J. Douglas Bremner
See book keywords and concepts |  Ire a t m e n t s
One of the drug industry's most charming commercials features a healthy and glamorous-looking sixty-something actress who confides to viewers that she has gotten shorter and that her doctor told her she might have bone fractures. Then she smiles and cheerfully advises women to see their doctors if they have gotten shorter. She also says that osteoporosis may be making women's bones brittle. The words Actonel (risedronate) float across the screen, and a male voice fires off the typical list of possible side effects, caveats, and contraindications. | | In response to efforts to regulate the content of TV ads for drugs, Billy Tauzin, president of the Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the lobbying organization for the drug companies, was quoted by the New York Times (May 17, 2005) as having said, "We don't make ice cream or handbags or automobiles, we make products that save lives" ("Drug Industry Is Said to Work on Ad Code").
The argument drug manufacturers make for the high cost of their products, which has become an old saw by now, is that the money supports research and development of new life-saving meds. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  The invention and marketing of fictitious diseases via television advertising has proven instrumental to the drug industry's successful pushing of medically unjustified drugs onto consumers. (See the Disease Mongering Engine to invent your own fictitious diseases and disorders right now!)
The survey further revealed 54 percent of consumers think that viewing drug advertisements allows them to "take charge of their health care." The survey did not, however, reveal whether these people were in fact suffering from deterimental cognitive side effects at the moment they were taking the survey. |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
See book keywords and concepts |  HOOKED ON DRUGS
John touched on another important area where the medical profession has lost credibility: its ties with the drug industry. Medical education and drug companies are in bed together, and have been for quite some time. John talked some about the depth of the problem and how the educational system has been corrupted. He said:
The problem with doctors starts with our education. The whole system is paid for by the drug industry, from education to research. The drug industry has bought the minds of the medical profession. It starts the day you enter medical school. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
See book keywords and concepts | | FDA's Counsel Accused of Being Too Close To drug industry, , Jeanne Lenzer, 7/24/2004.
• NIH Scientists Caught Concealing Millions in Royalties, Alliance for Human Research Protection, , 1/11/2005.
• FDA Wins Spoof Award for its "Collusion" with the drug industry, British Medical Journal 2005; 330:555, 3/12/2005.
• Reputation of the FDA in Shambles after Vioxx Scandal; Calls for Wholesale FDA Reform, , 11/10/2004.
• American Consumers Suffering as More New Drugs Debut in US, Analysis Shows, Pugh and Borenstein, Knight-Ridder, 12/18/2004. |
Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey
See book keywords and concepts |  In the 1999-2000 election cycle, the drug industry spent more money on political lobbying than any other industry, more than the oil and gas industry, more than tobacco, more than the insurance or automobile industry. The drug industry has also ratcheted up its spending on doctors. The number of drug representatives employed to make pitches directly to doctors rose by 57% in the 1990s to a total of88,000 by the end of the decade. Perhaps most remarkably, the drug industry now funds 40% of continuing education in American medical schools. | | Lawrence Diller, later spoke of his testimony in an article that appeared in the February 4,2004 Christian Science Monitor, addressing his "loss of faith in my academic colleagues to generate accurate information and opinions that I feel I can trust because of the extremely intimate link between researchers and the drug industry." And what of improving regulation of the medical profession? Diller says this in the same article:
We don't have to worry about regulation of doctors because the government has been bought off and so has the public by the drug industry. |
Shannon Brownlee
See book keywords and concepts |  In response, the drug industry is already shifting some of its marketing effort away from drug reps. In early 2007, Pfizer announced it was cutting ten thousand jobs worldwide, including a 1 o percent reduction in its sales force.
Concerned doctors have taken it upon themselves to help their colleagues learn to read the medical literature more critically. The Cochrane Collaboration, for instance, performs meta-analyses, or studies of studies, to provide physicians with the most valid data. | | All three of those sources provide some good data, and a lot of misinformation. The drug industry spends about twenty-five billion dollars a year marketing drugs to doctors, and its sales reps are part of that strategy. According to one study, for every dollar spent on marketing a drug to doctors, a company reaps on average more than ten dollars in sales. |
Andreas Moritz
See book keywords and concepts |  And the doctors are satisfied that their patients are happy. The drug industry is satisfied because the patients are doomed to taking expensive drugs for the rest of their lives.
