A Public Drug Registry Would Bring Honesty to Pharmaceutical Research

[Guest guest]

Wednesday, September 15, 2004 commentary:

A Public Drug Registry Would Bring Honesty to Pharmaceutical Research, But

the Idea Terrifies Drug Companies

Mike

Newstarget Network

A new idea has surfaced in the medical community -- to publish the results

of all medical studies on a publicly accessible website that would include

results from both positive and negative studies. This proposal has been

floated in response to the recent discovery by regulatory authorities and

various members of the press that drug companies routinely hide or suppress

the publication of studies showing undesirable results.

For example, we are now learning that the use of anti-depressant drugs

promotes violent behavior among children and can even include suicidal

behavior, and that even though there was clear clinical evidence of this

link, the drug companies and FDA chose to hide this information from the the

public, making sure it never saw the light of day. It only came out in state

lawsuits filed by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a person I

consider a law enforcement hero for his courage and determination in rooting

out the corruption of drug companies.

The fact is that for decades, drug companies have been cherry-picking

studies that would highlight only the positive, desired outcomes that they

wanted to forward to the FDA and share with the public. In this way, drug

companies could initiate 100 clinical trials for a particular drug, then

throw out all the trials showing negative results, producing only trials for

FDA review that showed positive results. This is one of the primary reasons

why today's popular pharmaceuticals simply don't work -- the science has all

been distorted. There are no people who are made healthier by taking

multiple prescription drugs for life, and the vast majority of prescription

drugs have undergone this fraudulent process of selective clinical trials

that were designed, from the very beginning, to stumble across a few

selected studies that might show positive results.

This is all very interesting to me, because I find that defenders of modern

medicine and pharmaceuticals often say that only their medicine is

" scientifically proven. " Everything else, including alternative medicine,

medicinal herbs, nutritional therapies, and so on are not scientifically

proven according to these people. And yet, their own so-called scientific

method is anything but scientific. A scientific method would require looking

at all of the study results, and drawing a conclusion from all the available

data. What is extremely non-scientific is picking and choosing the data you

wish to view, and then forwarding that data to the regulatory officials who

will approve drugs for widespread public use based on those selected

positive results. That's not science. That's quackery.

Even worse, by designing a study in a certain way, you can take almost any

chemical, including highly toxic chemicals, and tweak out some sort of

positive claim by using enough people with enough studies and approaching it

with a carefully chosen study design. For example, one of the tricks drug

companies play with clinical trials is to remove individuals from the trial

who aren't showing the desired positive results. A trial might start out

with 200 people, but after 3 months, if certain individuals aren't showing

the desired results, such as lower cholesterol or stabilized blood sugar

levels, they can simply be dismissed from the trial for a variety of

reasons. That leaves the 100 people or so who were for some reason showing a

positive result, and yet that positive result could be from something

completely unrelated to the drug. It could have been lifestyle changes, it

could have been the placebo effect, or even new exercise routines taken up

by patients who are suddenly interested in their health.

So, the bottom line is that if you initiate a large enough number of studies

and you dismiss all the people who don't respond in the way you want them to

respond, and then you cherry-pick those few studies that showed precisely

the results you want, you end up with a seriously distorted view of what the

pharmaceutical or chemical actually causes in the human body. But you also

end up with a data set that you can promote to the FDA, the press, and

physicians as being " scientifically proven. " And this process is precisely

what goes on for the vast majority of prescription drugs offered today by

pharmaceutical companies that are approved by the FDA, prescribed by

physicians, and taken by tens of millions of Americans.

The cold, hard truth about pharmaceuticals is that by and large they are not

scientifically proven -- they are based on fraudulent clinical studies, and

they simply don't work to make people healthier. In time, the American

public will come to realize this, and this idea of having a publicly

accessible database of all clinical trials might be one way in which the

public begins to learn the truth about prescription drugs. But I doubt that

we're going to see such a public database anytime soon. For one thing, the

pharmaceutical industry is terrified by the idea. They certainly don't want

the actual scientific results of their studies to be made public, because

that would quite readily show how ineffective and toxic their prescription

drug products really are.

So you can expect Big Pharma to delay this idea for as long as possible, and

even if it does become a reality, you can expect there to be loopholes put

in place so that not all trials have to be published. That would once again

return the system to the cherry-picking protocol, where drug companies could

selectively choose which studies they wish to publish, and by doing that,

they could of course present a distorted view of the data.

If such a publicly accessible database existed today, you'd be shocked to

learn the number of deaths and harmful side effects that have been caused by

clinical drug trials conducted over the last 20 years. Without a doubt, the

pharmaceutical industry depends on the fact that they can bury negative

results and make them disappear. If those results were to suddenly be made

public, and if stringent rules were put in place which required all such

studies to be made public in the future, you can bet the pharmaceutical

industry would experience a meltdown caused by the widespread realization

that pharmaceuticals really aren't good for people after all.

