Here Is something that MIGHT ( or Might NOT ) Shock You

Rigged Clinical Trials: Drug Studies Favor the Pharmaceutical Companies Companies more concerned with profits than with patients

Global Research, November 7, 2008

Orthomolecular Medicine News Service - 2008-11-05

If you have often suspected that drug studies are rigged by the pharmaceutical manufacturer, you are right. "Drug studies skewed toward study sponsors," reported The Washington Post. (1) "Industry-funded research often favors patent-holders, study finds." Specifically, the American Journal of Psychiatry study authors said, "In 90% of the studies, the reported overall outcome was in favor of the sponsor's drug... On the basis of these contrasting findings in head-to-head trials, it appears that whichever company sponsors the trial produces the better antipsychotic drug." (2)

Marcia Angell, MD, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, agrees. "Is there some way (drug) companies can rig clinical trials to make their drugs look better than they are? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Trials can be rigged in a dozen ways, and it happens all the time." One "way to load the dice," she writes, "is to enroll only young subjects in trials, even if the drugs being tested are meant to be used mainly in older people. Because young people generally experience fewer side effects, drugs will look safer." Another of the "common ways to bias trials is to present only part of the data - the part that makes the product look good - and ignore the rest." She adds, "The most dramatic form of bias is out-and-out suppression of negative results." (3)

You will rarely hear academia complain. Why? Because they are aboard the gravy train. Dr. Angell: "Columbia University, which patented the technology used in the manufacture of Epogen and Cerezyme, collected nearly $300 million in royalties" in 17 years. "The patent was based on NIH-funded research." That means you, the taxpayer, footed the bill. Harvard is in just as deep. In its own Faustian dealings with the drug companies, "a Harvard hospital has a deal that gives Novartis rights to discoveries that lead to new cancer drugs ... Merck is building a twelve-story research facility next door to Harvard Medical School . . . In Harvard Medical School 's Dean's Report for 2003-4, the list of benefactors included about a dozen of the largest drug companies."

READ THE COMPLETE Story - found at the the Center for Research Globalization

Then COME Back Here and tell us YOUR THOUGHTS on this subject,
by Posting your comments

============================================