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Q. What types of doctors face the worst malpractice suits?Malpractice Risk, by Physician Specialty (rand.org)Data from 1991 through 2005 for nearly 41,000 physicians covered by a large nationwide liability insurer. At least 200 physicians in each of 24 specialties, allowing analysis of malpractice risk, by specialty. category.)Malpractice ClaimsAcross specialties, 7.4 percent of physicians annually had a claim, and 1.6 percent made an indemnity payment. Among physicians in neurosurgery, 19.1 percent annually faced a claim, but just 2.6 percent in psychiatry did (Figure 1). Physician age, year, and state of practice did not affect these estimates.Specialties with higher proportions of claims do not always incur higher proportions of payments. For example, gynecology had the 12th highest average annual share of physicians with a claim but the highest share with a payment.Indemnity PaymentsAcross specialties, the mean indemnity payment was $274,887, and the median was $111,749 (Figure 2). Specialties most likely to face indemnity claims were not always those with the highest average payments.The difference between mean and median reflects a skewed distribution toward large payments in some specialties. Obstetrics and gynecology accounted for the most payments of at least $1 million, followed by pathology, anesthesiology, and pediatrics.Career Malpractice RiskMost physicians can expect to face at least one malpractice claim over a 30 year career. By 45 years of age, 36 percent of physicians in low-risk specialties are likely to have had at least one malpractice claim, compared to 88 percent of those in high-risk categories. By this same age, just 5 percent in low-risk specialties and 33 percent in high-risk ones are likely to have made at least one indemnity payment. By 65 years of age, 75 percent of physicians in low-risk specialties and 99 percent of those in high-risk ones are likely to have had at least one malpractice claim, and 19 percent of those in low-risk specialties and 71 percent of those in high-risk ones are likely to have had at least one indemnity payment.Findings and ImplicationsThese results confirm malpractice rates in many high-risk specialties found in earlier research based on self-reporting. The results indicate higher malpractice rates than previously reported in low-risk specialties, possibly because of the stigma of a claim in these fields. The results also indicate that many will never have to make an indemnity payment. Nevertheless, the risk of a claim, the possibility of a claim leading to a payment, and the size of a payment contribute to high levels of perceived malpractice risk among U.S. physicians. ■Malpractice Risk According to Physician Specialty | NEJMTop 10 Specialties Sued: 2013 Malpractice ReportNearly 1,400 physicians who were sued for medical malpractice share their experience in Medscape’s recent Malpractice Report.According to the report, the top 10 medical specialties experiencing the most lawsuits were:Most malpractice claims against primary care physicians are a result of missed diagnoses, particularly of cancer and myocardial infarction in adults and meningitis in children, as well as medication errors.Other highlights from the malpractice report include:35% of lawsuits were “failure to diagnose” (17% “failure to treat”)74% of physicians were surprised to be sued24% of physicians sued were dismissed prior to deposition– 45% went to depositions– 21% went all the way to trial61% took up to 2 years to conclude57% of plaintiffs received no monetary award– 18% received up to $100,000– 16% received up to $500,000– 2% received over $2 million62% of responding physicians said the lawsuit result was fair.In almost all cases, the insurer paid the full payout amount.29% of physicians said they no longer trust patients and treat them differently.93% of sued physicians said saying “I’m sorry” would not have helped.Respondents to the malpractice survey advise other doctors to: follow up even when you don’t think you have to; practice more defensive medicine; document more often and more thoroughly; and get rid of rude, demanding, noncompliant patients.Click here to view the full Malpractice Report by Medscape.Medscape Malpractice Report 2015: Why Most Doctors Get SuedPaid Malpractice Claims Among US Physicians by Specialty, 1992-201410 Worst Medical Specialties with Highest Malpractice RatesOur list of 10 worst medical specialties with highest malpractice rates, should give you some insight into which medical jobs are probably the hardest to perform. Being sued can’t be a pleasant experience, and according to statistics by the age of 65 years, 99% of physicians in high-risk specialties are projected to face a malpractice claim. If you think that those belonging in low-risk specialties are in a significantly better position, you are wrong because 75% chance of being sued is still a lot. Because of this, most physicians have a feeling that lawsuit is almost inevitable, and resort to defensive medicine. “Defensive medicine in simple words is departing from normal medical practice as a safeguard from litigation”. Ordering unnecessary tests, avoiding patients with complications, eliminating high risk procedures, are some forms of defensive medicine. The main problem with defensive medicine is that it raises the cost of healthcare, but it can also pose health risks to the patient.wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock.comWhile statistics are very interesting, they still can’t explain why male doctors have nearly 2.5 times the odds of being sued for malpractice than female doctors. Problems in physician – patient communication are claimed to be the biggest cause of malpractice claims, maybe that answers the question as to why female doctors face fewer claims.For our list, we are using data from a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. We are ranking specialties by the annual probability of facing a malpractice claim, however the study presents data for all the specialties in the form of a graph, only giving exact numbers for some specialties – this is why we will mention only the percentages that are explicitly stated in the text of the study; but this poses no problem for correct ranking. Before we begin with our list of 10 worst medical specialties with highest malpractice rates, it is important to mention that while the specialties on our list have the highest rates of malpractice, they do not necessarily have the highest indemnity payments. For example, pediatrics have a rate of just 3.1% and are not on our list, while at the same time they have the highest average payment of $520,924, which is pretty high considering that average across specialties is $274,887, albeit if you think about it, it is quite logical, because jurors are more likely to be harsh towards a doctor whose mistake caused an injury of a child, than for example towards a doctor that messed up someone’s plastic surgery.10. Oncology (9.14%)Some claims against oncologists are delay in diagnosis of cancer, incorrect chemotherapy dosage, suboptimal pain management for a dying patient, negligence for informed consent.Romaset/Shutterstock.com9. Pulmonary medicine (9.32%)Failure to diagnose pulmonary embolism or lung cancer, premature extubation of a ventilated patient, injury of a patient during bronchoscopy are just some examples of pulmonary medicine malpractice claims.Photographee.eu/Shutterstock.com8. Urology (10.49%)When it comes to urology, the number 8 on our list of worst medical specialties with highest malpractice rates, surgical procedures with postoperative complications are the most common reason for malpractice claims, prostatectomy usually resulting in the most expansive claims. Taking into account that average rate of malpractice claims for all physician specialties is 7.4%, and that urology’s got rate above 10%, it’s not surprising that it is on our list of 10 worst medical specialties with the highest malpractice rates.Image Point Fr/Shutterstock.com7. Obstetrics and Gynecology (11.02%)Events during labor and delivery, missed diagnosis of fetal anomalies, shoulder entrapment with brachial plexus nerve injury, neurological impairment, wrongful birth or death are common claims against Obstetricians/Gynecologists.Africa Studio/Shutterstock.com6. Gastroenterology (11.64%)Medication errors relating to heartburn, errors in diagnosis associated with colonic malignancies are some of the most prevalent claims.Image Point Fr/Shutterstock.com5. Plastic Surgery (12.7%)Some plastic surgery malpractice injuries are: scarring, disfigurement, caving of the surgical site, infection, paralysis, and as with any major surgery – death.iconogenic/Shutterstock.com4. Orthopedic Surgery (14.16%)Total knee/hip replacement, knee arthroscopy, exploration and decompression of the spinal canal, shoulder arthroscopy, and rotator cuff repair, are some procedures that are associated with malpractice claims.Minerva Studio/Shutterstock.com3. General Surgery (15.31%)Annual probability of facing a malpractice claim for general surgery, the number three on our list of worst medical specialties with highest malpractice rates, is 15.3 percent. Surgery on the wrong body part or wrong patient, unnecessary disfigurement, nerve injuries, misdiagnosis, unsterilized equipment are some causes of general surgery malpractice claims.Stoyan Yotov/Shutterstock.com2. Thoracic-cardiovascular Surgery (18.9%)Common errors during Thoracic-cardiovascular surgery are accidental injury of neighboring organs, infection in the chest cavity, sponges or surgical instruments being left in the patient’s body, and of course in the worst cases death. Annual probability of facing a malpractice claim for thoracic-cardiovascular surgery is 18.9%.sudok1 / 123RF Stock Photo1. Neurosurgery (19.1%)If we were to take malpractice claims statistics as a measure of how difficult a surgeon’s job is, we’d come to the conclusion that neurosurgeons have the toughest job. However, it is significant to notice that the difference with thoracic-cardiovascular surgery is just 0.2%, which may be considered negligible and therefore a tie between the two specialties. With the annual probability of facing a malpractice claim of 19.1%, and average indemnity payment of $344,811 neurosurgery is on the top of our list of 10 worst medical specialties with highest malpractice rates.Herrndorff/Shutterstock.comWhen the Doctor Faces a LawsuitWithin months of completing my training, I received the call that every doctor dreads.“You’ve been named in a malpractice lawsuit,” said the hospital administrator on the other end of the line.The family of a patient I had seen briefly a year before believed that a colleague’s decision not to operate hastened her demise. Now their lawyers, combing through the medical records, believed that a single sentence in my note brought that doctor’s decision into question. As a second or maybe even third opinion, I had written that the woman was a “possible candidate” for surgery.The truth was that when I saw her she was a possible candidate, but only tenuously so. In fact, her health deteriorated so rapidly that by the time she finished seeing all the specialists and returned to her original surgeon, the chances of her surviving any treatment, no matter how heroic, were almost nil.Though I knew all that, in the weeks after that telephone call I couldn’t help questioning myself, going over the case in my mind as soon as I woke up, then again and again late into the night. I froze with fear every time I was asked for my opinion on a diagnosis or treatment plan and became a master at evasion, littering my assessments and write-ups with words like “maybe,” “perhaps” and “will await further work-up.” And I wondered if my colleagues knew, if the blot on my record had already soaked through the fabric of my professional reputation.In the end, the family dropped the case; I never met with any lawyers or went to court. But memories of the all-encompassing threat of a claim came flooding back when I read a recent study of how litigation affects doctors.Medical malpractice lawsuits have existed in the United States for more than 150 years, though today, most medical errors are never pursued in court, and a large majority of claims never result in any kind of payment to patients. And even though the direct and indirect costs of such suits account for only 2.4 percent of total health care costs, that’s still $55 billion yearly. To say nothing of the even more important social costs, an issue addressed last month in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons.Researchers surveyed more than 7,000 surgeons and found that nearly one in four were in the midst of litigation. Surgeons involved in a recent lawsuit were more likely to suffer from depression and burnout, including feelings of emotional exhaustion and detachment, a low sense of accomplishment and even thoughts of suicide.