Drug company used ghost writers to author work bylined by academics, documents show

Drug company used ghost writers to author work bylined by academics, documents show

www.rawstory.com

According to newly released documents from GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company often paid ghostwriters to pen medical studies, editorials and even a textbook that listed physicians as the authors.

The documents—some of which date back to late 1990s—were recently unsealed in litigation over a GlaxoSmithKline product. We saw them after they were attached to a letter released this week by a nonprofit watchdog group urging the National Institutes of Health to crack down on ghostwriting in

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Laden also helped a number of authors write a 2001 study that was funded by GlaxoSmithKline and concluded that a GSK antidepressant, Paxil, is “generally well tolerated and effective for [treating] major depression in adolescents.” Within a few years, problems with the study became apparent, and both UK regulators and the Food and Drug administration issued warningsabout Paxil. Glaxo, following the FDA’s warning, issued a letter in 2004 informing healthcare providers that Paxil is “not approved for use in the pediatric population, and clinical trials for PAXIL failed to demonstrate efficacy in pediatric depression.”

I have always said that "Big Pharma" is nothing but a legal drug dealer. Americans and westerners alike are hooked on their drugs, sometimes out of pure silliness. We already know that they lobby our medical professionals to get us hooked on those drugs and we already know that they have doctors on the payroll, whom it seems that they pimp out.

Now, apparently they have been going a step beyond that, but having doctors pin their name to whatever the company wants to say.

Sadly, we are forced to patronize these medical professionals and pharma companies. We aren't legally allowed to treat ourselves and sadly, the only guarentee of your self interests being looked out for, is by yourself or your family, though prevented you are.

I bet that an investigation into these drug companies and any ties with politicians would expose corruption to the extreme. Basically, your health is pimped out to these companies for profit.


--airspoon



www.rawstory.com
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reply to post by airspoon


No need to mention that the side effects of the drugs they create outweigh the initial 'healing' effects of the drug.

a great number of pills claiming to fix all kinds of mental conditions have been marketed to the public, but many of those pills were approved for sale without proper research for side effects. Even worse: the side effects might have been known but hidden to the public. Below is a list of warnings issued on commonly sold psychiatric drugs. Some of those side effects are actually frightening as a pill should not be able to have that much power over the human brain. Think about it: Some drugs are subject to warnings because they can cause you to … commit suicide?

Seems a bit odd that you would create a drug to treat mental illnesses but can concequently aggrivate the condition aswell?
Also, it is apparent that drugs like anti depressants and ritalin are being administered more and more in the coming years. I had a friend who went to a GP because she was having a few problems but nothing major and he suggested anti depressants straight away, even though exercise and a good diet can be 8X more effective than anti depressants.

May 3: FDA adverse drug reaction reports linked antipsychotic drugs to 45 child deaths and 1,300 serious adverse reactions, such as convulsions and low white blood cell count.
May 12: The manufacturer of Paxil warned that the antidepressant increases the risk of suicide in adults.
May 26: Health Canada issued new warnings of rare heart risks for all drugs prescribed for “ADHD,” including the risk of sudden death.

There are many different examples here

To me many different reasons for this come up, money is first (obviously.)
Secondly, if this whole depopulation agenda is true than this is just another part of it. Because if we are being given medicines that actually make us sicker in some way thats an alarm for it in itself.
They obviously know how toxic these medicines really are if they are getting ghost people to sign them off.
Or maybe there just trying to drug us up enough so we just take what they have in store for us next. who knows

This certainly doesnt come as a surprise.

The drug companies are just like any other company. They have advertising, marketing, and the other departments that are designed to BS you and make themselves look good.

The FDA lets this slide all the time. Look at food regulations.

SandF

I've done just about every drug there is and I can tell you that by far the pharmaceuticals are the worse most addicting out of all of them. I went through a several month addiction to Xanax and Ambien. Methadone is stronger and more addictive than street heroin. Xanax is much more overwhelming, addictive, and retards the mental functions and motor skills than any other street drug. And Prozac intensifies suicidal thoughts and really inhibits creativity or abstract thought. # all of those drugs. Why do you think kids are hitting up their mothers' medicine cabinets now instead of going to their friendly neighborhood dealer? Big Pharma is just a glorified drug dealer pushing poison and I personally will never willingly take any of their junk again. Just some vaporized marijuana and an occasional beer seems to keep the body healthy and happy.

reply to post by Joehio


I agree. Legal drug pushers.