Risk Indications of a Heart Attack
Most food-related blood vessel diseases, including heart attacks, stroke, rheumatism and angina pectoris, are not primarily disorders of sugar and fat metabolism, but diseases resulting from protein storage. |
Shannon Brownlee
See book keywords and concepts | | Saturation advertising from the drug industry and slick "disease awareness" campaigns from patient advocacy groups, many of which are funded by pharmaceutical companies, make us fret constantly about illness and have helped turn us into a nation of the worried well.
Free speech
In his book Generation Rx, Greg Critser traces the beginning of direct-to-consumer drug advertising to a couple of young Madison Avenue hotshots named Joe Davis and William Castagnoli. In 198 c, the two were hired by Merrell Dow to advertise its new antihistamine, a drug called Seldane. | | We'll now look at the drug industry's role
(and to a lesser extent the device industry's) in persuading both patients and doctors that we're sicker than we really are, and that the path to wellness lies with medical intervention: with a pill, an operation, or a test. Today, direct-to-consumer ad campaigns routinely paint mild conditions as serious and normal variations in human characteristics as disease. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
See book keywords and concepts | | FDA Wins Spoof Award for its "Collusion" with the drug industry, British Medical Journal 2005; 330:555, 3/12/2005.
• Reputation of the FDA in Shambles after Vioxx Scandal; Calls for Wholesale FDA Reform, , 11/10/2004.
• American Consumers Suffering as More New Drugs Debut in US, Analysis Shows, Pugh and Borenstein, Knight-Ridder, 12/18/2004.
• FDA Delays Response to Drug Suit, , Associated Press, 11/4/2004.
• "Risk-Free" Drugs Don't Exist, Business Week Online, 2/23/2005.
• Testimony of Barbara Atkinson, MD on House Bill 2355, KUMC Campus News, 3/17/2005. | | Drug Industry and HMO's Deployed Nearly 1,000 Lobbyists to Push Medicare Bill. Press Release, 6/23/2004.
• Corporate Control of Our Genes. Jonathan King, .
• NIH Research Money Spent Per Death, , 6/24/2004.
Chapter 17 In the "Bush"
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it for religious convictions. - Blaise Pascal
George W. Bush is the President of the United States, and the "buck" stops here; whoops! That was Harry Truman's slogan. |
Ron Garner
See book keywords and concepts |  An example of a synthetic vitamin which is perpetrated as the real thing is ascorbic acid. The drug industry calls it vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is not vitamin C, but rather a fraction, the outside layer of the biologically utilizable vitamin C complex, as shown in Figure 16.1. i- ASCORBIC ACID -1
ASCORBICEN BIOFLAVINOID COMPLEXES
TYROSINAS E
P FACTORS K FACTORS J FACTORS
1- ASCORBIC ACID -1
Figure 16.1 Complete vitamin C complex
Likewise, alphatocopherol, which is sold as Vitamin E, is only part of the Vitamin E complex. As Richard Murray points out:
... |
Bottom Line Health
See book keywords and concepts | | Prior to 1980, most clinical research was publicly funded, but now most is funded directly by the drug industry and other medical industries, whose primary mission is to maximize the return on investments for investors.
Now, 90% of clinical trials are commercially funded—as well as 75% of published clinical research. When a pharmaceutical company sponsors a study, the odds are five times greater that the findings will favor its product. |
Shannon Brownlee
See book keywords and concepts | | A month and a half after Lunesta's debut, doctors were writing sixty thousand new prescriptions a week for the drug, and drug industry analysts were proclaiming the dawning of a new day for the sleeping pill market. The two existing sleep drugs, Ambien and Sonata, shared a two-billion-dollar-a-year market between them. Corey Davis, an analyst with JP Morgan, predicted in the Wall Street Journal that sleep drug sales could hit six billion dollars by 2008. Lunesta, said Davis, "could do for the insomnia market what Prozac did for depression. |
Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey
See book keywords and concepts | | Diller says this in the same article:
We don't have to worry about regulation of doctors because the government has been bought off and so has the public by the drug industry. The ads directed to consumers convince everyone that life is simply.. .neurotransmitter bubbles going from one set of synapses to another. The lobbying of the drug industry is legendary—and this is a doctor speaking.