[Guest guest]

i guess we'll see how much money the drug companies have. if this doesn't

fly, we know why. :-(

susan

A Public Drug Registry Would Bring

Honesty to Pharmaceutical Research

Wednesday, September 15, 2004 commentary:

A Public Drug Registry Would Bring Honesty to Pharmaceutical Research, But

the Idea Terrifies Drug Companies

Mike

Newstarget Network

A new idea has surfaced in the medical community -- to publish the results

of all medical studies on a publicly accessible website that would include

results from both positive and negative studies. This proposal has been

floated in response to the recent discovery by regulatory authorities and

various members of the press that drug companies routinely hide or suppress

the publication of studies showing undesirable results.

For example, we are now learning that the use of anti-depressant drugs

promotes violent behavior among children and can even include suicidal

behavior, and that even though there was clear clinical evidence of this

link, the drug companies and FDA chose to hide this information from the the

public, making sure it never saw the light of day. It only came out in state

lawsuits filed by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a person I

consider a law enforcement hero for his courage and determination in rooting

out the corruption of drug companies.

The fact is that for decades, drug companies have been cherry-picking

studies that would highlight only the positive, desired outcomes that they

wanted to forward to the FDA and share with the public. In this way, drug

companies could initiate 100 clinical trials for a particular drug, then

throw out all the trials showing negative results, producing only trials for

FDA review that showed positive results. This is one of the primary reasons

why today's popular pharmaceuticals simply don't work -- the science has all

been distorted. There are no people who are made healthier by taking

multiple prescription drugs for life, and the vast majority of prescription

drugs have undergone this fraudulent process of selective clinical trials

that were designed, from the very beginning, to stumble across a few

selected studies that might show positive results.

This is all very interesting to me, because I find that defenders of modern

medicine and pharmaceuticals often say that only their medicine is

" scientifically proven. " Everything else, including alternative medicine,

medicinal herbs, nutritional therapies, and so on are not scientifically

proven according to these people. And yet, their own so-called scientific

method is anything but scientific. A scientific method would require looking

at all of the study results, and drawing a conclusion from all the available

data. What is extremely non-scientific is picking and choosing the data you

wish to view, and then forwarding that data to the regulatory officials who

will approve drugs for widespread public use based on those selected

positive results. That's not science. That's quackery.

Even worse, by designing a study in a certain way, you can take almost any

chemical, including highly toxic chemicals, and tweak out some sort of

positive claim by using enough people with enough studies and approaching it

with a carefully chosen study design. For example, one of the tricks drug

companies play with clinical trials is to remove individuals from the trial

who aren't showing the desired positive results. A trial might start out

with 200 people, but after 3 months, if certain individuals aren't showing

the desired results, such as lower cholesterol or stabilized blood sugar

levels, they can simply be dismissed from the trial for a variety of

reasons. That leaves the 100 people or so who were for some reason showing a

positive result, and yet that positive result could be from something

completely unrelated to the drug. It could have been lifestyle changes, it

could have been the placebo effect, or even new exercise routines taken up

by patients who are suddenly interested in their health.

So, the bottom line is that if you initiate a large enough number of studies

and you dismiss all the people who don't respond in the way you want them to

respond, and then you cherry-pick those few studies that showed precisely

the results you want, you end up with a seriously distorted view of what the

pharmaceutical or chemical actually causes in the human body. But you also

end up with a data set that you can promote to the FDA, the press, and

physicians as being " scientifically proven. " And this process is precisely

what goes on for the vast majority of prescription drugs offered today by

pharmaceutical companies that are approved by the FDA, prescribed by

physicians, and taken by tens of millions of Americans.

The cold, hard truth about pharmaceuticals is that by and large they are not

scientifically proven -- they are based on fraudulent clinical studies, and

they simply don't work to make people healthier. In time, the American

public will come to realize this, and this idea of having a publicly

accessible database of all clinical trials might be one way in which the

public begins to learn the truth about prescription drugs. But I doubt that

we're going to see such a public database anytime soon. For one thing, the

pharmaceutical industry is terrified by the idea. They certainly don't want

the actual scientific results of their studies to be made public, because

that would quite readily show how ineffective and toxic their prescription

drug products really are.

So you can expect Big Pharma to delay this idea for as long as possible, and

even if it does become a reality, you can expect there to be loopholes put

in place so that not all trials have to be published. That would once again

return the system to the cherry-picking protocol, where drug companies could

selectively choose which studies they wish to publish, and by doing that,

they could of course present a distorted view of the data.

If such a publicly accessible database existed today, you'd be shocked to

learn the number of deaths and harmful side effects that have been caused by

clinical drug trials conducted over the last 20 years. Without a doubt, the

pharmaceutical industry depends on the fact that they can bury negative

results and make them disappear. If those results were to suddenly be made

public, and if stringent rules were put in place which required all such

studies to be made public in the future, you can bet the pharmaceutical

industry would experience a meltdown caused by the widespread realization

that pharmaceuticals really aren't good for people after all.