The have the government backing them up though, so it's a bit different than the guy on the corner huh?

There have been plenty of advances in medicine that are benneficial, dont get me wrong. But when it comes to the average housewife popping pills all day.....or the kids that are bred on medication via their hypochondriac parents...

reply to post by InertiaZero

There have been plenty of advances in medicine that are benneficial, dont get me wrong. But when it comes to the average housewife popping pills all day.....or the kids that are bred on medication via their hypochondriac parents...

Ill continue that for you. The people with HIV buying treatments for the rest of there years..
Interesting fact: There is no test that can actually 100% tell if you have HIV or not, It just tests for HIV antibodies. So you could have some sort of HIV vaccine and then be tested for HIV and you will be told you have HIV even though you dont: you just have the antibodies in your system.
So people could be absolutely stigmatised from society and buy a lifetimes amout of AIDS drugs, and not even have HIV! Imagine all the revenue!
And in africa, alot of the time they dont even test for HIV. If you have the symptoms you have HIV. Note that the symptoms of HIV are close to what someone gets when they have the common cold.
Who makes HIV treatments?
Big pharma.

So in reality, Big pharma are getting insane amounts of money off people who potentially dont have HIV.
Kind of makes you question their intentions dosent it?

Why isn't the "5th branch of the government", i.e., the media, covering more of this? This should be treated as the big scandal that it is. Maybe the people have truly turned into sheep, you have pharmaceutical companies convincing you to pay through the nose for your meds and most of those meds do nothing except keep you in debt.

Some related links;
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

“There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

Glaxo used ghostwriting to promote Paxil

It's a shame we'll never have meaningful health care reform as long as big corporations are making too much money off the current system.

Aside from nebulous conspiracy theories, commerce is the aim of Big Pharma, the banks that fund them and the gambling of "insurance' investors.

Since our leaders have coopted the battlecry of "Greed is good." they are benefiting as well, at least by ensuring these financial monsters are supporting their political gamesmanship with the media, and at worst by actually investing via associates and family in the companies themselves.

The matter of 'doctored' (love the pun) papers which become legitimized as medical professionals lend their names to research they only 'reviewed' is just the tip of the iceberg. Big Pharma is NOT the only industry engaging in this lawyerly practice.

Soon, I predict, we will see more evidence of the practice in places like military contractors claims of technological capabilities, information system industries claims of cyber security, Economics reports, think-tank policy documents, etc, etc.

Sadly, commerce is a poor driver of governance since it relates directly to personal gain... and we all know where that road leads.

reply to post by littlecloud

If you test positive for two antibody screening tests in South Africa, you are usually given more tests including qualitative and quantitative PCR tests (which look for the virus itself, and the latter viral load test gives an idea of the number of viral particles, and the progression of the illness).
One is also given a CD4 count (normal counts vary between 2000-600) .
Generally no HIV medications are given until the CD4 drops to 250.
Some doctors are arguing to increase this to 350, but many already have full-blown Aids when they are tested and treated.
Actually some provinces sporadically run out of Aids drugs with serious consequences, and getting onto treatment is not easy.
Sadly there will always be some idiot who abuses things - there are reports of stolen pills and robbed patients, because some have started smoking certain ARVs with street-drugs.

reply to post by Blackmarketeer

Why isn't the "5th branch of the government", i.e., the media, covering more of this?

Because although we have freedom of speech, the guy who owns the presses AND the guy with the big advertising bucks has final say on what is printed.

The US press was turned into a propaganda machine a century ago when JP Morgan bought up the newspapers determined to be those needed to influence public opinion.

Today the media is basically dominated by five major companies they are:
Time Warner
VIACOM
Vivendi Universal
Walt Disney
News Corp
Those 5 companies own 95% of all the media that we get every day. They own the major entertainment theme parks, entertainment movie studios, television and radio broadcast networks and programing, video news and sports entertainment.
Source: hubpages.com...

Anyone involved in the fight against the take over of the food supply ran head first into this. For example: John Munsell told me in an e-mail that (deleted) a big New York media sent a reporter to cover his story. It was in-depth coverage (three days) - the editor loved it - but at the last minute the OWNER pulled the plug on the story.

I have seen the exact same type of manipulation. So do not expect the "press" to be on the side of the little guy.

Heck look at the Chairman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals - Stan Painter's testimony in the Hall in the Congressional Investigation of the Hallmark/Westland Meat recall. The USDA tried to bring criminal charges against him! There were over 1000 non-compliance reports – weighing some 16 pounds -- turned over as a result of a FOIA request. Yet the USDA and CONGRESS!!!! blew him off.