Dr. Diller testified at a hearing where the FDA was gathering information on the risks antidepressants pose to children. | | The drug industry has also ratcheted up its spending on doctors. The number of drug representatives employed to make pitches directly to doctors rose by 57% in the 1990s to a total of88,000 by the end of the decade. Perhaps most remarkably, the drug industry now funds 40% of continuing education in American medical schools.
Not only do pharmaceutical companies spend more on lobbying than any other industry, they also employ more lobbyists, with the total exceeding the total number of people serving in the House of Representatives. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
See book keywords and concepts |  Not until July 2002 did negative exposure about this unethical practice force the drug industry to "voluntarily" create new ethical guidelines, which explicitly outline the proper interaction between a salesperson and a physician.
According to the guidelines, salespeople can no longer persuade physicians with gifts, meals, equipment, tickets to sporting events or shows, or pay for medical conferences, travel, lodging or other personal expenses that would personally benefit a physician. | | It has been described as a revolving door — from the drug industry to the FDA just in time to chair a panel responsible for approving a drug application from the company he or she used to work for; the drug gets approved; and within a few months, perhaps a year it's, "See ya, FDA," and back to the company whose drug was just approved.
According to Byron J. Richards, author of Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America, the interim head of the FDA, Andrew von Eschenbach, M.D., and FDA Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs, Scott Gottlieb, M.D. |
Charles Barber
See book keywords and concepts |  An Indian medical journal complains that the country is becoming "the greatest source of human guinea pigs for the global drug industry."51 GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Novartis all run trials there. Why? Vast numbers of potential research subjects, cheaper costs, and the fact that the patient population is "treatment naive"—they are largely unexposed to drugs, which makes the evaluation of the effect of a given drag easier. India's other advantages include English-speaking medical personnel, lots of hospitals (700,000 specialty beds), and medical colleges (221). | | It is the belief that such a cure-all agent exists that has created the massiveness of the psychiatric drug industry in the first place.
The other caveat is that the approaches explored in the coming chapters require earnest work and a strong commitment to get better. These treatments and approaches require action instead of passivitythe patient can no longer just be a vassal—a mere recipient of a pill— but must take the lead and be in charge of their own treatment and their own recovery. This requires, unfortunately, sweat and bother. | | The size and reach of the psychiatric drug industry is staggering. It is far, far greater than most psychiatric practitioners realize and certainly greater than the drug companies would want you to know. There are various ways to measure the dimensions of the enterprise:
• 3 3 million Americans were prescribed at least one psychiatric drug in 2004, up from 21 million in 1997.13
• The spending on antidepressants rose from $5.1 billion in 1997 to $13.5 billion in 2006; and on antipsychotics from $1.3 billion in 1997 to 11.5 billion in 2006. | | The Bush administration has had very close ties with the drug industry: Donald Rumsfeld, for example, was formerly CEO of Searle, which was acquired by Pharmacia, the makers of Xanax, and budget director Mitch Daniels was vice president of Eli Lilly.
For all the talk of disaster, the top seven U.S.-based drug companies made $34 billion profit from $193 billion in revenues in 2004, which translates to an 18 percent profit margin.6 In 2006, the return on revenues for the pharmaceutical industry was 20 percent, making it the second most profitable industry in America. | | In the 1990s, the drug industry's profitability grew to almost four times the median for all industries in the Fortune 500. By the early 2000s, it had increased to more than eight times the median.24
At this point, the sins of the big drug companies are well known, or at least better known. The excesses and ethical lapses have become so blatant that even mainstream bastions of free enterprise such as Forbes have labeled the drug companies as corporate "pill pushers" and accused them of abandoning science for sales. | | In the drug industry generally, marketing dominates science. The drug companies consistently spend almost double on marketing what they do on research.54 As omnipresent as drug ads on TV have become, expenditures on advertising make up only a very small portion of the marketing budget. Up to 90 percent of the marketing budgets go directly to manipulating the source—directly toward influencing the doctors themselves—in the form of drug samples, lecture fees, and "educational" grants. |
Bottom Line Health
See book keywords and concepts | | To learn more, we talked with John Abramson, MD, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School who is widely recognized for his in-depth research of the drug industry...
•Are most Americans overmedicated? They sure are. Americans take many drugs unnecessarily, and when drugs are needed, people often take the wrong ones. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
See book keywords and concepts |  At stake is the credibility of specialists, who must stand up for their patients and not answer to the powerful empire of the drug industry.
