Massive medical fraud exposed: pharmaceutical company paid doctors to prescribe

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Massive medical fraud exposed: pharmaceutical company paid doctors to

prescribe drugs and run sham clinical trials

 

Here's a must-read article for anyone interested in learning how the

pharmaceutical industry really operates. It's a case of aggressive

marketing gone bad, with a mixture of corrupt physicians, underhanded

payola and a near-total disregard for patient health. And yet it's

business as usual in the pharmaceutical industry: drug maker

Schering-Plough, one of the largest drug companies in the world, has

been outright bribing physicians to prescribe drugs and operate sham

clinical trials.

 

Here's how it would work: doctors who prescribed the drug company's

products and avoided competing drugs were paid " consulting fees " of

tens of thousands of dollars. And what kind of consulting did these

doctors do? The kind of consulting that requires nothing more than

signing a blank sheet of paper and cashing the check, of course. And

thousands of doctors participated in this criminal scam, collecting

untold sums of money in exchange for hyping Schering-Plough's

pharmaceuticals to patients. (Medical ethics, anyone?)

 

Doctors were paid even more money to conduct fraudulent clinical

trials that would require patients to take the drugs for twelve months

at a time, which of course rang up even more drug profits for the

manufacturer and resulted in more kickbacks to the doctors. That's

right: they're literally playing doctor with your life while pocketing

the drug money.

 

If all this sounds outrageous, think again: this is precisely the kind

of criminal activity that now typifies the pharmaceutical industry and

organized medicine in general. These companies will do anything to

make a buck, including outright bribing doctors with lavish meals,

free gifts and even trips to Hawaii and other exotic destinations, all

under the guise of " continuing medical education " (CME) courses. It's

all a scam, and the vast majority of physicians just go right along

with it, pocketing the benefits and dosing up their patients with

whatever drug they've been told to prescribe.

 

I've seen it myself: a room-full of doctors in Hawaii, ditching a drug

company sponsored " education " event, where airfare and hotels were

provided for free. Why were the doctors ditching the class? Because

they wanted to have fun in Hawaii, and attendance wasn't required

after the first hour. It's basically just a paid vacation scam,

courtesy of the pharmaceutical company. And it's happening every day,

right now.

 

Prescription drugs are so profitable -- some drugs are now sold at

more than 500,000% markup over the actual cost of their raw

ingredients -- that drug companies will do practically anything to

sell more pills. They invent fictitious diseases and urge doctors and

parents to dose their children with powerful narcotics. They conduct

fraudulent clinical trials, making sure to bury any negative results

that would show how dangerous their drugs really are. They buy the

favor of the media by pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into

magazine, television, newspaper and online advertising. They pressure

the FDA into delaying the ban on extremely dangerous drugs in order to

squeeze out another twelve months of profits even while patients are

dying from drug-induced liver failure.

 

And the scam works: drug profits are up. Way up. Meanwhile, the

American people are sicker than ever. Drugs aren't helping the

population at large, all they're doing is turning the United States

into a nation of chemical zombies who suffer from the extremely toxic

side effects of taking dozens of prescriptions in combination.

 

It's the greatest con in American history. It's the racket of the

millennium. The drug companies are running the show, cutting off drugs

from Canada, monopolizing the U.S. market, running the FDA, bribing

doctors and killing patients all the while. Even based on statistics

from conventional medicine, prescription drugs are right now killing

100,000 Americans each year and injuring another two million. And that

doesn't count the tens of thousands of additional deaths caused by

NSAIDs and over-the-counter painkillers.

 

It's not an exaggeration to call this a medical holocaust. These drug

companies seem determined to dose the entire population with as many

simultaneous prescriptions as possible, as long as it generates

profits for their shareholders. Business ethics are nowhere to be

found in the pharmaceutical industry these days: it's all about money,

profits, power and control.

 

And the funny part about all this is that these drugs are almost

entirely unnecessary. There's not a single chronic disease that's

actually cured or reversed from any prescription drug in existence.

All these drugs do is treat symptoms and barely keep the patients

alive long enough to write another check to cover their growing

medical debt. Chemotherapy is a sham and has absolutely no scientific

merit whatsoever. (Yes, it shrinks tumors, but it adds nothing to a

patient's lifespan.) Statin drugs are a con, and yet they're being

over-prescribed for all sorts of chronic disorders that actually need

to be treated with nutrition and exercise, not drugs. And

over-the-counter drugs are both extremely dangerous and highly

ineffective. NSAIDs kill some 40,000 patients each year from

intestinal bleeding -- and yet offer no real benefit to patients that

couldn't be achieved from simple changes in diet and exercise.