Senate Hearings
www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/pdf/109hrg/99848.pdf
Hearing where Stan Painter is blown off
www.fsis.usda.gov/PDF/RBI_Transcripts_101006.pdf


The testimony makes it very clear that the new international HACCP regs (1996) that turn control of the food supply over to the corporations was the REAL cause of the current "Food Safety Crisis"

We have been INTENTIONALLY poisoned by our own government as a means to convince us that we need laws that will allow the complete takeover of the food supply by the Corporate Cartel who CAUSED the illnesses in the first place.

reply to post by halfoldman


This is most definately true, but isnt the case alot of the time unfourtunetly.

afrol News - A growing number of researchers question the "official" inflated numbers of HIV/AIDS prevalence in African countries such as Botswana, South Africa and Lesotho. Poor testing, a special diagnosis of AIDS in Africa and erroneous computer-generated estimates by the UN had led to "misleading" numbers, they hold. The history of AIDS in Uganda serves as proof.

But among the millions of Africans given the diagnosis AIDS, only very few have actually been tested by these "unreliable tests". AIDS diagnosis on the continent with the highest prevalence is done by other standards than elsewhere, something that the World Health Organisation (WHO) had decided on in 1985, given the high costs of testing.

Diagnosis is expensive, and concidering the amount of tests that people need to go through (as you said) many people in africa simply cannot afford it and in many places there probably isnt even the right amount of medical expertise to determine wether someone has AIDS or not.
The reason why medication is so short is probably because of this.

Source

reply to post by littlecloud

That information is dated (2004), which was the high-point of Thabo Mbeki's Aids-denialism.
Rian Malan was much criticized for his arguments. He subsequently made them less statistical:
en.wikipedia.org...
I guess the Aids industry is very large, whether they try to sell a pill or a herb or a book either way.
Just because something is a pill does not make it "big pharma".
With Brazil and India we won battles for "people's pharma".
Alternative medicine makes huge profits in SA - everything from ozone, to healing waters to herbs.
Whatever the origin of AIDS, the alternative medicine doesn't help, and the pills work.
All I can say is that nobody in SA today will be given any treatment unless their CD4 is under 350 by the state.
That is virtually full-blown AIDS.
www.avert.org...
(see also testing and treatment in link)
When to start ARV treatment: www.avert.org...
This is our SA guideline. There is no way that ARVS will be dished out to a person who is not probably tested.

reply to post by halfoldman


Oh really? My mistake then
Still, it is a very profitable disease. Ive read articles claiming that HIV is man made but i am yet to determine wether these are true or not.

reply to post by littlecloud

Well, there is a lot of debate about the statistics and how they are gathered and used, also by people who worked for UNAIDS like Elisabeth Pisani.
The problem with Rian Malan is that it seemed he was just trying to ingratiate himself with Mbeki's administration.
He certainly wasn't qualified to make his assumptions, and it's hard to understand his point: he said HIV is a big problem in southern Africa, but not quite as big as the statistics say.
But it's probably true to say that no statistics are entirely accurate.
I know it is a big problem here (one can just go to the clinics, hospitals and funeral parlors), and it's really academic whether we have 6 million, or 5.5 million or 4 million people with HIV (the official figure is 5.5 million).

I guess they make a lot of money out of all kinds of diseases, sometimes real and sometimes hyped.
The alternative medicine industry also makes huge profits on all kinds of untested and unproven concoctions.
They're often just as shady as big pharma.
I think allergy clinics are big business nowadays, and every child that goes in is diagnosed with an allergy to something, which cannot possibly be accurate.

reply to post by littlecloud

Surprising and fair:
An article in our Afrikaans language paper today vindicated some of Rian Malan's points.
See: Rapport (12 December 2010, p.2, article by Sune Kitshoff: [email protected]).
In October 2009 President Zuma announced 756 000 registered deaths of AIDS in 2008.
A lot more than the 573 000 in 2007.
Rian Malan began investigating and challenging these statistics, which implied apocalyptic increases in AIDS mortality.
It turns out a 5 was erroneously replaced by a 7!
The article states that Rian Malan was challenged by the Treatment Action Campaign's Nathan Geffen on these figures.
Even the TAC now admits that Malan was probably right.
The numbers are still concerning, but lower than expected, and show a typical decline of deaths after an initial wave of the virus.
Apparently we in SA never got those figures, but the New York Times did.