Why do drugs cost four dollars a day for the individual consumer? Why doesn't our government get to negotiate lower prices through Medicare as is done through the Veterans Administration, for example? The simple answer is that landmark legislation—the Medicare Bill Part D—was passed by Congress in 2003 to prevent this and to ensure that millions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on drugs. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  Big Pharma owns the FDA and Congress. The drug industry sees FDA management and Congressional leaders as a training pool for future Big Pharma jobs -- based on how well Big Pharma is supported. There will certainly be plenty of rewards to pass out after this legislation becomes law.
It is a sick situation that this new fake safety legislation provides the FDA with unprecedented new power to stamp out competition to drug companies as well as expose Americans to far greater safety risks than ever before. |
page 1 of 9 | Next ->
FAIR USE NOTICE: The research quoted here is provided under the protection of Fair Use provisions and published by the 501(c)3 non-profit Consumer Wellness Center for the purposes of public comment and education. Authors / publishers may submit books for consideration of inclusion here.
TERMS OF USE: Read full terms of use. Citations of text from NaturalPedia must include: 1) Full credit to the original author and book title. 2) Secondary credit to the Natural News Naturalpedia as a research resource and a link to www.NaturalNews.com/np/index.html
This unique compilation of research is copyright (c) 2008 by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center.
ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of this NaturalNews Naturalpedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.
|
 |
Refine your search
with Drug industry...
...and Key Health Concepts:...and Drug
...and Drugs
...and Health
...and Medicine
...and Side effects
...and Products
...and Disease
...and Prescription
...and Prescription drugs
...and Diet
...and Objects:...and Industry
...and People
...and Companies
...and Market
...and Company
...and School
...and Pills
...and Pill
...and Data
...and Prescriptions
...and Adjectives:...and Medical
...and Public
...and New
...and Little
...and American
...and Paid
...and European
...and Whole
...and Potential
...and Free
...and Who:...and Doctors
...and Patients
...and Americans
...and Physicians
...and Patient
...and Physician
...and Human
...and Families
...and Adults
...and Family
...and Concepts:...and Research
...and World
...and Education
...and Time
...and Money
...and Marketing
...and Care
...and Access
...and Alternatives
...and Advertising
...and Organizations:...and Fda
...and Drug companies
...and Medical school
...and Hospitals
...and Government
...and Establishment
...and Pharmaceutical companies
...and Manufacturers
...and Organization
...and Pharmacy
...and Where:...and United states
...and Canada
...and America
...and Harvard
...and England
...and Boston
...and Japan
...and Canadian
...and Mexico
...and San francisco
...and Physiology:...and Effects
...and Levels
...and Increasing
...and Young
...and Effect
...and Prevent
...and Protection
...and Immune
...and Condition
...and Developing
...and Actions:...and Taking
...and Growing
...and Making
...and Sleep
...and Eat
...and Learning
...and Approach
...and Standing
...and Understanding
...and Play
...and Anatomy:...and Body
...and Heart
...and Head
...and Face
...and Brain
...and Chest
...and Arms
...and Muscles
...and Joint
...and Urinary tract
|
Related Concepts:
Drug
Industry
Drugs
Medical
Doctors
People
Fda
Research
Companies
Patients
Health
Americans
Drug companies
Public
Medicine
New
Medical school
World
Market
Physicians
Education
Company
Medical profession
Side effects
Effects
Little
Time
Products
Money
Marketing
United states
Disease
Prescription
Prescription drugs
Prozac
Prescription drug
Educational
School
American
Bob
Paid
Diet
Pharmaceutical industry
European
Whole
Care
Hospitals
Patient
Free
Alternatives
Access
Canada
Potential
Treatment
Advertising
Pills
Study
Medical students
Physician
America
Safety
Taking
Government
Treatments
Clinical
Direct-to-consumer
Nutrition
Apa
Pill
Diseases
Body
Medical education
Sales
Health care
Example
Medicines
Studies
Establishment
True
Practice
Pharmaceutical companies
Nih
Food
Medications
Profits
Data
Codex
Federal
Alkaloids
Chemical
Levels
Problems
Criticizing
New drugs
International
Services
Experience
Travel
Heart
Prescriptions
|
Email this page to a friend
