Medical journal reveals that 70 percent of drug decision-making panel members

[Guest guest]

Medical journal reveals that 70 percent of drug decision-making panel members

have financial ties to industry

http://www.newstarget.com/019608.html

 

The journal Nature has published studies showing that 70 percent of the drug

decision panels run in this country are rigged with decision-makers who have

strong financial ties to the very drug companies whose products are affected

by these decisions.

 

So much for evidence-based medicine. Drug approval decisions have little to do

with evidence and everything to do with materialistic greed and cold, hard

cash. That cash is doled out to decision-makers in the form of research

grants, consulting fees and outright bribes. These decision-makers, who are

often physicians, generally do not reveal their conflicts of interest. Yet

they accept positions on decision-making panels where these so-called experts

sit around and decide what should be the standard practice for various

diseases, symptoms and conditions. Write-ups of those practices are then

distributed to physicians around the country who follow the procedures. The

journal Nature has revealed that 70 percent of these panels are rigged with

decision-makers who have conflicts of interest.

 

Conventional medicine tries to say this is all evidence-based. They say you

should trust all this information because doctors are trained in medical

school and their studies are published in peer-reviewed journals. What they

don't tell you is the reality of the situation, which is that pharmaceutical

companies pay for most of the clinical trials conducted on drugs, and nearly

all drug trials magically produce results that favor the firm footing the

bill.

 

They also don't tell you that the negative studies are swept under the rug and

censored by the drug companies. You only hear about the positive studies. They

could conduct trials on a particular drug in which five trials reveal that the

drug kills people and five other trials reveal that it helps people, and guess

which five you will hear about? Guess which five the mainstream press will

cover in the news? Guess which five will show up in a published peer-reviewed

article in the medical journals? They also don't tell you about the influence

of medical journals themselves.

 

Drug-pushing medical journals

 

Drug company advertising brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year that

fund these medical journals and pay the salaries of the editors who determine

which studies the journal will and won't accept. So guess what gets into the

journals? That's right -- the studies that promote prescription drugs. The

benefits of these drugs are routinely exaggerated and the risks are routinely

minimized.

 

When something goes wrong with the drug and it starts killing tens of

thousands of Americans, guess what? They convene a decision panel. This is

what happened with the FDA recently, when they convened a panel to decide

whether Vioxx was dangerous enough to be banned from the marketplace. It turns

out Vioxx has probably killed more than 60,000 Americans, according to a

senior drug safety researcher at the FDA, Dr. David Graham. He revealed this

in testimony before the U.S. Senate. According to the FDA, that's not

dangerous enough to pull the drug. The FDA panel voted to keep Vioxx on the

market.

 

What they did not tell you is that many of those panel members had strong

financial ties to drug companies. They were being paid consulting fees or

receiving research grants from the very companies that were affected by their

decisions.

 

Once again, so much for evidence-based medicine. The only evidence that I'm

finding here is evidence of a giant drug racket. There is ample evidence of

corruption and collusion. In fact, the more you look at this industry, the

more you realize just how deeply the American people have been conned. It's a

giant scam. There are really no other words to describe it. To call it

scientifically based medicine is a hoax. It's an insult to real science and

honest scientists.

 

Prescription drugs are a leading cause of death in America

 

Conventional medicine wants you to think these drugs are recommended because

they've been scientifically proven, because they have undergone safety testing

and have been approved as safe by the FDA. They don't tell you the rest of the

story. Prescription drugs are now the fourth leading cause of death in this

country. The drugs approved as safe by the Food and Drug Administration are

now killing 100,000 Americans a year.

 

Prescription drugs make deaths from terrorism, murder, automobile collisions

and illegal drug use seem tiny by comparison. The number of deaths from

prescription drugs dwarfs just about everything else that's happened in this

country in terms of fatalities. That's the story they absolutely do not want

you to know about. In fact, it has taken years for the truth to surface about

these decision panels populated by experts with ties to the pharmaceutical

industry. They don't go out of their way to tell you about their conflicts of

interest. They keep them hidden until someone comes along, does the research

and finds out that these people have been taking money from the very companies

whose products they are testing.

 

Intimidation of critics

 

Do you know what happens when you're a doctor on one of these panels and you

vote against the approval of one of these drugs? Take a guess. Your research

money suddenly dries up, and you have no more research grants. Your career

fizzles out. In fact, this was happening at the Harvard Research Medical

Center. One of the people there, Dr. James Fries, characterized it as " a

pattern of consistent intimidation by the drug companies. " That's his quote,

and that's what's happening to experts who don't say good things about

prescription drugs.

 

Critics can easily be blackballed by the industry, so there is tremendous

pressure on doctors and decision-makers to always vote in favor of

brand-named, high-profit prescription drugs anytime they sit on decision

panels. Now, they will tell you they have no conflicts of interest. They say,

" We only decide based on the evidence. " And yet they consistently decide in

favor of dangerous drugs, even when clear evidence of harm is right in front

of them.

 

They are heavily influenced by drug company money, intimidation, threats and

the medical profession's " circle the wagons " mentality. For years and years,

I've been warning about collusion in the drug industry and the magnitude of

the drug racket in the United States. This industry is largely a scam. In

fact, what's going on today is criminal in nature.

 

If you wish to be a healthy individual, then you have to find alternatives to

prescription drugs. You have to say no to unnecessary surgery, radiation and

chemotherapy. You must get outside this corrupt system and move on to

something that actually promotes healing like naturopathic medicine,

nutrition, herbal medicine, homeopathy or massage therapy. These are the areas

of medicine in which you can experience and discover lasting human health.

 

Don't be a financial slave to drug companies that are only interested in

turning your body into a profit center. Remember, they can only make more

money by expanding the definition of disease and using your body as a system

for generating financial profits. They're exploiting your health to generate

shareholder profit. That's the reality of what's going on out there today, and

thanks to the Internet, the truth about conventional medicine is finally

beginning to be told.

 

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" The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. " -Albert

Einstein