… What a filthy business. And it’s not going to change.
Because it’s not going to change — I mean, the journals aren’t going to do anything about it, just as universities aren’t going to do anything about conflict of interest — we need to think about ways of protecting ourselves from the many bogus, corporate-run studies that inspire doctors to prescribe dangerous drugs.
Remember that the assault comes from more than these sources. In bogus, corporate-run Continuing Education events, in direct payments in exchange for prescription, in the training of a drug sales force made up of medical school professors, in countless ways, we’re cultivating a generation of compromised practitioners who hurt us and our children with the meds that enrich the practitioners.
Don’t forget the crucial adjunct to these practices: Constant frightening television advertisements.
What can we do?
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Beats me. They’ve got all the money. And they’re fucking geniuses.
September 12th, 2009 at 8:37AM
In the 1950s and 1960s, a physician named M.H. Pappworth (his book "Human Guinea Pigs") collected unethical studies like a small child might collect colorful pebbles on a beach. They were everywhere. These type of studies are rare now. I don’t know if they lost fashion or if the laws and regulations put in place actually worked. The popularity of these types of studies started fading after the Tuskegee syphilis study was reported. Maybe it’s a question of publicity or teaching people how to recognize these studies.