line for a percentage of the damages if the company loses or if it settles out of court.

Tom Greene: "We had no idea the extent of the Neurontin prescriptions, how successful this program had been."
Tom Greene is David Franklin’s attorney. He has spent the last seven years amassing Warner-Lambert and Parke-Davis documents going back to 1994. He shared many of them with "Dateline" — they fill more than 160 boxes, memos and reports that prove, Greene says, that David Franklin was merely a cog in a grand marketing strategy to deliberately and illegally encourage off-label use.

Greene: "There are countless documents that support what he says and go far beyond his story and bring the level of knowledge of this illegal marketing program to the highest levels of the company."
For example, one memo shows that plans for marketing Neurontin for at least one off-label use were sent to top executives, including Anthony Wild, the president of Parke-Davis’ pharmaceutical division, and Lodewijk de Vink, president of parent company Warner-Lambert. Neither responded to our request for comment.
Other Parke-Davis documents, like one from 1997, show that there were teams inside the company not merely pushing the envelope on acceptable marketing practices but deliberately advocating going around the expensive FDA approval process, because the patent life of the drug was so short.
The "recommendation" is that Parke-Davis "not file" an application with the FDA but instead take the message straight to the doctors.
It was a full-court press. While sales reps and medical liaisons like David Franklin supplied company information in doctors’ offices, documents show company messages being planted aggressively in the scientific literature. Doctors simply trying to stay educated about new drugs would find themselves inundated with research, paid for by the company and made to look like independent scientific papers.

Greene: "They wanted to disseminate knowledge of these off-label uses throughout the medical literature. They hired outside companies to write articles about off-label uses so that the message about off-label use of Neurontin could be planted in the medical literature around the country, and indeed around the world."
Here’s one example of how what Parke-Davis called its "publication strategy" worked: A company called Medical Education Systems of Philadelphia (MES) was hired by Parke-Davis to put together a series of articles on off-label uses of Neurontin. MES would contact doctors hand-picked by Parke-Davis to author the articles. But in some cases, it appears that articles were essentially ghostwritten by MES, and the doctor’s name added later. As one MES status report notes: "MES draft completed — we just need an author."
And what did the doctors get for becoming authors of papers they sometimes didn’t write? Fees of up to one thousand dollars a pop.

Sheehan: "You are attempting to create a false impression, and you are making false representations, and you’re doing it for money. I just don’t see how that approach can be supported or can be viewed as appropriate."

Hockenberry: "You know, it’s always been my impression that the finding of an author precedes the actual writing of the paper."

Sheehan: "One would hope that’s what would happen."
Papers were just the beginning. Franklin says there was lots of money to go around.

Hockenberry: "Did you pay doctors?"

Franklin: "I personally did not pay physicians. What my responsibility was, was to let physicians know that there was money available to them."
In fact the documents show there were all kinds of ingenious ways for doctors to get paid for an education in the use of Neurontin. For instance, "honoraria" are fees paid to doctors to hear information or a presentation about Neurontin. Parke-Davis records show that these scientific presentations occurred in some unscientific places: "Bus to Yankee Stadium," "World Yacht Cruise" and "Braves Stadium."
Doctors were also recruited for teleconferences, seminars and trips to places like Jupiter Beach, Fla., perhaps better known for golf than for research.
Paying physicians like this, giving them drug company money to listen to information about the products they prescribe, may be legal and common practice in the industry, but to critics like Dr. Arnold Relman, professor emeritus at Harvard and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, it’s a conflict of interest — especially in the case of Neurontin.

Relman: "What you have is an unproven drug being widely used for difficult problems by doctors who are given a powerful economic incentive to do it, spurred on by a company that’s wildly aggressive in its marketing."
After seven years of legal motions and countermotions, Franklin’s lawsuit is now being scrutinized by the U.S. government and all 50 states to see if government medical programs like Medicaid may have been defrauded into spending millions on improper off-label prescriptions.
And in fact, in recently filed court papers, the Justice Department said that Franklin’s case "has presented evidence of an illegal off-label marketing scheme that is rife with false statements and fraudulent conduct all of which had one intended purpose and result — increasing sales ..."
Three years ago, Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert and Parke-Davis, so now the biggest drug company in the world is the defendant in one of the highest-profile cases in the history of the industry. Pfizer officials would not speak on camera but did provide this statement: "...the events to which you referred are alleged to have occurred well before — in some cases years before — Pfizer acquired Warner-Lambert. Pfizer completed the acquisition of Warner-Lambert in June 2000. It is long-standing policy that Pfizer has not and does not promote its products outside their FDA-approved labeling.... We are unable to comment further because of the pending litigation..."
But it’s litigation that will mean little to Regina Adams, who says she will always believe that her experience with bipolar disorder and the drug Neurontin almost ruined her life.