 

The FDA, meanwhile, watches all this and focuses its own efforts on

discrediting herbal supplements like ephedra. The agency seems

determined to outlaw or regulate all nutritional supplements, thereby

making vitamins illegal and practically guaranteeing another decade of

outrageous profits for drug companies. It's no surprise: most FDA

employees used to work for drug companies (or plan to in the near

future). Many FDA employees maintain strong financial ties to the

pharmaceutical industry. They're simply out to crush the natural

health industry and thereby boost their own personal profits from

pharmaceuticals.

 

Modern medicine is in shambles, folks. It's a train wreck. We're

sicker, fatter and more depressed than ever. And the really good

advice that people need isn't reaching them. Good health is really

simple, it turns out. Get lots of natural sunlight on your skin daily.

Eat superfoods like chlorella and spirulina. Avoid all refined

carbohydrates and processed foods. Ban soft drinks from your life.

Never touch cigarettes. Pick up strength training, yoga, pilates,

cycling, jogging or some other physical exercise activity. And

breathe, people. Breathe consciously. Your body needs oxygen. Learn

how to put yourself in control of your own health: read Take Back Your

Health Power!

 

In a way, the massive fraud now being exposed in western medicine is a

blessing in disguise. Big Medicine has gone so far over the top with

aggressive marketing and downright evil (if not criminal) tactics that

the whole profiteering orgy is going to come crashing down on them.

Big Medicine will soon be history -- remembered as just a moment of

insanity in the history of modern civilization. Some day, people will

say, " Do you remember when the whole country was dosed up on

chemicals? " They'll shudder with the thought of it -- how we were all

duped by the drug companies, by our family doctors, and by the Bush

Administration's complicity in the whole scheme. They'll ask, " How

could an entire country go mad like this? "

 

And the answer, of course, is that the whole country was doped up on

prescription drugs that alter brain chemistry, cloud the mind, and

turn ordinary consumers into pill-popping zombies.

 

It was a brilliant scam. It generated billions of dollars in profits.

And now the truth is starting to come out: Big Medicine is about to

become another sad chapter in the history of human deception. Good

riddance.

 

Highly recommended reading: Death By Medicine by Gary Null, Ph.D.

 

Now, here's the full article on prescription drug bribery originally

published by the New York Times, included here for educational and

discussion purposes only, under fair use consideration.

 

Printable version of this article

 

See more articles on:

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Overview:

 

* As Doctors Write Prescriptions, Drug Company Writes a Check

 

The check for $10,000 arrived in the mail unsolicited. The

doctor who received it from the drug maker Schering-Plough said it was

made out to him personally in exchange for an attached " consulting "

agreement that required nothing other than his commitment to prescribe

the company's medicines. Two other physicians said in separate

interviews that they, too, received checks unbidden from

Schering-Plough, one of the world's biggest drug companies.

 

" I threw mine away, " said the first doctor, who spoke on the

condition of anonymity because of concern about being drawn into a

federal inquiry into the matter.

 

Those checks and others, some of them said to be for six-figure

sums, are under investigation by federal prosecutors in Boston as part

of a broad government crackdown on the drug industry's marketing

tactics. Just about every big global drug company — including Johnson

& Johnson, Wyeth and Bristol-Myers Squibb — has disclosed in

securities filings that it has received a federal subpoena, and most

are juggling subpoenas stemming from several investigations.

 

The details of the Schering-Plough tactics, gleaned from

interviews with 20 doctors, as well as industry executives and people

close to the investigation, shed light on the shadowy system of

financial lures that pharmaceutical companies have used to persuade

physicians to favor their drugs.

 

Schering-Plough's tactics, these people said, included paying

doctors large sums to prescribe its drug for hepatitis C and to take

part in company-sponsored clinical trials that were little more than

thinly disguised marketing efforts that required little effort on the

doctors' part. Doctors who demonstrated disloyalty by testing other

company's drugs, or even talking favorably about them, risked being

barred from the Schering-Plough money stream.

 

Schering-Plough says that the activities under investigation

occurred before its new chief executive, Fred Hassan, arrived in April

2003, and that it has overhauled its marketing to eliminate inducements.