“Malpractice is at the top of the list of major stressors for most physicians,” said Dr. Charles M. Balch, the lead author and a professor of surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “It’s right up there with financial distress, serious work-home conflicts and life-and-death circumstances.”Other studies estimate that, depending on the specialty, anywhere from 75 percent to 99 percent of practicing doctors will over the course of a lifetime be threatened with a lawsuit. “We are not talking about some small subset of physicians who are vulnerable because they are weak,” said Dr. Tait D. Shanafelt, a co-author and associate professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “Malpractice affects a wide swath of our colleagues and their patients.”Doctors who have been sued may end up practicing defensive medicine, ordering unnecessary tests and medications or refusing to treat patients with more complex illnesses altogether as a safeguard against future litigation. Those same doctors can also become burned out, which can lead to even more errors, and more malpractice claims.“Burnout may be what reinforces the connections between malpractice, defensive medicine and poor-quality care,” said Amitabh Chandra, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and an economist who has written extensively on medical malpractice.The study authors propose that one way to disrupt the negative cycle is to improve communication between patients and doctors, so that patients are aware of the risks that can occur despite a doctor’s best efforts. Another important step is instituting programs that continue those conversations even after an error occurs. “We need supportive work environments and more programs that allow doctors and patients to resolve issues directly,” Dr. Balch said.But change will require looking at malpractice reform in a new way, one that gives weight not just to the economic costs but to the ways reform might affect how patients and doctors interact.“Ultimately we are dealing with doctors who are working under enormous pressures,” Dr. Chandra said. “For them, the emotional costs are colossal.”Physicians React: Life After a LawsuitSandra LevyHow Does a Malpractice Lawsuit Change Doctors' Lives?Getting sued changes some physicians' lives and the way they view patients. When doctors are sued for malpractice, they often feel anxiety, anguish, depression, a sense of betrayal, and shame. The emotional distress they experience can last a lifetime.A lawsuit can drag on for months, or even years. When the case is pending, many physicians suffer. They don't eat well, they don't sleep well, and they are frequently depressed.After the lawsuit is settled or resolved, many doctors leave their practice, retire early, practice defensive medicine, and look at patients as potential adversaries for the remainder of their careers. Even when doctors win their court case, they may have lost substantial earnings in time away from their practices during court depositions and hearings. Physicians may also suffer in their personal lives.Spurred by a recent article in Medscape, in which five doctors described the emotional stress they went through during their malpractice trials, a lively discussion ensued."Three close college friends were never the same after their stupid lawsuits. It has to be a variant of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and while we're having a shortage of docs (especially primary care...), our legal system is removing good docs from the front line," said an internist.Sued More Than OnceAn ob/gyn who was sued three times expressed the emotional toil that ensued:All cases were settled, mainly because it was cheaper and because I was not sure that I could tolerate the emotional effects of a trial. I did continue to practice and didn't always see patients as adversaries, but I do think it took its toll. I retired at 60 after practicing for 30 years in ob/gyn with a main hospital that serviced an underprivileged community. I retired from exhaustion and burnout. I loved my work, and if it were possible to practice with shortened hours and without risk for lawsuits, I would still be working.Yet another physician who has experienced more than one lawsuit said:I was sued for something that was done by another medical provider without my knowledge. After over 3 years of stress, I was found not liable and dismissed. Two years later, I was just starting to feel like my life was getting back on track. Another suit was filed by the relatives of a deceased nursing home patient who had a court-appointed guardian. I cared for that patient for several years. Those relatives never once came to see him. The suit was dismissed, but my anger remains. Now it is no longer enough to provide good care and relate well with patients and families. Apparently, we are now supposed to relate well to family members we do not even know exist. I am actively planning for retirement and now work primarily on administration. If I had it to do over again, I would never have gone to medical school.A cardiologist who worries about lawsuits said:Now that I'm in private practice, I have fear of being sued, which does force me to spend extra hours every day to make sure I documented well. Between this and the pressure of sustaining productivity in private practice, it does affect other aspects of my life. I do ask myself whether I did the correct thing going into medicine...but my answer is "yes, I did"...the problem is, maybe I'm practicing in the wrong country. It's almost impossible to get sued in other countries, and it is based on true medical neglect. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way in this country, and this is why we have sky-high medical costs, medical fraud, and sometimes a lack of trust in your own patients.A Call for Tort ReformSeveral respondents were adamant that tort reform is needed to protect physicians. An internist said:We desperately need tort reform. To paraphrase Atul Gawande, 'I do approximately the same number of surgeries a year as ground balls fielded by a major league third baseman. If that third baseman makes two errors, he wins the gold glove. If I make two errors, then patients end up injured, or worse.' Point being, we all make mistakes, and of course there needs to be a way to compensate those who experience bad outcomes. Unfortunately, our current system results in unnecessary stress, loss of productivity, defensive medicine, and logjams in our judicial system.Another call for tort reform came from a dermatologist:All of these cases and replies are further evidence of how bad tort law is in this country. If, like most of civilization, a plaintiff MUST PAY damages to the winning defendant, it is highly probable that none of these suits would have taken place. The pathetic Band-Aids of tort reform would not change the fact that the doctor and all of his other patients and the whole of society, other than the plaintiff and his client, LOSE as soon as a suit is filed, even when the defending doctor "wins," the dermatologist added.Some physicians took an even stronger stand. An otolaryngologist commented:Doctors shouldn't complain about the high cost of malpractice insurance. They should threaten to withhold their precious lifesaving skills until unscrupulous patients and their predatory lawyers back off. The legal system is not set up to be fair to doctors, and the reason is that doctors have allowed it to evolve that way. We only have ourselves to blame, really.A family medicine doctor reported, "I know directly of at least one case where the case was lost, and the subsequent emotional toll on the physician was catastrophic. Another I know of indirectly where the loss of the malpractice suit was followed by massive clinical depression."Finally, an ophthalmologist whose lawsuit lasted 7 years said:I had seen a patient for ptosis of the upper eyelids who also complained of excessive tearing of his eyes. I had found that this was due to laxity of his lower eyelids and recommended repair at the same time. He declined. After the surgery, he sued me because I caused his eyes to tear even though my records documented that the problem was preexisting. Even his wife sued me separately for lack of consortium. He also alleged lack of informed consent. The charges stated that I coerced him into signing the consent on his gurney on the way into the operating room. The fact that the surgical consent was signed 7 days earlier in my office and was witnessed did not influence the judge who allowed the suit to go forward. Seven years of grief and heartache.Finally, the suit was dismissed the night before trial because the plaintiff's attorney admitted that they had tried all those years to get an expert witness to represent him and couldn't do so. He ultimately had gone to another hospital and had the lower lid laxity repaired (which I had recommended), and his tearing problem resolved.A wary physician had this advice for colleagues: "Don't give the plaintiff attorney any information. He/she may be fishing for discovery without the cost of discovery. In my case, it was a friendly phone call asking for my side of what happened. I took the call. Wrong. Call your malpractice carrier immediately. Follow the advice of the attorney assigned to you."Five Doctors Tell 'How I Survived After Being Sued'It's Easy To Predict Which Doctors Will Face Malpractice SuitsOJO_IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGESA tiny fraction of doctors are responsible for a surprising number of malpractice claim settlements, according to new research published in The New England Journal of Medicine.Just one percent of doctors were linked to 32 percent of malpractice settlements paid out between 2005 to 2014, according to anonymized data collected from the U.S. National Practitioner Data Bank, which tracks nationwide information on all practicing physicians’ malpractice suits and their settlements.What’s more, the greater the number of claims a doctor settled, the chances they’d pay out another one in the future were exponential. Doctors who settled two malpractice suits had about twice the risk of being involved in a third settlement when compared to those with just one settlement. And doctors with three paid malpractice settlements were three times more likely to be accused of malpractice and pay out again.The highest risk doctors — those with six or more paid settlement claims — had more than 12 times the risk of a recurring settlement payment.While the study’s findings are meant as a wake-up call for hospitals and liability insurers, they are also an important reminder to patients that a minority of doctors may still be practicing despite disturbing track records.Who is most likely to face malpracticeCertain kinds of doctors are more likely to be involved in recurring malpractice settlements. Neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons, general surgeons, plastic surgeons and OB/GYNs were about twice as likely to have repeat malpractice settlements compared to internal medicine doctors, even after the researchers controlled for the inherent risk of things like surgery.Male doctors were also 40 percent more likely to have a recurring settlement compared to their female colleagues, while physicians younger than 35 only had about one-third the risk of recurrence compared to older ones. As these young physicians grew older, their risk of recurrence increased.In all, the study analyzed 66,426 paid malpractice claims for 54,099 doctors over ten years. Almost one-third of the claims centered around patient deaths. Fifty-four percent were suits about serious physical injury. Most malpractice lawsuits ended in settlements and averaged $371,054; only three percent resulted in verdicts.How patients are protectedBy federal law, when a hospital is thinking about giving a doctor admitting privileges in their institution, they have to look up his or her malpractice and disciplinary history in the Data Bank. Only hospitals, medical boards and federal investigators are allowed to query the databank in full, so patients don’t have access to this information.In one sense, patients can feel assured that the hospital has already vetted a doctor and knows their full history, good or bad. But the law doesn’t stipulate what hospitals do with that information, or how it should inform their decision-making process, which explains why some high-risk doctors are still working.The study’s lead researcher David Studdert, a medicine and law professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, says he intended his findings to be a call to hospitals, liability insurance companies and other institutions about this minority of high-risk doctors. Studdert calls his work an important step in developing a predictive, national tool that could one day identify high-risk physicians before they start accumulating malpractice claims.