No Mo GMO

The Rise Of Marketing-Based Medicine

By Ed Silverman | January 28th, 2010
www.pharmalot.com/2010/01/-the-rise-of-marketing-based-medicine

Make sure to watch the video below and check out Sepp’s website at www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/health_supreme_newsgrabs

You’ve heard of evidence-based medicine. Well, a new paper summarizes a panoply of practices employed over the past two decades or so – ghostwriting, suppressing or spinning data, disease mongering and managing side effect perceptions among docs – that the authors call marketing-based medicine. And they rely on internal documents from litigation – such as the much-publicized lawsuits over anti-psychotics and antidepressants – to illustrate their point.

“While much excitement has been generated surrounding evidence-based medicine, internal documents from the pharmaceutical industry suggest that the publicly available evidence base may not accurately represent the underlying data regarding its products,” they write in Bioethical Inquiry (see here). “We propose that while evidence-based medicine is a noble ideal, marketing-based medicine is the current reality…Although many internal industry documents are legally available on the internet, there are as yet few publications in the biomedical literature based primarily on internal industry sources. These internal documents, as well as material drawn from other sources, provide insight into the intersection between marketing and science within the pharmaceutical industry.”

The essay refers to revealing emails in which execs remonstrate over trial data that contradict desired marketing messages; instances where a company ‘cherry picked’ trial results for publication; behind-the-scenes thinking about the use of ghostwriters, and materials given sales reps to help them downplay side effects when pitching docs. Much of this is familiar to those who have followed any of these issues, but the authors attempt to gather it all together to argue that marketing has all too easily trumped science. They also lament that medical journals have, at times, been manipulated.

One interesting email is from AstraZeneca’s Seroquel litigation about cherry picking data in which one employee writes to others that hiding data may come back to haunt everyone. “There has been a precedent set of cherry picking data…Thus far, I am not aware of any repercussions regarding interest in the unreported data. That does not mean we should continue to advocate this practice,” the AZ employee writes.

“There is growing pressure from outside the industry to provide access to all data resulting from clinical trials conducted by industry. Thus far, we have buried trials 15, 36 and 51 and are now considering COSTAR.

The larger issue is how do we face the outside world when they begin to criticize us for suppressing data. One could say our competitors indulge in this practice. However, until now, I believe we have been looked upon by the outside world favorably with regard to ethical behavior. We must decide if we wish to continue this distinction. The reporting of the COSTAR results will not be easy. We must find a way to diminish the negative findings. But in my opinion, we cannot hide them.”

We should also note that, as psychologists, the lead researcher may advocate therapy before, or instead of, medication, an issue that has been raised before on this site when discussing psychology’s views of antidepressants.

Very Good Video

p2pfoundation.net/jeffrey-smith-on-the-dangers-of-genetically-modified-foods/2010

“Expert Jeffrey M. Smith, author of the #1 GMO bestseller Seeds of Deception, and Genetic Roulette, entertains a wildly appreciative audience with shocking facts about how genetically modified organisms (GMOs) entered our lives. Smith links GMO to toxins, allergies, infertility, infant mortality, immune dysfunction, stunted growth, and death. Whistleblowers were fired, threatened, and gagged, and warnings by FDA scientists were ignored.”