Wyeth used ghost writers to pimp it's drugs

Like the big Pahrma companies aren't making enough money bilking the public of their hard earned money, Wyeth pharmaceuticals used ghost writers to pimp it's hugely successful hormone replacement meds Premarin and Prempro. Those meds later turned out to be a major disaster for the company resulting in an increase in breast cancer and dementia in patients and thousands of lawsuits against Wyeth.

Busted: Wyeth Used Ghostwriters To Place Over 40 "Scientific" Articles In Medical Journals

Hormone replacement therapy drugs such as Premarin and Prempro were widely popular in the 1990s among women seeking to avoid the symptoms of menopause. The drugs became some of Wyeth's best sellers, raking in more than $2 billion for the company until a 2002 study showed that they significantly increased women's risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. Later research also implicated the drugs in an increase dementia risk among the elderly.

Wilson ordered Wyeth's ghostwriting documents unsealed in response to a request by the defendants, the journal PLoS Medicine and the New York Times. The documents reveal that between 1997 and 2005, Wyeth paid medical communications firms to ghostwrite at least 40 articles that promoted hormone replacement for treatment of not just menopause symptoms, but also other conditions such as Parkinson's disease. These articles, many of them reviews of prior studies, played up the benefits of the hormone drugs while downplaying their risks. The communications firms also secured doctors to put their names on the studies as authors.

The articles were published in 18 different medical journals. Neither Wyeth nor the studies' purported authors informed the journals that the company had funded the studies and employed their writers.

Read more: Natural News

I can't believe that this is only a civil lawsuit. They must have broken some kinds of criminal laws to have paid docs to attach their names to those bogus studies. I hope they at least put some scrutiny onto the ethics of the docs who attached their names to the studies.

[edit on 7/8/10 by FortAnthem]

reply to post by FortAnthem


This is not good news for many people.

They also produce "harmless' things like baby formula.
Which I fed my daughter when she was young.

Thank you Fort Anthem, I shall look into this further.

Cheers,
Pabs

Thanks for posting this OP.

No surprise here, Big Pharma would sell salt pills for 18 bucks a piece if they could get a way with it.

They do not cure anything, because cures don't make money, they sell treatments. This has been their model for at least 30-40 years.

Millions and Millions dump into research coffers for AIDS, Cancer, Hepatitis etc, yet no cures.