“Can you identify high risk physicians early on?” Studdert said. “If the answer is yes, then [institutions] want to hook into some kind of intervention program that can get in and reduce those risks.”If our study provokes a debate about what the right level of transparency is for multi-claim physicians, I think that’s a good thingDavid Studdert, senior researcherWhat malpractice actually meansOverall, very few doctors are sued for malpractice. Over the 10-year period Studdert analyzed, only six percent of all practicing American doctors were linked to a paid malpractice settlement. And just because a doctor chose to settle a malpractice suit, it doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is admitting to malpractice, he pointed out. It could be a strategic move to avoid the costs of a lengthy lawsuit. It also could be that an investigation revealed he or she delivered substandard — but not negligent — care, and the settlement is an acknowledgment of that.“It may be that the physician is delivering substandard care, it may be that physician has poor conversational skills or some combination of those things,” Studdert said about recurring claim settlements. “But either way it’s a little bit of a warning sign and suggests at the very least that someone should be looking into the quality of care that clinician is delivering.”Some states make data malpractice settlements and disciplinary action for doctors available through the state medical board, either on a website or by submitting a formal request, according to The Washington Post. Consumer sites like docinfo.org or healthgrades.com, which spit out reports on disciplinary actions and settled lawsuits, are also avenues for research, notes the Post. But the information probably won’t give you much insight into why that claim was settled, or for what.Say you’ve got an upcoming breast cancer surgery and you want to research your surgeon. You may not know if the claim settled against your doctor was for breast surgery or something else completely unrelated to the type of procedure you’re getting, says Studdert, which makes this kind of data imperfect.Arthur Caplan, founding director of the division of medical ethics at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, pointed out that another problem with the available public databases is that they show only settled claims — not ongoing lawsuits. Patients could try to ask the doctor or surgeon face-to-face how many malpractice suits they’ve settled or how many are ongoing, he added, but while they should expect an honest answer, there are “no guarantees.”“I don’t think the potential patient can do much except get second opinions,” said Caplan.While Studdert’s findings are aimed at hospitals and other medical institutions, he understands the curiosity and worry it might arouse in patients. But he hopes his analysis demonstrates that malpractice lawsuits are a highly concentrated phenomenon among a small percentage of practicing doctors, and that the claims are skewed even more toward a few physicians who are sued again and again.“If our study provokes a debate about what the right level of transparency is for multi-claim physicians, I think that’s a good thing,” he concluded.5 of the worst medical malpractice cases (today.mims.com)

Yes. How The Flexner Report Hijacked Natural MedicineThe Cancer exchange | Integrative and Natural Cancer Research, TreatmentsNaturopathic medicine has far too many unprofitable remedies including food without pesticides and herbicides.The FDA, CDC, NIH, Big Pharma and research facilities have had many whistle blowers and convictions of felonies like fraud as shown in the many links below and many more links with those links.Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science2010-11-01, The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-med...Can any medical-research studies be trusted? That question has been central to [Dr. John] Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. “Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.” Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades.Note: For more along these lines, read the revealing comments of Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, on the massive corruption she found in the medical industry. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in science from reliable major media sources.SPIDER Bites CDCOctober 17, 2016, Huffington Posthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-gillam/spider-bites-cdc-ethics-c_b_12525012.htmlConcerns about the inner workings of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been mounting in recent months amid disclosures of cozy corporate alliances. Now a group of more than a dozen senior scientists have reportedly lodged an ethics complaint alleging the federal agency is being influenced by corporate and political interests in ways that short-change taxpayers. A group calling itself CDC Scientists Preserving Integrity, Diligence and Ethics in Research, or CDC SPIDER, put a list of complaints in writing in a letter to the CDC Chief of Staff and provided a copy of the letter to [a] public watchdog organization. The members of the group have elected to file the complaint anonymously for fear of retribution. “It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests... and Congressional intent for our agency is being circumvented by some of our leaders. What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception,” the letter states. The complaint cites among other things a “cover up” of the poor performance of a women’s health program called ... WISEWOMAN. The complaint alleges there was a coordinated effort within the CDC to misrepresent data given to Congress. “Definitions were changed and data ‘cooked’ to make the results look better than they were,” the complaint states. And the complaint cites as “troubling” the ties between soft drink giant Coca-Cola Co. ... and two high-ranking CDC officials.Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and health.CDC's Vaccine Safety Research is Exposed as Flawed and Falsified in Peer-Reviewed Scientific Journal2014-06-13, Yahoo! Finance/PR Newswirehttp://finance.yahoo.com/news/cdcs-vaccine-safety-research-exposed-115600020....Just months after U.S. Congressman Bill Posey compared the Center for Disease Control (CDC)'s vaccine safety studies to the SEC's Bernie Madoff scandal, malfeasance in the CDC's studies of thimerosal-containing vaccines has, for the first time, been documented in peer-reviewed scientific literature. The journal BioMed Research International now provides direct evidence that the CDC's safety assurances about the mercury-containing preservative are not fact-based, according to the article's lead author, Brian Hooker. The paper [cites] over 165 studies that have found thimerosal to be harmful, including 16 studies that had reported [serious detrimental] outcomes in human infants and children. "Substantial scientific evidence exists and has existed for many years that the vaccine ingredient thimerosal is a developmental neurotoxin" says George Lucier, former Associate Director of the National Toxicology Program. Studies showing harm from thimerosal sharply contradict published outcomes of six CDC coauthored and sponsored papers – the very studies that CDC relies upon to declare that thimerosal is "safe" for use in infant and maternal vaccines. Dr. Hooker ... said of the six CDC studies, "Each of these papers is fatally flawed from a statistics standpoint and several of the papers represent issues of scientific malfeasance. For example, important data showing a relationship between thimerosal exposure and autism are withheld from three of the publications. This type of cherry-picking of data by the CDC in order to change the results of important research studies to support flawed and dangerous vaccination policies should not be tolerated."Note: A Reuters article reports that the former head of the US's CDC was later named president of Merck's vaccine division with accompanying high salary. Could this be payoff for her support in suppressing studies that cast doubt on vaccines? For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing vaccines news articles from reliable major media sources.FDA "Corruption" Letter Authenticated: Lawyers, Start Your Engines!2010-03-12, CBS Newshttp://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-corruption-letter-authenticated-lawyers-start...The FDA has "certified" a 2009 letter sent anonymously by FDA staff to President Obama describing "systemic corruption and wrongdoing that permeates all levels of FDA." The FDA's official recognition of the letter means that lawyers who want to use it to demonstrate that the FDA isn't perfect won't have to go through weeks of tedious discovery demands to find someone at the FDA who can officially say, "Yup, we sent that." That's going to be a headache for drug companies who often defend their drugs in court by saying, "Hey, the FDA said this product was fine and we did everything they asked -- so it's not fair to hold us responsible." Plaintiffs' lawyers can now hold up the letter in court and argue that drug companies have been on notice that the FDA is riddled with politics, conflicts of interest and outright corruption, and is, as the letter says, "fundamentally broken." Written by a group of scientists on FDA letter head -- but with their names blacked out for fear of retaliation -- the letter describes a nightmare of bungling and self-dealing among higher-ups at the drug safety agency. It begs Obama to step in and reform the shop: "... many other FDA managers who have failed to protect the American public, who have violated laws, rules, and regulations, who have suppressed or altered scientific or technological findings and conclusions, who have abused their power and authority, and who have engaged in illegal retaliation against those who speak out, have not been held accountable and remain in place."Note: The FDA actively persecutes whistle-blowers, placed a former Monsanto lobbyist in a high ranking position, and gives industrial food companies preferential treatment over small farmers. In recent years, FDA executives have been caught participating in medical industry corruption, including keeping important prescription drug safety information hidden from consumers.'Cannot be trusted ... causing harm': Top medical journal takes on big pharma2019-12-04, Sydney Morning Heraldhttps://www.smh.com.au/national/cannot-be-trusted-causing-harm-top-medical-jo...A leading medical journal is launching a global campaign to separate medicine from big pharma. The BMJ [British Medical Journal] says doctors are being unduly influenced by industry-sponsored education events and industry-funded trials for major drugs. Those trials cannot be trusted, the journal's editor and a team of global healthcare leaders write in a scathing editorial. The "endemic financial entanglement with industry is distorting the production and use of healthcare evidence, causing harm to individuals and waste for health systems", they write. They are calling for governments to start funding independent trials of new drugs and medical devices, rather than relying on industry-funded studies. Sponsored research is more likely to find a favourable result compared to independent research. And they want medical associations to discourage doctors from going to industry-funded education events. Assistant Professor Ray Moynihan, a ... researcher studying the link between money and medicine, and is one of the leaders of The BMJ's campaign. “When we want to decide on a medicine or a surgery, a lot of the evidence we used to inform that decision is biased," he says. "It cannot be trusted. Because so much of that has been produced and funded by the manufacturers of those healthcare products." Dr Moynihan points to ... Johnson & Johnson, which sold pelvic mesh to thousands of Australian women. It knew the mesh could cause serious harm, but never properly warned women of the risks.Note: Read the highly revealing comments of Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, on the massive corruption she found in the medical industry. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources..Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong2011-01-24, Newsweekhttp://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/23/why-almost-everything-you-hear-about-medic...If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic lowers bad cholesterol, then—after more study—it doesn’t. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study finds that it doesn’t. But what if wrong answers aren’t the exception but the rule? More and more scholars who scrutinize health research are now making that claim. It isn’t just an individual study here and there that’s flawed, they charge. Instead, the very framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong. The result is a system that leads patients and physicians astray—spurring often costly regimens that won’t help and may even harm you. Even a cursory glance at medical journals shows that once heralded studies keep falling by the wayside. A major study concluded there’s no good evidence that statins (drugs like Lipitor and Crestor) help people with no history of heart disease. The study ... was based on an evaluation of 14 individual trials with 34,272 patients. Cost of statins: more than $20 billion per year. “Positive” drug trials, which find that a treatment is effective, and “negative” trials, in which a drug fails, take the same amount of time to conduct. But negative trials took an extra two to four years to be published. With billions of dollars on the line, companies are loath to declare a new drug ineffective. As a result of the lag in publishing negative studies, patients receive a treatment that is actually ineffective. From clinical trials of new drugs to cutting-edge genetics, biomedical research is riddled with incorrect findings.Note: For the good of your health, the entire article at the link above is well worth reading. For lots more on how the profit-oriented health profession puts public health at risk, click here and here.So staggeringly profitable is the drug industry that in 2002 the combined profits for the top 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 were greater than those of all the other 490 companies combined.2004-09-05, Boston Globehttp://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/09/05/a_dangerous_doseMarcia Angell [is] a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School [and one of the] former editors of The New England Journal of Medicine. Her new book, "The Truth About the Drug Companies," is a sober, clear-eyed attack on the excesses of drug company power. How does the drug industry deceive us? It plies attending physicians with expense-paid junkets to St. Croix and Key West, Fla., where they are given honoraria and consulting fees to listen to promotional presentations. It promotes new or little-known diseases such as "social anxiety disorder" and "premenstrual dysphoric disorder" as a way of selling the drugs that treat them. It sets up phony front groups disguised as "patient advocacy organizations." It hires ghostwriters to produce misleading scientific articles and then pays academic physicians to sign on as authors. It sends paid lackeys and shills out onto the academic lecture circuit to ''educate" doctors about a drug's unapproved uses. It hires multinational PR firms to trumpet dubious studies as scientific breakthroughs while burying the studies that are likely to harm sales. It buys up the results of publicly funded research. It maintains a political chokehold on the American public by donating more money to political campaigns than any other industry in the country. For many years the drug industry has reaped the highest profit margins of any industry in America. In 2002, the top 10 American drug companies had profit margins of 17 percent; Pfizer, the largest, had profit margins of 26 percent. So staggeringly profitable is the drug industry that in 2002 the combined profits for the top 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 were greater than those of all the other 490 companies combined.Note: For an excellent 10-page summary of this revealing book written by the esteemed author, click here. For additional reliable information on the health cover-up, click hereUCSF study questions drug trial results2007-06-05, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/05/DRUGS.TMPMoney talks -- and very loudly -- when a drug company is funding a clinical trial involving one of its products. UCSF researchers looked at nearly 200 head-to-head studies of widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering medications, or statins, and found that results were 20 times more likely to favor the drug made by the company that sponsored the trial. "We have to be really, really skeptical of these drug-company-sponsored studies," said Lisa Bero, the study's author and professor of clinical pharmacy and health policy studies. The trials typically involved comparing the effectiveness of a drug to one or two other statins. UCSF researchers also found that a study's conclusions -- not the actual research results but the trial investigators' impressions -- are more than 35 times more likely to favor the test drug when that trial is sponsored by the drug's maker. Bero said drug companies fund up to 90 percent of drug-to-drug clinical trials for certain classes of medication. The researchers found other factors that could affect trial results. For example, pharmaceutical companies could choose not to publish results of studies that fail to favor their drugs, or they could be designed in ways to skew results. The study found the most important weakness of trials was lack of true clinical outcome measures. In the case of statins, some trials focused on less-direct results such as lipid levels but failed to connect the results with key outcomes such as heart attacks or mortality. "None of us really care what our cholesterol level is. We care about having a heart attack," Gibson said. "For the drug to be worthwhile taking, it has to be directly related to prevent a heart attack."Note: For lots more reliable information about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, click here.Is Big Pharma Addicted To Fraud?2013-07-29, Forbeshttp://www.forbes.com/sites/erikakelton/2013/07/29/is-big-pharma-addicted-to-...Recent news out of China raises the question once again of whether any aspect of the pharmaceutical business can be trusted. First, Chinese authorities announced they were investigating GlaxoSmithKline and other pharma companies for bribing doctors, hospitals and government officials to buy and prescribe their drugs. Glaxo is accused of using a Shanghai travel agency to funnel at least $489 million in bribes. Then the New York Times revealed last week the alarming news that an internal Glaxo audit found serious problems with the way research was conducted at the company’s Shanghai research and development center. Last year Glaxo paid $3 billion to resolve civil and criminal allegations of, among other things, marketing widely used prescription drugs for unapproved treatments and using kickbacks to promote sales. Glaxo is a leader in pharma fraud and wrongdoing, with other industry heavyweights close behind. Over the past decade, whistleblowers and government investigations in the US have exposed a never-ending series of problems by numerous pharma companies in all facets of the industry, starting with fraudulent “research” papers used to bolster marketing and continuing through to the manufacture of contaminated and defective products, the marketing of drugs for unapproved and life-threatening uses and the mispricing of prescription drugs. Pharma ... has paid more than $30.2 billion in civil and criminal penalties to the US and state governments and continues to face more allegations of wrongdoing. The industry – despite huge penalties and a long string of public mea culpas – has a fraud habit that is just too profitable to kick. Finding a cure should be a top priority of regulators worldwide.Note: For more on pharmaceutical industry corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.BMJ editor Fiona Godlee takes on corruption in science2016-04-19, MSNhttp://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/bmj-editor-fiona-godlee-takes-on-corrupti...Dr. Fiona Godlee, editor of the BMJ [British Medical Journal], specializes in the unexpected. [A marionette puppet on her desk is] dressed as a doctor, complete with a stethoscope around its neck. Its strings represent the hidden hand of the pharmaceutical industry. Godlee keeps it ... to remind her of the dark forces at work in science and medicine. And she is blunt about the results: "I think we have to call it what it is. It is the corruption of the scientific process." Hundreds of papers are being pulled from the scientific record, for falsified data, for plagiarism, and for a variety of other reasons that are often never explained. Sometimes it's an honest mistake. But it's estimated that 70 per cent of the retractions are based on some form of scientific misconduct. As the editor of one of the oldest and most influential medical journals, Godlee is leading several campaigns to change the way science is reported, including opening up data for other scientists to review, and digging up data from old and abandoned trials for a second look. She has strong words about the overuse of drugs, and the influence of industry on the types of questions that scientists ask, and the conclusions that are drawn from the evidence. "I do have a belief in the fundamentality of science to correct itself. We can't do that under the blanket of secrecy," she says. It matters, Godlee says, because bad science can be dangerous. "We do know that patients are harmed, and we know that the health systems are harmed as a result of poor science."Note: Retraction Watch is fascinating reading for anyone interested in what goes on behind science's closed doors. Read also the revealing comments of Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, on the massive corruption she found in the health industry. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing science corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.Transparency Hasn’t Stopped Drug Companies From Corrupting Medical Research2018-09-14, New York Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/opinion/jose-baselga-research-disclosure-b...In order to get prescription drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, companies must conduct clinical trials to show that the drugs are safe and effective. But drug companies don’t have direct access to human subjects, so they’ve always contracted with academic researchers to conduct the trials on patients in teaching hospitals and clinics. Traditionally, they gave grants to the institutions for interested researchers to test their drugs, then waited for the results and hoped that their products looked good. That began to change in the 1980s, partly as a result of a new law that permitted researchers and their institutions, even if funded by the National Institutes of Health ... to patent their discoveries and license them exclusively to drug companies in return for royalties. That made them business partners, and the sponsors became intimately involved in all aspects of the clinical trials. Drug company involvement biases research in ways that are not always obvious, often by suppressing negative results. A review of 74 clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that 37 of 38 positive studies — that is, studies that showed that a drug was effective — were published. But 33 of 36 negative studies were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome. Bias can also be introduced through the design of a clinical trial. It’s often possible to make clinical trials come out the way you and your sponsors want. Disclosure is better than no disclosure, but it does not eliminate the conflict of interest.Note: The above was written by Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. For more, see this mercola.com article. Then see concise summaries of deeply revealing Big Parma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.How Independent Are Vaccine Defenders?2008-07-25, CBS Newshttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/25/cbsnews_investigates/main4296175.shtmlThey're some of the most trusted voices in the defense of vaccine safety: the American Academy of Pediatrics, Every Child By Two, and pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit. But CBS News has found these three have something more in common - strong financial ties to the industry whose products they promote and defend. The vaccine industry gives millions to the Academy of Pediatrics for conferences, grants, medical education classes and even helped build their headquarters. The totals are kept secret, but public documents reveal bits and pieces. A $342,000 payment from Wyeth, maker of the pneumococcal vaccine - which makes $2 billion a year in sales. A $433,000 contribution from Merck, the same year the academy endorsed Merck's HPV vaccine - which made $1.5 billion a year in sales. Every Child By Two, a group that promotes early immunization for all children, admits the group takes money from the vaccine industry, too - but wouldn't tell us how much. Then there's Paul Offit, perhaps the most widely-quoted defender of vaccine safety. He's gone so far as to say babies can tolerate "10,000 vaccines at once." In fact, he's a vaccine industry insider. Offit holds in a $1.5 million dollar research chair at Children's Hospital, funded by Merck. He holds the patent on an anti-diarrhea vaccine he developed with Merck. And future royalties for the vaccine were just sold for $182 million cash.Note: An excellent report endorsed by dozens of respected doctors and nurses reveals the serious risks of vaccines. Read an incisive list of questions on the usefulness of vaccines that are rarely raised by the media. This US government webpage states, "Since 1988, over 21,585 petitions have been filed with the VICP [Vaccine Injury Compensation Program] ... with 7,090 of those determined to be compensable. Total compensation paid over the life of the program is approximately $4.2 billion." Why isn't that $4 billion price tag for vaccine injuries being talked about?Journals 'regularly publish fraudulent research2006-05-03, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,1766642,00.htmlFraudulent research regularly appears in the 30,000 scientific journals published worldwide, a former editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) said today. Even when journals discover that published research is fabricated or falsified they rarely retract the findings, according to Richard Smith, who was also chief executive of the BMJ publishing group. Writing in the latest edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr Smith called on editors to blow the whistle on bad research and to use their clout to pressure universities into taking action against dodgy researchers. The former BMJ editor said it was likely that research fraud was "equally common" in the 30,000 plus scientific journals across the globe but was "invariably covered up". His call for action comes in the wake of several high profile cases of fraudulent research, including the Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk who fabricated stem cell research that it was claimed would open up new ways to treat diseases like Parkinson's. Dr Smith criticised the failure of scientific institutions, including universities, to discipline dodgy researchers even when alerted to problems by journals. "Few countries have measures in place to ensure research is carried out ethically," he said. "Most cases are not publicised. They are simply not recognised, covered up altogether or the guilty researcher is urged to retrain, move to another institution or retire from research."Note: For reliable information on the collusion of industry, government, and research facilities who place profits above advances in public health: http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverupBig Pharma snared by net2004-09-26, The Observer (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1312765,00.htmlNo one foresaw ... the shocking extent to which the internet would change the terms of trade between corporations and society. One of the world's largest drug companies [was] the first victim. Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, the world's second-largest pharma, denied any wrongdoing, but agreed to pay $2.5m ... for concealing evidence of its antidepressant Seroxat's potential for harming children, while doing them no measurable good. Infinitely more frightening ... this pharma had the backing of institutions that we, the public, rely on to protect us from poisoning by prescription. The Royal College of Psychiatrists had insisted only a year earlier that 'there is no evidence that antidepressant drugs can cause dependence syndromes'. It was really the internet that allowed public health activists to do an end run around GSK's and the medical authorities' denials of the drug's risks. An explosion of websites dedicated to vivid accounts of antidepressant reactions told these campaigners about hundreds of thousands affected by a problem that officially did not exist. Health activists in Britain and America have uncovered the core of pharma might. In both countries, clinical drug tests are paid for by the pharmas, who tweak the trials' design for the best possible results. Until recently, only the most favourable findings got published in the 20,000-odd biomedical journals, many of them dependent on pharmas for funding. The drugs are approved for marketing by regulators, whose salaries are mostly financed by the subjects of their evaluations. The medicines are then prescribed by doctors routinely courted with pharma gifts ... meant to persuade them to change their prescribing habits.Note: For a two-page summary with lots more reliable information on major health cover-ups by a doctor who was editor-in-chief of one of the most pretigious medical journals in the world, click here.The Man Behind The Vaccine Mystery2002-12-12, CBS Newshttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/12/eveningnews/main532886.shtmlIt's been a mystery in Washington for weeks. Just before President Bush signed the homeland security bill into law an unknown member of Congress inserted a provision into the legislation that blocks lawsuits against the maker of a controversial vaccine preservative called "thimerosal," used in vaccines that are given to children. Drug giant Eli Lilly and Company makes thimerosal. It's the mercury in the preservative that many parents say causes autism in thousands of children. But nobody in Congress would admit to adding the provision, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta – until now. House Majority Leader Dick Armey tells CBS News he did it to keep vaccine-makers from going out of business under the weight of mounting lawsuits. "I did it and I'm proud of it," says Armey, R-Texas. "It's a matter of national security," Armey says. Because Armey is retiring at the end of the year, some say the outgoing majority leader is the perfect fall guy to take the heat and shield the White House from embarrassment.Note: A Reuters article reports that the former head of the US's CDC was later named president of Merck's vaccine division with accompanying high salary. Could this be payoff for her support in suppressing studies that cast doubt on vaccines?Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?'2018-04-11, CNBC Newshttps://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable...Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering "gene therapy" treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run. "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled "The Genome Revolution." "The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients. "While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow." Richter cited Gilead Sciences' treatments for hepatitis C, which achieved cure rates of more than 90 percent. The company's U.S. sales for these hepatitis C treatments peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015, but have been falling ever since. "GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients," the analyst wrote. "In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines. Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise."Note: Many cancer treatments have been suppressed, sometimes in brutal ways, because the medical profession would lose the huge profits of traditional cancer treatments. Watch this video for undeniable evidence showing that this is the case. Read an excellent article on how the profiteering drug industry is crippling our children, possibly even intentionally. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing health news articles from reliable major media sources.Patents Over Patients2007-04-01, New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/opinion/01moss.htmlWe could make faster progress against cancer by changing the way drugs are developed. In the current system, if a promising compound can’t be patented, it is highly unlikely ever to make it to market — no matter how well it performs in the laboratory. The development of new cancer drugs is crippled as a result. The reason for this problem is that bringing a new drug to market is extremely expensive. In 2001, the estimated cost was $802 million; today it is approximately $1 billion. To ensure a healthy return on such staggering investments, drug companies seek to formulate new drugs in a way that guarantees watertight patents. In the meantime, cancer patients miss out on treatments that may be highly effective and less expensive to boot. In 2004, Johns Hopkins researchers discovered that an off-the-shelf compound called 3-bromopyruvate could arrest the growth of liver cancer in rats. The results were dramatic; moreover, the investigators estimated that the cost to treat patients would be around 70 cents per day. Yet, three years later, no major drug company has shown interest in developing this drug. The hormone melatonin, sold as an inexpensive food supplement in the United States, has repeatedly been shown to slow the growth of various cancers when used in conjunction with conventional treatments. Early this year, another readily available industrial chemical, dichloroacetate, was found by researchers at the University of Alberta to shrink tumors in laboratory animals by up to 75 percent. However ... dichloroacetate is not patentable, and the lead researcher is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test the chemical. Potential anticancer drugs should be judged on their scientific merit, not on their patentability.Note: To explore several cancer cures which have shown dramatic potential, yet are not being studied for lack of funds due to inability to patent the process, click here. Why are these very promising treatments not being fast-tracked as the expensive AIDS drugs were? For a top MD's revealing comments on this, click here. And for why the media won't feature these promising cancer treatments in headlines, click here.Supreme Court shields vaccine makers from lawsuits2011-02-22, Los Angeles Timeshttp://www.latimes.com/business/sc-dc-0223-court-vaccines-20110223,0,1732649....The Supreme Court on [February 22] shielded the nation's vaccine makers from being sued by parents who say their children suffered severe side effects from the drugs. By a 6-2 vote, the court upheld a federal law that offers compensation to these victims but closes the courthouse door to lawsuits. Justice Antonin Scalia said the high court majority agreed with Congress that these side effects were "unavoidable" when a vaccine