Betreff:
More On Crimes
Against Humanity By Big Pharma |
Von: Dorothee Krien |
Datum:
Tue, 31 Jul 2007
18:33:19 +0100 |
http://3rdoutlawpsychiatry.blogspot.com
MORE ON CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY BY BIG PHARMA,PSYCHIATRY'S SENIOR
PARTNERS
by Justice Lover
The partnership between the shrinks and the transnational drug corporations
(Big Pharma) has been going for many years now, almost since the inception of
Modern Psychiatry. So much so that the one cannot do without the other. Big Pharma cannot make its enormous profits without the
shrinks' prescriptions, and the shrinks cannot "treat their mental
patients" without the deadly poisons produced by Big Pharma. The shrinks
won't do their jobs for Big Pharma without the heavy bribes they are getting
(both individually and as a profession) from Big Pharma, and without the
sedative effects of its potent neuroleptics, which crush the natural resistence
of the patients, and allow the shrinks to continue their good life without
worries.
Much less is known about the collaboration between Big Pharma and the medical
profession. It has been obvious for more than 4 years now that no medical
ethics could exist under the control of the American Psychiatric Association
(APA), as the American Medical Association (AMA) has been for at least 4 years.
As the shrinks gained control over the AMA , it became inevitable that Big
Pharma would invade medicine - the entire medical profession ! - too, as the
following two articles testify.
The third article bellow is about the collaboration of the AMA with the tobacco
industry to the detriment of the entire public.
http://www.newstarget.com/021956.html
"Drug reps use psychological tactics to successfully influence
doctors' prescribing habits
by Mike Adams
Monday, July 30, 2007
Pharmaceutical companies spend more than $15 billion each year promoting
prescription drugs in the United States. One-third of that amount is spent on
"detailing" -- an industry term for drug company representatives'
one-on-one promotion to doctors. A paper published April 24, 2007 in the Public
Library of Science journal Medicine uncovers the tactics which pharmaceutical
sales representatives, commonly called "drug reps," are trained to
use in promoting drugs to prescribing physicians.
"It's my job to figure out what a physician's price is. For some
it's dinner at the finest restaurants, for others it's enough convincing data
to let them prescribe confidently and for others it's my attention and
friendship... but at the most basic level, everything is for sale and
everything is an exchange," stated former Eli Lilly drug rep
Shahram Ahari.
Ahari, no longer a drug rep, co-wrote the paper with Adriane Fugh-Berman,
associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University
Medical Center in Washington,D.C. The paper is based on conversations between
Ahari and Fugh-Berman, who researches pharmaceutical marketing.
The writers report that drug reps are trained to gather as much personal
information as possible about the doctors to whom they are promoting
pharmaceuticals -- from birthdays and hobbies to religious affiliation. Drug
reps are trained to note any detail that can be used to establish a personal
relationship with a doctor. Ahari stated, "During training, I was told,
when you're out to dinner with a doctor, 'The physician is eating with a
friend. You are eating with a client."
Drug reps offer gifts, and not just mugs and pens inscribed with drug names. "The
highest prescribers receive better presents," wrote Ahari. Pharmaceutical
companies rank doctors according to the number of prescriptions they write --
from 1 at the low end to 10 for high prescribers. According to Ahari,
"Some reps said their 10s might receive unrestricted 'educational' grants
so loosely restricted that they were the equivalent of a cash gift."
The source of the 1-to-10 ranking data is prescription tracking. So-called
"health information organizations" (including IMS Health, Dendrite
and Verispan) purchase prescription records from pharmacies. According to the
authors, IMS Health buys records of about 70 percent of prescriptions filled by
community pharmacies. Pharmaceutical companies purchase the records and use
them to identify high-prescribing doctors.
How the AMA earns millions by helping drug companies buy influence
Prescription tracking records do not always identify doctors by name; in
some cases they are identified by a state or federal license number or a
pharmacy-specific identifier. To establish the identity of the prescribing
doctors, pharmaceutical companies rely on the American Medical Association
(AMA), which maintains a Physician Masterfile on every U.S. physician. Citing
the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors wrote, "In 2005, database
product sales, including an unknown amount from licensing Masterfile
information, provided more than $44 million to the AMA."
Once the high prescribers are identified, the drugs reps are then directed to
reward those doctors with attention and gifts. The highest prescribing doctors
are the ones with whom the drug reps work hardest to build relationships. According
to Ahari, "The highest prescribers (9s and 10s) are every rep's sugar
mommies and daddies." Lower prescribing doctors are hardly ignored,
however; Ahari explained that he was taught to "pick a handful out and
make them feel special enough" and then associate increased prescribing
with personal attention and a reward such as dinner at a fine restaurant.
When doctors express skepticism about a certain drug, reps will take one of
several approaches. One tactic is to present the doctors with journal articles
that counter the doctor's perceptions. "Armed with the articles and having
hopefully scheduled a 20 minute appointment (so the doc can't escape), I play
dumb and have the doc explain to me the significance of my article," wrote
Ahari. The drug rep then asks the doctor to prescribe the medication based on
his or her own explanation (to the sales rep) of the journal articles.
Yet another tactic, reserved for doctors who prefer a competing drug, is
described by Ahari: "We force the doctors to constantly explain their
prescribing rationale, which is tiresome. Our intent is to engage in discourse
but also to wear down the doc until he or she simply agrees to try the product
for specific instances."
