My Father-In-Law is an outstanding highly trained retired Allergist. As a child The Journal for the American Medical Association (JAMA) was available on the counter to read and her father modeled the behavior of reading JAMA in front of her. As a young child, she took up the practice. My wife recalls reading trials of new wonder drugs for some disease, and then a couple years latter reading about how those same wonder drugs ended up hurting people after they had been approved, and seeing announcements on the news with the stories of either class action suits or federal criminal investigations related to those same wonder drugs. This made an impact on her because she noticed it happening enough times that it formed a pattern. And so my wife has a Rule: No new medications to be used in her or our children (or me for that matter) unless the drug has been fully approved, completed Phase 4 trials and on the market for at least 30 years. She is REALLY serious about that rule. I am in BIG trouble if I break her rule.
I have mentioned before in my post I want more and more people to stop saying Big Pharma or Pharma and instead use the term BAD Pharma.
Follow the Science
I am referring to Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre.
The book is a detailed, in depth analysis of the methods by which BAD Pharma has completely captured healthcare, from the clinic exam room and the Academic Journals to the Regulatory Agencies.
Plainly put, in academic research we have a major problem. We know that about 85% of scientific research papers are not True. This book is the best summary of how that applies to healthcare.
From Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma, Introduction pp x-xi:
So, to be clear, this whole book is about meticulously defending every assertion in the paragraph that follows.
Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analyzed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favor the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies -often undisclosed- and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.
True to his word, Dr Goldacre then proceeds to thoroughly prove what he claims.
If one were to then expound on the issue and even briefly look with a critical eye into the international government alignment with Bad Pharma, one would see a situation which in economics would be referred to as regulatory capture. One would see selected experts that are made in charge of all decisions of all aspects of health. The governments then incentivize compliance with “evidence based” Bad Pharma regimens. The governments then censor all other voices and label any opposition as Mis- Dis- or Misinformation while the Bad Pharma companies use their media establishments, who Bad Pharma controls through advertising dollars, to push their agenda and protocols. Both Government, Bad Pharma, and Controlled media then schmear any dissenting voice that gets through the censorship.
(There is another word in Political Science to describe this type of relationship between government and corporate interests.)
Now with current WHO regulatory practices we plan to make that structure global in scope and mandatory in compliance…