is given to millions of children. If the drug makers could be sued and forced to pay huge claims for devastating injuries, the vaccine industry could be wiped out, he said. The American Academy of Pediatrics applauded the decision. The ruling was a defeat for the parents of Hannah Bruesewitz, who as a child was given a standard vaccination for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. She later suffered a series of seizures and delayed development. Her parents sought compensation for her injuries, but their claim was turned down. They then sued the drug maker in a Pennsylvania court, contending that the vaccine was defectively designed. A judge and the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled they were barred from suing, and the Supreme Court affirmed that judgment.Note: For powerful evidence that childhood vaccines are much less effective than is generally believed, click here.A Doctor's Dilemma: When Crucial New-Drug Data Is Hidden2012-09-24, Time Magazinehttp://healthland.time.com/2012/09/24/a-doctors-dilemma-when-crucial-new-drug...Dr. Ben Goldacre is no slouch when it comes to rooting out the flaws in scientific studies, analyzing clinical trial data and recognizing when it's been manipulated or fudged. But even Goldacre has been fooled by bad science. In ... his forthcoming book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, ... Goldacre describes how he ended up prescribing the antidepressant reboxetine to his patients based on insufficient data. The research overwhelmingly finds the drug to be ineffective, but it was still approved in the U.K. In order to get approval of the drug in Europe, the manufacturer had simply not published its negative data. Seven trials had been conducted comparing reboxetine against a placebo. Only one, conducted in 254 patients, had a neat, positive result, and that one was published in an academic journal, for doctors and researchers to read. But six more trials were conducted, in almost 10 times as many patients. All of them showed that reboxetine was no better than a dummy sugar pill. None of these trials was published. I had no idea they existed. It got worse. The trials comparing reboxetine against other drugs showed exactly the same picture: three small studies, 507 patients in total, showed that reboxetine was just as good as any other drug. They were all published. But 1,657 patients' worth of data was left unpublished, and this unpublished data showed that patients on reboxetine did worse than those on other drugs.Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on pharmaceutical corruption, click here.Under The Influence2007-04-02, CBS Newshttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/29/60minutes/main2625305.shtmlIf you have ever wondered why the cost of prescription drugs in the United States are the highest in the world or why it's illegal to import cheaper drugs from Canada or Mexico, you need look no further than the pharmaceutical lobby and its influence in Washington, D.C. Congressmen are outnumbered two to one by lobbyists for an industry that spends roughly a $100 million a year in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses to protect its profits. One reason [drug company] profits have exceeded Wall Street expectations is the Medicare prescription drug bill ... passed three-and-a-half years ago. The unorthodox roll call on one of the most expensive bills ever placed before the House of Representatives began in the middle of the night. The only witnesses were congressional staffers, hundreds of lobbyists, and U.S. Representatives like Dan Burton, R-Ind., and Walter Jones, R-N.C. "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill," says Jones. Why did the vote finally take place at 3 a.m.? "They didn't want on national television in primetime," according to Burton. "I've been in politics for 22 years," says Jones, "and it was the ugliest night I have ever seen." Jones says the arm-twisting was horrible. It certainly wasn't ugly for the drug lobby which ... has been a source of lucrative employment opportunities for congressmen when they leave office. In all, at least 15 congressional staffers, congressmen and federal officials left to go to work for the pharmaceutical industry, whose profits were increased by several billion dollars. "They have unlimited resources," Burton says. "And when they push real hard to get something accomplished in the Congress of the United States, they can get it done."Note: This article also states that the Medicare prescription bill "was the largest entitlement program in more than 40 years, and the debate broke down along party lines." Usually Republicans are against entitlement programs while Democrats support them. Why was it the opposite in this case? Could it be that big industry made huge profits from the passage of this bill? For lots more, click here.Gardasil Researcher Speaks Out2009-08-19, CBS Newshttp://www.cbsnews.com/8301-500690_162-5253431.htmlAmid questions about the safety of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, one of the lead researchers for the Merck drug is speaking out about its risks, benefits and aggressive marketing. Dr. Diane Harper says young girls and their parents should receive more complete warnings before receiving the vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Dr. Harper helped design and carry out the Phase II and Phase III safety and effectiveness studies to get Gardasil approved, and authored many of the published, scholarly papers about it. She has been a paid speaker and consultant to Merck. It's highly unusual for a researcher to publicly criticize a medicine or vaccine she helped get approved. Dr. Harper joins a number of consumer watchdogs, vaccine safety advocates, and parents who question the vaccine's risk-versus-benefit profile. She says data available for Gardasil shows that ... there is no data showing that it remains effective beyond five years. This raises questions about the CDC's recommendation that the series of shots be given to girls as young as 11-years old. "If we vaccinate 11 year olds and the protection doesn't last... we've put them at harm from side effects, small but real, for no benefit," says Dr. Harper. "The benefit to public health is nothing, there is no reduction in cervical cancers, they are just postponed, unless the protection lasts for at least 15 years, and over 70% of all sexually active females of all ages are vaccinated." She also says that enough serious side effects have been reported after Gardasil use that the vaccine could prove riskier than the cervical cancer it purports to prevent. Cervical cancer is usually entirely curable when detected early through normal Pap screenings.Note: For more on the dangers of vaccines, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.The Price of Prevention: Vaccine Costs Are Soaring2014-07-02, New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/health/Vaccine-Costs-Soaring-Paying-Till-It...Vaccination prices have gone from single digits to sometimes triple digits in the last two decades, creating dilemmas for doctors and their patients as well as straining public health budgets. Some doctors have stopped offering immunizations because they say they cannot afford to buy these potentially lifesaving preventive treatments that insurers often reimburse poorly, sometimes even at a loss. Childhood immunizations are so vital to public health that the Affordable Care Act mandates their coverage at no out-of-pocket cost and they are generally required for school entry. Old vaccines have been reformulated with higher costs. New ones have entered the market at once-unthinkable prices. Together, since 1986, they have pushed up the average cost to fully vaccinate a child with private insurance to the age of 18 to $2,192 from $100, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The costs for the federal government, which buys half of all vaccines for the nation’s children, have increased 15-fold during that period. The most expensive shot for young children in Dr. Irvin’s refrigerator is Prevnar 13, which prevents diseases caused by pneumococcal bacteria, from ear infections to pneumonia. Each shot is priced at $136, and most states require children to get four doses before entering day care or preschool. Pfizer, the sole manufacturer, had revenues of nearly $4 billion from its Prevnar vaccine line last year.Note: Read an excellent article on how big Pharma is raking in the big bucks on vaccines which haven't even been adequately tested for safety. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on pharmaceutical industry corruption and vaccine controversies from reliable major media sources.Purdue Pharma sought secret plan to become 'end-to-end pain provider,' lawsuit alleges2019-01-31, CNN Newshttps://www.cnn.com/2019/01/31/health/purdue-pharma-unredacted-lawsuit/index....Pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma LP secretly pursued a plan, dubbed "Project Tango," to become "an end-to-end pain provider" by selling both opioids and drugs to treat opioid addiction, all while owners on the board - members of one of America's richest families - reaped more than $4 billion in opioid profits, according to a lawsuit newly unredacted. The suit says the company and its owners, the Sackler family ... engaged in a decade of deception to push their pharmaceuticals, namely the painkiller OxyContin, on doctors and patients, publicly denying what internal documents show they privately knew to be true: that the highly addictive drugs were resulting in overdoses and deaths. Purdue examined selling overdose antidotes, including Narcan, as "complementary" products to the same doctors to whom it sold its opioids, the lawsuit claims, and although the company maintained a ledger of doctors it suspected of inappropriate opioid prescriptions and other forms of abuse, dubbed "Region Zero," it continued to collect revenue from those doctors. The Sacklers paid themselves more than $4 billion in opioid profits between April 2008 and 2018. In 2017, there were 47,600 opioid-linked drug fatalities in the United States. The unredacted complaint also says consulting firm McKinsey & Co. played a crucial role in advising the company on how to push its product on doctors and boost its profits.Note: Many doctors also profited from excessive prescribing of dangerous opioids. And according to a former DEA agent, Congress helped drug companies fuel the opioid epidemic. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing Big Pharma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.Big Pharma Prepares to Profit From the Coronavirus2020-03-13, The Intercepthttps://theintercept.com/2020/03/13/big-pharma-drug-pricing-coronavirus-profits/As the new Coronavirus spreads illness, death, and catastrophe around the world, virtually no economic sector has been spared from harm. Yet amid the mayhem ... one industry is not only surviving, it is profiting handsomely. “Pharmaceutical companies view Covid-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity,” said Gerald Posner, author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.” The world needs ... treatments and vaccines and, in the U.S., tests. Dozens of companies are now vying to make them. The ability to make money off of pharmaceuticals is already uniquely large in the U.S., which lacks the basic price controls other countries have, giving drug companies more freedom over setting prices for their products than anywhere else in the world. During the current crisis, pharmaceutical makers may have even more leeway than usual because of language industry lobbyists inserted into an $8.3 billion coronavirus spending package, passed last week, to maximize their profits from the pandemic. Initially, some lawmakers had tried to ensure that the federal government would limit how much pharmaceutical companies could reap from vaccines and treatments for the new coronavirus that they developed with the use of public funding. But many Republicans opposed adding language to the bill that would restrict the industry’s ability to profit, arguing that it would stifle research and innovation. The final aid package not only omitted language that would have limited drug makers’ intellectual property rights, it specifically prohibited the federal government from taking any action if it has concerns that