 

At the heart of the various investigations into drug industry

marketing is the question of whether drug companies are persuading

doctors — often through payoffs — to prescribe drugs that patients do

not need or should not use or for which there may be cheaper

alternatives. Investigators are also seeking to determine whether the

companies are manipulating prices to cheat the federal Medicaid and

Medicare health programs. Most of the big drug companies, meanwhile,

are also grappling with a welter of suits filed by state attorneys

general, industry whistle-blowers and patient-rights groups over

similar accusations.

 

In many ways, the investigations are a response to the evolution

of the pharmaceutical business, which has grown in the last

quarter-century from a small group of companies peddling a few

antibiotics and antianxiety remedies to a $400 billion bemoth that is

among the most profitable industries on earth.

 

Offering treatments for almost any affliction and facing

competition in which each percentage point of market share can

represent tens of millions of dollars, most drug makers now spend

twice as much marketing medicines as they do researching them. Their

sales teams have changed from a scattering of semiretired pharmacists

to armies of young women and men who shower physicians with attention,

food and - until the drug industry recently agreed to end the practice

- expensive gifts, just to get two to three minutes to pitch their

wares. A code of conduct adopted in 1990 by the American Medical

Association suggests that doctors should not accept any gift worth

more than $100, but the guidelines are widely ignored.

 

A quarter-century ago, the Food and Drug Administration was the

lone cop on the drug industry beat. But the F.D.A.'s enforcement

powers over drug marketing have been severely curbed since 1976 by a

series of court rulings based mainly on the companies' free-speech

rights. That left a vacuum that many companies decided to exploit,

said William Vodra, a former F.D.A. lawyer.

 

" A lot of people decided there was no check on what they were

allowed to do, " Mr. Vodra said. Using fraud, kickback and antitrust

statutes, federal prosecutors, state attorneys general and plaintiffs

lawyers stepped into the void, asserting that the companies' sales

pitches have cost the government billions of dollars in payments for

drug benefits.

 

This legal scrutiny can be expected to intensify. Once the new

Medicare drug benefit takes full effect in 2006, the government will

pay for almost half of all medicines sold in the nation. So the

marketing programs will cost the government even more money and, if

they are uncovered and determined to be illegal, will probably result

in even larger fines.

 

Last month, Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million and pleaded guilty

to criminal charges involving the marketing of the pain drug Nuerontin

by the company's Warner-Lambert unit. AstraZeneca paid $355 million

last year and TAP Pharmaceuticals paid $875 million in 2001; each

pleaded guilty to criminal charges of fraud for inducing physicians to

bill the government for some drugs that the company gave the doctors free.

 

Over the last two years, Schering-Plough, which had sales of

$8.33 billion last year, has set aside a total of $500 million to

cover its legal problems - mainly for expected fines from the Boston

investigation and from a separate inquiry by federal prosecutors in

Philadelphia who are investigating whether Schering-Plough overcharged

Medicaid.

 

Besides looking into whether Schering-Plough paid doctors large

sums to prescribe the company's drug for hepatitis C, prosecutors are

investigating whether many company-sponsored clinical trials for the

drug were simply another way to funnel money to doctors.

 

Dr. Chris Pappas, director of clinical research for St. Luke's

Texas Liver Institute in Houston, said that Schering-Plough " flooded

the market with pseudo-trials. "

 

Dr. Pappas and eight other liver specialists who were

interviewed say the system worked like this: Schering-Plough paid

physicians $1,000 to $1,500 per patient for prescribing Intron A, the

company's hepatitis C treatment. In conventional clinical trials,

participants are given drugs free, but the doctors said that in these

cases the patients or insurers paid for their medication. Because

patients usually undergo Intron A treatment for nearly a year and the

therapy costs thousands of dollars, Schering-Plough's payments to

physicians left plenty of room for the company to profit handsomely,

the doctors said.

 

In return for the fees, physicians were supposed to collect data

on their patients' progress and pass it along to Schering-Plough, the

doctors said. But many physicians were not diligent about their

recordkeeping, and the company did little to insist on accurate data,

according to Dr. Pappas and the others.

 

One of the nation's most prominent liver disease specialists,

who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of angering big drug

makers, called the trials " purely marketing gimmicks. "

 

" Science and marketing should not be mixed like that, " the

doctor said.

 

Schering-Plough did more than encourage physicians to place

patients on Intron A, many of the physicians said. They said the

company would remove any doctor from its clinical program - and shut

off the money spigot - if he or she wrote prescriptions for competing

drugs, participated in clinical trials of alternatives to Intron A or

even spoke favorably about treatments besides Intron A.