Adams: "Now that I look back, and that I know what I know now, I wouldn’t have ever taken the drug. I want everybody to know that’s taking this drug the truth about it."
Last year the FDA approved the use of Neurontin in the treatment of post herpetic neuralgia, severe nerve pain, in addition to epilepsy. It is still widely prescribed for pain and a variety of other unapproved uses, some of which have been studied and endorsed by scientists and approved for use in other countries.
And as for whistleblower Franklin, he may have escaped legal liability for what he did during his four months with Parke-Davis, but he hasn’t escaped his own conscience. He admits he should have known from the start that he was heading down the wrong path.

Franklin: "Actually interviewing for this position, I was asked about giving examples of where I had to bend the rules in the past and how I handled that and how comfortable was I working in gray areas."
This case could end up clarifying some of those gray areas and end up costing defendant Pfizer millions of dollars. And there’s one more thing. Because his lawsuit is filed under the federal False Claims Act, as a whistleblower Franklin stands to get a piece of any monetary damages, up to 30 percent, which could add up to millions. So the four-month job in sales that caused so much agony for this scientist, ironically, might in the end have set him up for life.

Hockenberry: "But even after you get a settlement, if you do, or a judgment if you do, or the case just completely goes away if it does, there are patients out there who took drugs based on decisions doctors made relying on your judgment."

Franklin: "Right."

Hockenberry: "They could be hurt because of that."

Franklin: "They may have been hurt. And that’s something that I wrestle with."

Hockenberry: "What’s to wrestle with? If they’re hurting, it’s because of you."

Franklin: "It’s because of me. There hasn’t been a day in six years that I haven’t thought about this and wrestled with my involvement in it and the guilt I feel associated with it, and the sense that I need to correct it."

Facts about the FDA, the AMA, ADA.
http://medicaltruth.com/FDA-AMA/home.htm

"The sincerest motives of the medical PROFESSION are derailed by the greed and power of the medical INDUSTRY."

The Medical System in the USA is guilty of deception, fraud, murder, and cover-ups. But this does not mean the entire system is useless. Rarely is anything bad w/o some good. An MD's skills are wonderfully used when they can save lives from accidents, gunshots, birth defects, and such. If you are ever shot or injured, the first place you want to go is the Emergency Room, staffed with well-trained, competent surgeons! It is not this area of medicine that is the problem. It is the area of treating illness or diseases where the problem exists, and the problem lies mainly with the system's control over what options the MD's have available.

For example: if you are ever diagnosed with cancer, you need to know that your MD or Oncologist is legally forbidden from curing your cancer. Their hands are tied by the FDA and AMA, who have used their power to pass legislation forbidding any licensed MD from treating cancer with anything other than treatments that have never proven to work - surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.

"The thing that bugs me is that people think the Food and Drug Administration is protecting them -- it isn't. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it's doing are as different as night and day." --Dr. Herbert L. Ley, former Commissioner of the FDA

Did you know? The average lifespan of the average American is 75 years, while the average lifespan of your MD is 58 years! Following your doctor's advice can cost you 17 years of your life (if you're lucky)!! Is there something our Doctor's are not being taught?

In spite of our supposedly superior medical technology, the USA is #1 in the world in degenerative disease and the 20th in life expectancy. - World Health Organization.

"Heart disease, cancer, stroke are the top 3 killers in our country [Despite the fact that all 3 of these diseases have been curable for decades]. The 4th major killer in the US is prescription drugs." - USA Today

Did you know that each of these diseases was cured over 20 years ago: diabetes, heart disease, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, osteoporosis, arthritis, ulcers and others? Yes, each of these diseases has been cured - in animals, not in people! Why not in us? Could there be something veterinarians know that our doctors are not allowed to tell us?

Any treatment that you can obtain and self-administer threatens to remove your doctor from the treatment program. Although your doctor may not object to this, the American Medical Association (AMA) is strongly opposed to such a trend. For this reason the American Medical Association has pushed for legislation to prevent the public from ever being exposed to alternatives.

The term conspiracy has become extremely unfashionable. It is popular to label anyone who points out a conspiracy as paranoid. This reaction is so prevalent that we have developed into a society of closed minds. Open up a bit and consider what powerful drug companies have accomplished after decades of a Congress for sale. The legislation that the Pharma-Cartel companies have managed to get passed has a real effect on anyone who becomes sick.

(For a full explanation and analysis of this issue, visit Quack Pot Watch and find out how you can protect your freedom of choice in health care. Don't let someone else's greed rob YOU of YOUR health!)

(Medical professionals kill over 300,000 patients a year as a result of medical negligence! - USA Today, 1/13/91)

Comparative cost: new drugs v older drugs
From http://www.voanews.com/       
Select topic 'Health & medicine'

"The cost per pill is roughly ONE TO THREE CENTS per pill in contrast to A DOLLAR OR MORE per pill for some of the more expensive medicines that are currently available," Dr. Appel said.