the treatments or vaccines developed with public funds are priced too high.Note: For glaring examples of how big Pharma and select public officials made money hand over fist during previous virus scares, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the avian and swine flu from reliable major media sourcesDrug Companies Drive the Psychiatric Drugging of Children2012-07-24, Huffington Posthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/psychiatric-drugs_b_1693649.htmlJohnson & Johnson, the company that makes the antipsychotic drug Risperdal, has tentatively agreed to a settlement of $2.2 billion to resolve a federal investigation into the company’s marketing practices. Johnson & Johnson confidentially paid psychiatrists such as Harvard’s Joseph Biederman to promote adult drugs such as the powerful antipsychotic drug Risperdal for children. The company has even ghost-written at least one of the Harvard professor’s “scientific” articles. Another recent DOJ settlement with drug company GlaxoSmithKline resulted in Glaxo’s agreement to pay $3 billion in criminal and civil fines. GlaxoSmithKline employed several tactics aimed at promoting the use of [Paxil] in children, including helping to publish a medical journal article that misreported data from a clinical trial. GlaxoSmithKline also secretly paid about $500,000 to psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff ... to promote Paxil. Glaxo even ghostwrote a psychopharmacology textbook for family doctors, who write many prescriptions for children, which was “coauthored“ by Nemeroff and psychiatrist Alan Schatzberg. None of these drug-company-bought psychiatrists has suffered serious consequences. Meanwhile, the DOJ has now enforced a total of $8.9 billion in criminal and civil fines against GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson. Stimulants, antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs are very harmful to the brain. The health professions would do far more good stopping the drugging of children than continuing or increasing it.Note: The above was written by Peter Breggin, MD, author of the book, "Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families" For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing Big Pharma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.People Are Now Taking Placebo Pills to Deal With Their Health Problems – And It's Working2018-08-23, Timehttp://time.com/5375724/placebo-bill-health-problems/The medical community has been aware of the placebo effect – the phenomenon in which a nontherapeutic treatment (like a sham pill) improves a patient’s physical condition – for centuries. But Ted Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School ... was tired of letting the people in his studies think they were taking a real therapy and then watching what happened. Instead, he wondered, what if he was honest? In 2009 the university’s teaching hospital ... launched the first open-label placebo, or so-called honest placebo, trial to date, starting with people who had [irritable bowel syndrome, or] IBS. Nearly twice as many people in the trial who knowingly received placebo pills reported experiencing adequate symptom relief, compared with the people who received no treatment. [Patients] taking the placebo also doubled their rates of improvement to a point that was about equal to the effects of two [common] IBS medications. Researchers are learning that placebo has nuance too. For instance, the effect appears to be stronger if people are told a medication is hard to get or expensive, and color may also matter, with people responding better to blue pills as sedatives and white pills for pain. More important to Kaptchuk than understanding why honest placebos work is figuring out how the gain in scientific knowledge could translate into clinical practice. “Placebo has generally been denigrated in medicine, but I always wanted to figure out ways to ethically harness it,” he says.Note: A 2009 Scientific American article describes how the placebo effect reduced the size of tumors. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing health news articles from reliable major media sources.This old drug was free. Now it’s $109,500 a year.2017-12-18, Washington Posthttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/18/this-old-drug-was-free...For decades, Don Anderson of Seattle has been taking the same drug to help control the temporary bouts of immobility and muscle weakness caused by a rare and frightening genetic illness called periodic paralysis. The drug Anderson has been taking all these years was originally approved in 1958 and used primarily to treat the eye disease glaucoma under the brand name Daranide. The price has been on a roller coaster in recent years — zooming from a list price of $50 for a bottle of 100 pills in the early 2000s up to $13,650 in 2015, then plummeting back down to free, before skyrocketing back up to $15,001 after a new company, Strongbridge Biopharma, acquired the drug and relaunched it this spring. The zigzagging trajectory of the price of Daranide, now known as Keveyis, shows just how much freedom drug companies have in pricing therapies — and what a big business opportunity selling extremely-rare-disease drugs has become. In 2016, after The Washington Post asked questions about the high price of the drug, Sun Pharmaceutical said it would give the drug away free. Late last year, Sun agreed to sell Keveyis to a biotech company, Strongbridge Biopharma. In April, Strongbridge relaunched the drug. In August, it jacked the list price ... to $15,001 for a bottle of 100 pills. In a PowerPoint presentation for investors, Strongbridge Biopharma estimated that the annual price of treatment for the drug, Keveyis, would range from $109,500 to $219,000.Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing Big Pharma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.US pharmaceutical company defends 5,000% price increase2015-09-22, BBChttp://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34320413The head of a US pharmaceutical company has defended his company's decision to raise the price of a 62-year-old medication used by Aids patients by over 5,000%. Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the rights to Daraprim in August. After Turing's acquisition, a dose of Daraprim in the US increased from $13.50 (Ł8.70) to $750. The pill costs about $1 to produce, but [CEO Martin] Mr Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager, said that does not include other costs like marketing and distribution, which have increased dramatically in recent years. "We needed to turn a profit on this drug," Mr Shkreli told Bloomberg TV. "The companies before us were actually giving it away almost." He says the practice is not out of line with the rest of the industry. "Daraprim is still underpriced relative to its peers," he told Bloomberg TV. The Infectious Diseases Society of America, the HIV Medicine Association and other health care providers wrote an open letter to Turing, urging the company to reconsider.Note: Following public outcry, Martin Shkreli now says that Daraprim's price will not increase by 5000%, but the fact that this would even be consider shows how rampant corruption is in the industry. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing big pharma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.When Crime Pays: J&J’s Drug Risperdal2015-09-17, New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/opinion/nicholas-kristof-when-crime-pays-jj...Risperdal is a billion-dollar antipsychotic medicine with real benefits — and a few unfortunate side effects. It can cause strokes among the elderly. And it can cause boys to grow large, pendulous breasts; one boy developed a 46DD bust. Yet Johnson & Johnson marketed Risperdal aggressively to the elderly and to boys while allegedly manipulating and hiding the data about breast development. J&J got caught, pleaded guilty to a crime and has paid more than $2 billion in penalties and settlements. But that pales next to some $30 billion in sales of Risperdal around the world. In 1994, J&J released Risperdal. The Food and Drug Administration said it ... was effective primarily for schizophrenia in adults. That’s a small market. So J&J reinvented Risperdal as a drug for a broad range of problems, targeting everyone from seniors with dementia to children with autism. The company also turned to corporate welfare: It paid doctors and others consulting fees and successfully lobbied for Texas to adopt Risperdal in place of generics. Even though Risperdal wasn’t approved for the elderly, J&J formed a sales force called ElderCare. The F.D.A. protested and noted that there were “an excess number of deaths” among the elderly who took the drug. At the same time, J&J ... began peddling the drug to pediatricians, so that by 2000, more than one-fifth of Risperdal was going to children and adolescents. In 2003, the company had a “back to school” marketing campaign for Risperdal. By 2004 Risperdal was a $3-billion-a-year drug.Note: For more, see this NY Times article and this one. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing big pharma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.Opioid epidemic: ex-DEA official says Congress is protecting drug makersOctober 31, 2016, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/31/opioid-epidemic-dea-official...A former top Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official has accused Congress of putting pharmaceutical company profits ahead of public health in the battle to combat the US’s prescription opioid epidemic. Joseph Rannazzisi, head of the DEA office responsible for preventing prescription medicine abuse until last year, said drug companies and their lobbyists have a “stranglehold” on Congress to protect a $9bn a year trade in opioid painkillers claiming the lives of nearly 19,000 people a year. Rannazzisi ... said the drug industry engineered recent legislation limiting the DEA’s powers to act against pharmacies endangering lives by dispensing disproportionately large numbers of opioids. He also accused lobbyists ... of whipping up opposition to new guidelines for doctors intended to reduce the prescribing of the painkillers. Charges that Congress is too beholden to pharmaceutical companies have been levelled for years. But ... the influence on opioid policies is particularly disturbing because so many lives are being lost. Industry groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying to stave off measures to reduce prescriptions and therefore sales of opioid painkillers. Among the most influential drug industry groups is the Pain Care Forum, co-founded by a top executive of Purdue Pharma – the manufacturer of the opioid which unleashed the addiction epidemic, OxyContin. It spent $740m lobbying Congress and state legislatures over the past decade.Note: See also a Washington Post article for more. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and Big Pharma profiteering.Health Care’s Trick Coin2013-02-02, New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/opinion/health-cares-trick-coin.htmlThis month, Johnson & Johnson is facing more than 10,000 lawsuits over an artificial hip that has been recalled because of a 40 percent failure rate within five years. Mistakes happen in medicine, but internal documents showed that executives had known of flaws with the device for some time, but had failed to make them public. The entire evidence base for medicine has been undermined by [a] lack of transparency. Sometimes this is through a failure to report concerns raised by doctors and internal analyses, as was the case with Johnson & Johnson. More commonly, it involves the suppression of clinical trial results, especially when they show a drug is no good. The best evidence shows that half of all the clinical trials ever conducted and completed on the treatments in use today have never been published in academic journals. Trials with positive or flattering results, unsurprisingly, are about twice as likely to be published — and this is true for both academic research and industry studies. In the worst case, we can be misled into believing that ineffective treatments are worth using; more commonly we are misled about the relative merits of competing treatments, exposing patients to inferior ones. This problem has been documented for three decades, and many in the industry now claim it has been fixed. But every intervention has been full of loopholes, none has been competently implemented and, lastly, with no routine public audit, flaws have taken years to emerge.Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on pharmaceutical industry corruption, click here.When CIA and NSA Workers Blow the Whistle, Congress Plays DeafOctober 27, 2016, The Intercepthttps://theintercept.com/2016/10/27/when-cia-and-nsa-workers-blow-the-whistle...Do the committees that oversee the vast U.S. spying apparatus take intelligence community whistleblowers seriously? For the last 20 years, the answer has been a resounding “no.” My own experience in 1995-96 is illustrative. Over a two-year period working with my wife, Robin (who was a CIA detailee to a Senate committee at the time), we discovered that, contrary to the public statements by then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell and other senior George H. W. Bush administration officials ... American troops had in fact been exposed to chemical agents during and after the 1991 war with Saddam Hussein. Officials at the Pentagon and CIA were working to bury it. The agency didn’t care about helping to find out why hundreds of thousands of American Desert Storm veterans were ill. Seeing the writing on the wall, I began working on what would become a book about our experience: “Gassed in the Gulf.” The agency tried to block publication of the book and attempted to reclassify hundreds of previously declassified Department of Defense and CIA intelligence reports that helped us make our case. Our story [became] a front-page sensation just days before the 1996 presidential election. Within six months, the CIA was forced to admit that it had indeed been withholding data on such chemical exposures, which were a possible cause of the post-war illnesses that would ultimately affect about one-third of the nearly 700,000 U.S. troops who served in Kuwait and Iraq. None of the CIA or Pentagon officials who perpetrated the cover-up were fired or prosecuted.Note: The above article was written by whistleblower and former CIA analyst Patrick Eddington. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about intelligence agency corruption and the manipulation of public perception.GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn after bribing doctors to increase drugs sales2012-07-03, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jul/03/glaxosmithkline-fined-bribing...The pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline has been fined $3bn (Ł1.9bn) after admitting bribing doctors and encouraging the prescription of unsuitable antidepressants to children. The company encouraged sales reps in the US to mis-sell three drugs to doctors and lavished hospitality and kickbacks on those who agreed to write extra prescriptions. The company admitted corporate misconduct over the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin and asthma drug Advair. GSK also paid for articles on its drugs to appear in medical journals and "independent" doctors were hired by the company to promote the treatments. Paxil – which was only approved for adults – was promoted as suitable for children and teenagers by the company despite trials that showed it was ineffective. Children and teenagers are only treated with antidepressants in exceptional circumstances due to an increased risk of suicide. The second drug to be mis-sold was Wellbutrin – another antidepressant aimed only at adults. The prosecution said the company paid $275,000 to Dr Drew Pinsky, who hosted a popular radio show, to promote the drug on his programme, in particular for unapproved uses. US attorney Carmin Ortiz said: "The sales force bribed physicians to prescribe GSK products using every imaginable form of high-priced entertainment, from Hawaiian vacations [and] paying doctors millions of dollars to go on speaking tours, to tickets to Madonna concerts." Despite the large fine, $3bn is far less than the profits made from the drugs.Note: In February 2016, GlaxoSmithKline was fined another $53 million by the UK for preventing generic competition. The list of huge fines to top drug companies includes five fines of over $1 billion and dozens over $100 million. How can we trust these companies on the safety and reliability of their products?New Study Shows U.S. Government Fails to Oversee Treatment of Foster Children With Mind-Altering Drugs2011-11-30, ABC Newshttp://abcnews.go.com/US/study-shows-foster-children-high-rates-prescription-...The federal government has not done enough to oversee the treatment of America's foster children with powerful mind-altering drugs, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The GAO's report, based on a two-year-long investigation, looked at five states - Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Texas. Thousands of foster children were being prescribed psychiatric medications at doses higher than the maximum levels approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in these five states alone. And hundreds of foster children received five or more psychiatric drugs at the same time despite absolutely no evidence supporting the simultaneous use or safety of this. Overall, the GAO ... found that more than one-fourth of foster children were prescribed at least one psychiatric drug, [and] were prescribed psychotropic drugs at rates up to nearly five times higher than non-foster children. The chances of a foster child compared to a non-foster child being given five or more psychiatric drugs at the same time were alarming. In Texas, foster children were 53 times more likely to be prescribed five or more psychiatric medications at the same time than non-foster children. Foster children were also more than nine times more likely than non-foster children to be prescribed drugs for which there was no FDA-recommended dose for their age. For ... those less than 1 year old, foster children were nearly twice as likely to be prescribed a psychiatric drug compared to non-foster children.Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the pharmaceutical industry.Doctors Reap Millions for Anemia Drugs2007-05-09, New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/business/09anemia.html?ex=1336363200&en=b68...Two of the world’s largest drug companies are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to doctors every year in return for giving their patients anemia medicines, which regulators now say may be unsafe at commonly used doses. The payments are legal, but very few people outside of the doctors who receive them are aware of their size. The payments give physicians an incentive to prescribe the medicines at levels that might increase patients’ risks of heart attacks or strokes. At just one practice in the Pacific Northwest, a group of six cancer doctors received $2.7 million from Amgen for prescribing $9 million worth of its drugs last year. [A] report prepared by F.D.A. staff scientists said no evidence indicated that the medicines either improved quality of life in patients or extended their survival. Several studies suggested that the drugs can shorten patients’ lives when used at high doses. The medicines ... are among the world’s top-selling drugs. They represent the single biggest drug expense for Medicare. Since 1991 ... the average dose given to dialysis patients in this country has nearly tripled. About 50 percent of dialysis patients now receive enough of the drugs to raise their red blood cell counts above the level considered risky by the F.D.A. Unlike most drugs, the anemia medicines do not come in fixed doses. Therefore, doctors have great flexibility to increase dosing — and profits. The companies have [failed] to test whether lower doses of the medicines might work better than higher doses. There is little evidence that the drugs make much difference for patients with moderate anemia, and federal statistics show that the increased use of the drugs has not improved survival in dialysis patients.Note: For lots more on major corruption in health care, click here.Inside Medicine: Is your doctor giving you this important number?2007-05-05, Sacramento Bee (Leading newspaper of California's capital city)http://www.sacbee.com/107/story/166505.htmlBy Dr. Michael Wilkes. I recently wrote a column about cholesterol-lowering medications. I stated that if 67 healthy men with elevated cholesterol took a cholesterol-lowering drug ... for five years, only one would benefit. The other 66 would not benefit, and it would cost about $5,500 over the five-year period. I received a ton of e-mail from readers. Many readers wrote that after knowing this number, they did not feel taking the drug was worth the effort or expense. Others took the opposite view. Both interpretations are valid, depending on the person's values. This number -- the 1 in 67 -- is a term doctors call "the number needed to treat," or NNT. It is a relatively new concept [that] is grossly underused in sharing information with the public. Doctors and pharmacists do a poor job talking with patients about their medications. Many people will derive little or no benefit from their medicines, but they are never told this. The key is for doctors and patients to understand the NNT. Here are some estimates of NNT: 1 in 2,550: The number of breast cancer deaths prevented in women between the ages of 50 and 59 screened annually for five years with mammograms. 1 in 2,000: The number of women ages 60-64 without risk factors who would prevent a hip fracture by taking medicine for osteoporosis for five years. 1 in 700: The number of people with mild high blood pressure who would prevent a stroke or heart attack by taking blood pressure medicine for one year. 1 in 16: The number of infections prevented by treating a victim of a dog bite with a week of antibiotics. 1 in 7: The number of children (otherwise healthy children) who benefit from treatment with an antibiotic for an ordinary ear infection.Note: Many doctors and scientists have made valid claims that drug companies are hyping disease in order to make profits on their drugs. For a top MD's discussion of this vital topic, click here.This is the last article I read at https://www.wanttoknow.info/pharmaceuticalcorruptionnewsarticles-0-10000 pick up from hereMany Medicines Are Potent Years Past Expiration Dates2000-03-28, Wall Street Journalhttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB954201508530067326.htmlDo drugs really stop working after the date stamped on the bottle? Fifteen years ago, the U.S. military decided to find out. Sitting on a $1 billion stockpile of drugs and facing the daunting process of destroying and replacing its supply every two to three years, the military began a testing program to see if it could extend the life of its inventory. The testing, conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ultimately covered more than 100 drugs, prescription and over-the-counter. The results ... show that about 90% of them were safe and effective far past their original expiration date, at least one for 15 years past it. The program's returns have been huge. The military from 1993 through 1998 spent about $3.9 million on testing and saved $263.4 million on drug expense. In light of these results, a former director of the testing program, Francis Flaherty, says he has concluded that expiration dates put on by manufacturers typically have no bearing on whether a drug is usable for longer. "Manufacturers put expiration dates on for marketing, rather than scientific, reasons," says Mr. Flaherty, a pharmacist at the FDA until his retirement last year. "They want turnover." Joel Davis, a former FDA expiration-date compliance chief, says that with a handful of exceptions - notably nitroglycerin, insulin and some liquid antibiotics - most drugs are probably as durable as those the agency has tested for the military. "Most drugs degrade very slowly," he says. "In all likelihood, you can take a product you have at home and keep it for many years." Drug-industry officials ... acknowledge that expiration dates have a commercial dimension.Note: As the Wall Street Journal charges to view this article at the above link, you can view it free here. For lots more on how the pharmaceutical industry cares more about profits than your health, click here.