 

The main competitor to Intron A, which Schering-Plough now sells

as Peg-Intron, is Roche's comparably priced drug Pegasys.

 

Dr. Donald Jensen, the hepatology director at Rush University

Medical Center in Chicago, said he wanted to perform clinical trials

using drugs from both Schering-Plough and Roche. " I was told by

Schering-Plough that I couldn't do both - that I had to sign an

exclusive agreement with them, " Dr. Jensen said. " That was the

juncture when Schering and I parted ways. "

 

Six specialists in liver disease said Schering-Plough also paid

what it called consulting fees to doctors to keep them loyal to the

company's products. The letter accompanying a check for $10,000

explained that the money was for consulting services that were

detailed on an accompanying " Schedule A, " said a doctor who insisted

on anonymity. But when the doctor turned to the attached sheet, he

said, " Schedule A " were the only words printed on an otherwise blank

sheet of paper.

 

Dr. Pappas, who in the past has consulted for Schering-Plough

and worked for Roche, said that stories about the enormous sums that

Schering-Plough paid its consultants were common among liver

specialists. " These were very high-value consulting agreements with

selected opinion leaders that looked like payments of money with no

clear agreements on what was supposed to be executed, " Dr. Pappas said.

 

In an interview, Mr. Hassan and other top executives declined to

discuss past marketing practices. Richard Kogan, the company's

previous chairman and chief executive, declined to be interviewed.

 

Schering-Plough's current management says that much has changed

at the company since Mr. Hassan took over. The company no longer

allows sales representatives or marketing executives to have any say

over its clinical trials, physician education or medical consulting,

they said. And in all clinical trials begun in the last year, they

said, drugs have been provided free to the enrolled patients, rather

than being billed to them or their insurers.

 

" The temptation to give clinical grants to high prescribers and

consulting agreements to high prescribers is why we pulled those

decisions out of the hands of the sales representatives, " said Brent

Saunders, who was named senior vice president for compliance and

business practices last year. " Sales representatives had an input into

that process before, which I think is still fairly normal in the

industry. "

 

In the separate Philadelphia investigation, Schering-Plough is

expected to plead guilty soon to charges that it failed to provide

Medicaid with its lowest drug prices, as is required by law, and to

pay a fine. Investigators are examining whether Schering-Plough, to

gain sales with some private insurers, offered premiums, such as free

patient consulting arrangements, with its drugs. Prosecutors are

arguing that such incentives had a market value and meant that

Schering-Plough was offering drugs to private payers at prices well

below those offered to Medicaid. Many other drug companies are the

targets of similar inquiries.

 

The Boston inquiry into suspected kickbacks and improper

marketing by Schering-Plough could take months more to resolve, people

close to the investigation say. Schering-Plough may also be charged

with obstruction of justice and document destruction as part of the

Boston inquiry, according to the company's filings with securities

regulators.

 

Industry experts say the federal inquiries into Schering-Plough

and the other drug giants have led some companies to adopt significant

changes in the way they peddle drugs to doctors. Other companies have

been slower to react. " These investigations came out of left field,

and no one saw them coming, " said Peter Barton Hutt, a former F.D.A.

general counsel who now advises drug companies. " The industry has

since had to reshape entirely what they are doing, but it was too late

to redo what they'd been doing for years. "

 

Tony Farino, leader of the pharmaceutical consulting service at

PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that as a result of the investigations

many companies in the drug industry were hiring executives to police

marketing and sales practices.

 

" Reputational risk is something they're all trying to manage, "

Mr. Farino said, " because the damages from failure can be significant. "

 

Source: http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=55366

 

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About the author:

Author Mike Adams is a holistic nutritionist with over 4,000 hours of

study on nutrition, wellness, food toxicology and the true causes of

disease and health. He is well versed on nutritional and lifestyle

therapies for weight loss and disease prevention / reversal. View

Adams' health statistics showing LDL cholesterol of 67 and outstanding

blood chemistry. Adams uses no prescription drugs whatsoever and

relies exclusively on natural health, nutrition and exercise to

achieve optimum health. Adams' books include the Seven Laws of

Nutrition, The Five Soft Drink Monsters and Superfoods For Optimum

Health. In his spare time, Adams engages in pilates, cycling, strength

training, gymnastics and comedy improv training. In the technology

industry, Adams is president and CEO of a well known email marketing

software company.