Companies that kill for profit

Which corporations do you think of first?  Halliburton, Blackwater, Lockheed Martin?  Yeah, them too-- but I'm talking about Merck and Pfizer.

In a recent editorial, the Journal of the American Medical Association detailed how Merck wrote up its own research papers on the drug Vioxx, then bribed prominent medical researchers to put their names on the papers to give them legitimacy.  We know this from court documents from lawsuits filed against Merck over premature deaths due to Vioxx.  As you recall, in roughly a 5 year period an estimated 58,000 Americans died of heart attacks caused by Vioxx, as many as we lost in the Vietnam War.  Several months ago Merck paid close to $5 billion to tens of thousands of families in a settlement agreement.  [None of this money has actually been given to victims or victims' families, it seems.  See comments for more.]

So how did Vioxx become a best-selling drug and a gold mine for Merck?  Certainly these ghost-written papers, often published in the most prestigious or prominent journals (including JAMA itself), played a role.  Drug reps cite medical literature when they are pushing doctors to prescribe drugs.  They need publications they can point to in making their sales pitch.  In fact, court documents show that Merck's marketing department was involved in this:

In an editorial on Wednesday, the journal said the analysis showed that Merck had apparently manipulated dozens of publications to promote Vioxx.

. . .

Combing through the documents, Dr. Ross and his colleagues unearthed internal Merck e-mail messages and documents about 96 journal publications, which included review articles and reports of clinical studies. In some cases, Merck's marketing department was involved in developing plans for manuscripts, the article said.

The Vioxx scandal is now several years old, but this ghostwriting practice is hardly limited to Vioxx or Merck.  In fact, having your own internal people write a journal article in consultation with marketing and advertising folks, then bribing some MD at a teaching college to slap his or her name on the thing, is apparently very common.

The [JAMA] article, based on documents unearthed in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx, provides a rare, detailed look in the industry practice of ghostwriting medical research studies that are then published in academic journals.

. . .

The lead author of Wednesday's article, Dr. Joseph Ross of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said a close look at the Merck documents raised broad questions about the validity of much of the drug industry's published research, because the ghostwriting practice appears to be widespread.

"It almost calls into question all legitimate research that's been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician," Dr. Ross said....

Wow.  We should question all research coming from Big Pharma studies, he's saying, even when the research appears to have been overseen and written up by those in academia.  This, in the pages of JAMA, which is as mainstream as it gets.

This is something to keep in mind when reading about other gold mine drugs, such as Eli Lilly's Cymbalta, which apparently increases the risk of suicide.  We can no longer turn to the peer-reviewed medical literature on PubMed and take this research at face value.  Cymbalta is Lilly's #2 best-selling drug, and you can bet they ghost-wrote the hell out of their Cymbalta data, laying on the rosy-colored spin.  Lilly's #1 top-selling drug, Zyprexa, is also the subject of lawsuits because it apparently causes weight gain and diabetes.

Unfortunately, all medical research into either conventional or alternative therapies is highly politicized, with billions of dollars at stake, and a great many unethical people involved.  If you have a health issue and you want information, it's best to read published medical studies and go over them with a fine-tooth comb.  But I will say that conventional medicine is more likely to lie than alternative practitioners, for the simple reason that far more money is involved.  People talk about "snake oil," but the real snake oil is in that little brightly colored pill whose name contains X or Z.  Many nutritional supplements are very inexpensive, whereas Big Pharma is raking in many billions of dollars a year.  Nobody spends big money marketing and advertising, say, selenium.  Selenium has been shown to reduce the risk of several types of cancer, especially colon and prostate cancers (by more than half, in some studies which followed participants for several years).  You can buy it for about $2-3 dollars per month.  The pro-selenium folks cannot make money off this mineral, but you can bet the cancer industry doesn't like it.  If I sound too cynical about those who profit from cancer treatment, consider that the American Cancer Society has a billion dollars on hand and takes in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, much of it from the pharmaceutical industry.  I just ran across this today, but the ACS looks to be... well, pretty evil. 

In short, consider this Merck example to be a warning, and keep in mind the economics: alternative medicine rarely involves major profits for anyone, while quashing alternative therapies means billions of dollars for the conventional medical industry.  And, if necessary, Big Pharma will knowingly send people to their deaths rather than lose profits off their most popular drugs.

Comments

[vioxx victim]

Merck has not paid one cent to a Vioxx plaintiff yet. Not one plaintiff in the Settlement has been paid anything. The Settlement still is a ongoing changing project that Merck and the lawyers thought up to keep the victims from getting any money for their pain and many deaths. Merck knew of the poison they were selling long before they took it off the market. Many people had their lives changed forever, and their families are dealing with the aftermath of heart attacks and strokes for the rest of their lives. The suffering victims have lost their jobs and some their very lives because of a company that puts profits first and lives last.

[freelearner]

I'm sorry, I didn't know that. The news articles I had read implied that the settlement money was being paid out to affected families. I guess I'm not surprised that they've found ways to delay this. I don't think Exxon has yet paid for the Valdez spill, in spite of court settlements.

Alternative medicine may be useful to anyone who has suffered a heart attack due to Vioxx and survived it. They might consider taking magnesium, omega-3 fatty acid supplements, CoQ10, L-carnitine, and natural vitamin E. My understanding is that all these things are extremely helpful to heart health.

Best of luck getting the bastards to pay up.

[Polymander]

Hey, I just stumbled across your blog and I love it. Except that homeschool blogs always make me a little jealous--I still wish I'd dropped out of high school (I'm a grad student now).

I noticed you've had some bad experiences with comment wars over at Kos--if you want a good newsblog where the discussion is more civil, my favorite is www.agonist.org. They pick up pretty interesting stuff, including a lot of econ.

[freelearner]

Hi Polymander,

I'm enjoying your blog as well! And accumulating a bunch of way-too-late comments on posts you wrote some time ago. I could not agree more with your post on bee propolis & HIV. I think I made a similar point in my post on the wildflower that kills MRSA. Why spend years analyzing the components, when the whole product works? Are we that afraid of natural remedies? I think mainstream medicine still follows Francis Bacon's "We Must Defeat Nature!!" school of philosophy.

By the way, my parents are growing artichokes in a little seedling bed in the window, no greenhouse required. We'll see if it can be done in Michigan without extra energy used. I've avoided grow lights and warming pads with my own seedlings, by moving the tray outside in the day and in at night. (I live near Ann Arbor, MI.) And I know that in the early 1800's wealthy families in Britain had "pineries," i.e. greenhouses in which they grew tropical plants such as pineapples. This was apparently without heating, just using layers of glass. I sometimes wonder what you could do with 2-3 layers of clear plastic (hot cap within a cold frame within a greenhouse) and some copper rods shoved 4-5' into the soil. I have a hypothesis that copper rods would bring the 55-degree temp up out of the soil. Buried lengths of copper are used in some geothermal furnaces, so there might be something to this.

Have you seen "The World According to Monsanto?" Catch it on Google Video, if you're interested. Boy are they evil.

Glad you happened by. I'll be visiting your blog too. And by the way, I highly recommend perusing "The Underground History of American Education" linked to in my sidebar. It's not "slick" or terribly well edited, but the quotations are a gold mine. Reading it was one of the many reasons why I had to stop going to Kos.