Islander
05-24-10, 08:25 PM
e-letter from healthiertalk@healthiertalk.com
Dear Reader,
Let me set the scene.
It’s 2002. You’re a huge drug company and your cash cow hormone replacement therapy (HRT) drugs have you living on easy street. The big bucks are rolling in and life is good.
Then disaster strikes. Researchers halt a huge government study on HRT when they found that women taking certain hormones had an increased risk for breast cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Sales on HRT drugs like Premarin take a massive dip.
What’s a poor suffering drug company to do?
Well, if you’re Big Pharma giant Wyeth-Ayerst the answers easy. You reshuffle the deck in your favor by hiring ghostwriters to snow medical journals with glowing papers backing the use of HRT in women.
Ignoring the obvious dangers to women you scramble to shore up your sinking profits. You have your stable of paid-off writers produce article after article making liberal references to the benefits of HRT and burying the risks. And you keep up this whitewashing for six years.
A recent study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that the five most prolific writers of pro-HRT journal articles since the federal study was halted were being paid by Wyeth. And, worse...they failed to disclose this clear conflict of interest 95% of the time!
Why bother relying on a TV commercial to convince you of the wonders of their drugs when they can go straight to your doctor’s primary source of information...medical journals? That’s right folks, your doctor will very likely be writing you your next prescription based on a journal article written by a drug company extolling the virtues of its own products.
This goes flying right by manipulation and lands squarely in the land of immorality. It’s one thing to believe that Big Pharma is all about profits over people. It’s quite another to see the proof of it printed in black and white in the prestigious medical journals our doctors rely on most.
Demanding that Big Pharma stay FAR away from my doctor’s prescription pad,
Alice Wessendorf
Dear Reader,
Let me set the scene.
It’s 2002. You’re a huge drug company and your cash cow hormone replacement therapy (HRT) drugs have you living on easy street. The big bucks are rolling in and life is good.
Then disaster strikes. Researchers halt a huge government study on HRT when they found that women taking certain hormones had an increased risk for breast cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Sales on HRT drugs like Premarin take a massive dip.
What’s a poor suffering drug company to do?
Well, if you’re Big Pharma giant Wyeth-Ayerst the answers easy. You reshuffle the deck in your favor by hiring ghostwriters to snow medical journals with glowing papers backing the use of HRT in women.
Ignoring the obvious dangers to women you scramble to shore up your sinking profits. You have your stable of paid-off writers produce article after article making liberal references to the benefits of HRT and burying the risks. And you keep up this whitewashing for six years.
A recent study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that the five most prolific writers of pro-HRT journal articles since the federal study was halted were being paid by Wyeth. And, worse...they failed to disclose this clear conflict of interest 95% of the time!
Why bother relying on a TV commercial to convince you of the wonders of their drugs when they can go straight to your doctor’s primary source of information...medical journals? That’s right folks, your doctor will very likely be writing you your next prescription based on a journal article written by a drug company extolling the virtues of its own products.
This goes flying right by manipulation and lands squarely in the land of immorality. It’s one thing to believe that Big Pharma is all about profits over people. It’s quite another to see the proof of it printed in black and white in the prestigious medical journals our doctors rely on most.
Demanding that Big Pharma stay FAR away from my doctor’s prescription pad,
Alice Wessendorf