Bad Pharma : Ben Goldacre - HarperCollins. The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal | Ben Goldacre | Business.
Insider Report on Big Pharma’s Corrupt Marketing and Phony Science. Francois T pointed to a post at the blog Health Care Renewal that summarizes an important insider report at the British Medical Journal on how much so-called medical research is of dubious validity, and performed to give talking points for marketing rather than to improve the lives of patients. The reports on the corruption is big Pharma “research” are so rife that this account hardly qualifies as news. For fun, I dug up the notes from a 2004 study in which I interviewed some experts on drug company marketing. The reason? Even then, it was seen as the most effective, and a big financial services client was keen to see what techniques they could adopt from it.
Even then, it was clear “research” was seen as key to effective selling. Per one interviewee, on sales reps: Creativity is NOT what you want for this job. And keep in mind, the costs of manipulated research findings are real. Madigan has been a paid consultant to work on litigation against Merck. GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn for healthcare fraud | Business.
Why full disclosure is healthy - health - 14 February 2012. Do British people know enough about the financial interests of those writing health articles? Time to toughen editorial codes LAST year, the BBC News website published an article that questioned if psychological therapies were enough to tackle the rise of depression in the UK. "Is it time," asked the author, "to question our seeming obsession with talking treatments? I want to stand up for the very important role medication can play in the treatment of mental illness. " What stood out for me was not just the pro-pill stance, but an endnote that its author, Richard Gray, a professor in nursing research at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, had "given lectures on behalf of a number of pharmaceutical companies".
It did not state he had been paid for them, or that he had received fees and honoraria from antidepressant manufacturers, including AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly, for consultancy work. This kind of omission happens all the time, so why single out this case? More From New Scientist.