Dr. Appel adds the results of the study may encourage doctors to prescribe diuretics more often for their patients with hypertension.

But then again maybe not, since he says the drugs are no longer aggressively made and promoted by large pharmaceutical companies.

JAMA link
http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v288n23/rfull/joc21962.html

JAMA. 2002;288:2981-2997

The journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. But The Observer has uncovered evidence that many articles written by so-called independent academics may have been penned by writers working for agencies which receive huge sums from drug companies to plug their products.

Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for 'lending' their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed.

These papers endorsing certain drugs are paraded in front of GPs as independent research to persuade them to prescribe the drugs.

In February the New England Journal of Medicine was forced to retract an article published last year by doctors from Imperial College in London and the National Heart Institute on treating a type of heart problem. It emerged that several of the listed authors had little or nothing to do with the research. The deception was revealed only when German cardiologist Dr Hubert Seggewiss, one of the eight listed authors, called the editor of the journal to say he had never seen any version of the paper.

An article published last February in the Journal of Alimentary Pharmacology , which specialises in stomach disorders, involved a medical writer working for drug giant AstraZeneca - a fact that was not revealed by the author.

The article, by a German doctor, acknowledged the 'contribution' of Dr Madeline Frame, but did not admit that she was a senior medical writer for AstraZeneca. The article essentially supported the use of a drug called Omeprazole - which is manufactured by AstraZeneca - for gastric ulcers, despite suggestions that it gave rise to more adverse reactions than similar drugs.

Few within the industry are brave enough to break cover. However, Susanna Rees, an editorial assistant with a medical writing agency until 2002, was so concerned about what she witnessed that she posted a letter on the British Medical Journal website.

'Medical writing agencies go to great lengths to disguise the fact that the papers they ghostwrite and submit to journals and conferences are ghostwritten on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and not by the named authors,' she wrote. 'There is a relatively high success rate for ghostwritten submissions - not outstanding, but consistent.'

Rees said part of her job had been to ensure that any article that was submitted electronically would give no clues as to the origin of the research.

'One standard procedure I have used states that before a paper is submitted to a journal electronically or on disc, the editorial assistant must open the file properties of the Word document manuscript and remove the names of the medical writing agency or agency ghostwriter or pharmaceutical company and replace these with the name and institution of the person who has been invited by the pharmaceutical drug company (or the agency acting on its behalf) to be named as lead author, but who may have had no actual input into the paper,' she wrote.

When contacted, Rees declined to give any details. 'I signed a confidentiality agreement and am unable to comment,' she said.

A medical writer who has worked for a number of agencies did not want to be identified for fear he would not get any work again.

'It is true that sometimes a drug company will pay a medical writer to write a review article supporting a particular drug,' he said. 'This will mean using all published information to write an article explaining the benefits of a particular treatment.

'A recognised doctor will then be found to put his or her name to it and it will be submitted to a journal without anybody knowing that a ghostwriter or a drug company is behind it. I agree this is probably unethical, but all the firms are at it.'

One field where ghostwriting is becoming an increasing problem is psychiatry.

Dr David Healy, of the University of Wales, was doing research on the possible dangers of anti-depressants, when a drug manufacturer's representative emailed him with an offer of help.

The email, seen by The Observer, said: 'In order to reduce your workload to a minimum, we have had our ghostwriter produce a first draft based on your published work. I attach it here.'

The article was a 12-page review paper ready to be presented at an forthcoming conference. Healy's name appeared as the sole author, even though he had never seen a single word of it before. But he was unhappy with the glowing review of the drug in question, so he suggested some changes.

The company replied, saying he had missed some 'commercially important' points. In the end, the ghostwritten paper appeared at the conference and in a psychiatric journal in its original form - under another doctor's name.

Healy says such deception is becoming more frequent. 'I believe 50 per cent of articles on drugs in the major medical journals are not written in a way that the average person would expect them to be... the evidence I have seen would suggest there are grounds to think a significant proportion of the articles in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal and the Lancet may be written with help from medical writing agencies,' he said. 'They are no more than infomercials paid for by drug firms.'

In the United States a legal case brought against drug firm Pfizer turned up internal company documents showing that it employed a New York medical writing agency. One document analyses articles about the anti-depressant Zoloft. Some of the articles lacked only one thing: a doctor's name. In the margin the agency had put the initials TBD, which Healy assumes means 'to be determined'.

Dr Richard Smith, editor of the British Journal of Medicine, admitted ghostwriting was a 'very big problem' .

'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,' he said.

'When we find out, we reject the paper, but it is very difficult. In a sense, we have brought it on ourselves by insisting that any involvement by a drug company should be made explicit. They have just found ways to get round this and go undercover.'

Links

http://www.drugawareness.org