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Doctors Without Borders
Why you can't trust medical journals anymore.
By Shannon Brownlee
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For the past two decades, medical research has been quietly corrupted by
cash from private industry.

Most doctors and academic researchers aren't corrupt in the sense of
intending to defraud the public or harm patients, but rather, more
insidiously, guilty of allowing the pharmaceutical and biotech industries
to manipulate medical science through financial relationships, in effect
tainting the system that is supposed to further the understanding of
disease and protect patients from ineffective or dangerous drugs.

More than 60 percent of clinical studies--those involving human
subjects--are now funded not by the federal government, but by the
pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

That means that the studies published in scientific journals like Nature
and The New England Journal of Medicine--those critical reference points
for thousands of clinicians deciding what drugs to prescribe patients, as
well as for individuals trying to educate themselves about conditions and
science reporters from the popular media who will publicize the
findings--are increasingly likely to be designed, controlled, and
sometimes even ghost-written by marketing departments, rather than
academic scientists.

Companies routinely delay or prevent the publication of data that show
their drugs are ineffective. The majority of studies that found such
popular antidepressants as Prozac and Zoloft to be no better than
placebos, for instance, never saw print in medical journals, a fact that
is coming to light only now that the Food and Drug Administration has
launched a reexamination of those drugs.

Today, private industry has unprecedented leverage to dictate what doctors
and patients know--and don't know--about the $160 billion worth of
pharmaceuticals Americans consume each year.

This is an unsettling charge that many (if not a majority) of doctors and
academic researchers don't want to acknowledge.

Once grasped, however, the full scope and consequences of medical conflict
of interest beget grave doubts about the veracity of wide swaths of
medical science. As Dr. Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of The Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA), puts it, "This is all about
bypassing science.

Medicine is becoming a sort of Cloud Cuckoo Land, where doctors don't know
what papers they can trust in the journals, and the public doesn't know
what to believe."

Clinical trial and error

How did we get to this point? What effect is industry influence having on
the treatment of patients? And why are the medical journals not more
vigilant to weed out papers that have been distorted by conflict of
interest? The answers to these questions begin, oddly enough, with an
amendment to U.S. patent law called the Bayh-Dole Act. Passed in 1980,
Bayh-Dole for the first time permitted universities to commercialize
products and inventions without losing their federal research funding, the
seed money for innovative research.

The brainchild of George Keyworth II, President Reagan's science advisor,
who was watching the United States get beaten in world markets by the
Japanese, Bayh-Dole was intended to stimulate advanced technological
invention and speed its transfer from university labs into private
industry, where it could be put to work spurring U.S. productivity.

It seemed like a win-win proposition. Indeed, Bayh-Dole has helped launch
the biotech industry and has propelled several life-saving products to
market.

The basic research behind Gleevec, for instance, an incredibly effective
new anti-cancer drug, was done by a university scientist. The drug's
manufacturer, Novartis, stepped in and provided additional funding for
development. In 1984, private companies contributed a mere $26 million to
university research budgets.

By 2000, they were ponying up $2.3 billion, an increase of 9,000 percent
that provided much needed funds to universities at a time when the cost of
doing medical research was skyrocketing.

And what about us patients? What are we to do with the knowledge that much
of what passes as science in medicine is little more than gussied-up
marketing?

There isn't much we can do. And so, I say if you're ill, if you are
ailing, or just sick at heart, go find a doctor who listens, who holds
your hand.

Just make sure you find a doctor who looks at evidence, not opinion, and
when she pulls out the prescription pad, start asking a lot of questions.

Shannon Brownlee is a fellow at the New America Foundation.

SEE:

Gangsters In Medicine - Rense.com Gangsters In Medicine By Thomas Smith

Valley@healingmatters.com. c. 2002-3 By Thomas Smith All rights reserved
12-23-2 ...
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