The pharmaceutical industry employs 100,000
drug reps whose job is, first and foremost, to sell drugs. Their tactics are on
par with some of the most clever and potent brainwashing techniques used
throughout the world, including those used on political prisoners to convince
them to denounce their home nations. Doctors are, in effect, being successfully
targeted and influenced through advanced brainwashing campaigns designed to
alter prescribing behavior and sell more high-profit drugs. Far from being
immune to such techniques, it appears that physicians are remarkably
susceptible to them."
=============
http://www.newstarget.com/021955.html
"Secret drug company payments to doctors remain legal in 48 states
by David Gutierrez
Monday, July 30, 2007
(NewsTarget) Only five states and the District
of Columbia require that pharmaceutical companies report gifts they make to
doctors, and even in these jurisdictions the laws are so poorly enforced that
the details of these transactions remain a de facto secret, according to a
study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers examined public records from Vermont and Minnesota, the only two
states that require disclosure by pharmaceutical companies and make that data
available to the public. By studying the data from 2002 to 2004, the
researchers hoped to gain a better understanding of how money moves from the
pharmaceutical to the medical industry.
"What we really found was laws aren't working," said study author
Joseph Ross, of the geriatrics department of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in
New York.
The researchers found that while reported payments were quite high, the details
of those transactions were not available. In other cases, reported payments
were so low as to be suspicious. For example, GlaxoSmithKline claimed zero
dollars spent in Vermont in the time period studied, yet the state attorney
general listed the company as making more payments than any other. In
Minnesota, Amgen recorded zero dollars in payments in 2002 or 2004, but more
than $4 million in 2003.
Part of the reason for this inconsistency is that gifts of drugs or items not
yet on the market can be classified as "trade secrets" and not
reported. But Ross believes that this loophole is being exploited.
"To designate every payment made as a
trade secret ... seems improbable," he said.
Pharmaceutical companies have been known to give doctors extravagant
gifts including all-expense-paid vacations or gourmet dinners as part of their
marketing campaigns. According to Dr. Harlan Krumholz, an associate professor
at the Yale University School of Medicine, this presents a conflict of interest
that the public should know about.
Ross agrees. "If both parties think this payment is appropriate,
then this information should be made available to the public," he said. "
==============
http://www.newstarget.com/021949.html
"Doctors, American Medical Association hawked cigarettes as healthy
for consumers
by Mike Adams
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Despite its stated mission, "To promote the art and science of
medicine and the betterment of public health," the American Medical
Association (AMA) has taken many missteps in protecting the health of the
American people. One of the most striking examples is the AMA's long-term
relationship with the tobacco industry.
Both the AMA and individual doctors sided with
big tobacco for decades after the deleterious effects of smoking were proven. Medical
historians have tracked this relationship in great detail, examining internal
documents from tobacco companies and their legal counsel and public relations
advisers. The overarching theme of big tobacco's efforts was to keep alive the
appearance of a "debate" or "controversy" of the health
effects of cigarette smoking.
The first research to make a statistical correlation between cancer and
smoking was published in 1930 in Cologne, Germany. In 1938, Dr. Raymond Pearl
of Johns Hopkins University reported that smokers do not live as long as
non-smokers. The tobacco industry dismissed these early findings as anecdotal
-- but at the same time recruited doctors to endorse cigarettes.
JAMA kicks off two decades of cigarette advertising
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published its first
cigarette advertisement in 1933, stating that it had done so only "after
careful consideration of the extent to which cigarettes were used by physicians
in practice." These advertisements continued for 20 years. The same year,
Chesterfield began running ads in the New York State Journal of Medicine, with
the claim that its cigarettes were "Just as pure as the water you drink...
and practically untouched by human hands."
In medical journals and in the popular media, one of the most infamous
cigarette advertising slogans was associated with the Camel brand: "More
doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette." The campaign began in 1946
and ran for eight years in magazines and on the radio. The ads included this
message:
"Family physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nose and throat specialists,
doctors in every branch of medicine... a total of 113,597 doctors... were asked
the question: 'What cigarette do you smoke?' And more of them named Camel as
their smoke than any other cigarette! Three independent research groups found
this to be a fact. You see, doctors too smoke for pleasure. That full Camel
flavor is just as appealing to a doctor's taste as to yours... that marvelous
Camel mildness means just as much to his throat as to yours."
Big Tobacco's suppression of scientific evidence
At the same time that JAMA ran cigarette ads, it published in 1950 the first
major study to causally link smoking to lung cancer. Morton Levin, then
director of Cancer Control for the New York State Department of Health,
surveyed patients in Buffalo, N.Y., from 1938 to 1950 and found that smokers
were twice as likely to develop lung cancer as non-smokers.
Cigarette producers may have hoped that the public would remain unaware of
studies published in medical journals. However, the dangers of smoking became
widely known in 1952 when Reader's Digest published "Cancer by the
Carton," detailing the dangers of cigarettes. Within a year cigarette
sales fell for the first time in more than two decades.
The tobacco industry responded swiftly, engaging the medical community in its
efforts. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) was formed by U.S.
tobacco companies in 1954. By sponsoring "independent" scientific
research, the TIRC attempted to keep alive a debate about whether or not
cigarettes were harmful.
The industry announced the formation of the TIRC in an advertisement that
appeared in The New York Times and 447 other newspapers reaching more than 43
million Americans. The advertisement, titled "A Frank Statement to
Cigarette Smokers," read:
"RECENT REPORTS on experiments with mice have given wide publicity
to a theory that cigarette smoking is in some way linked with lung cancer in
human beings.
Although conducted by doctors of professional standing, these
experiments are not regarded as conclusive in the field of cancer research. However,
we do not believe that any serious medical research, even though its results
are inconclusive should be disregarded or lightly dismissed.
At the same time, we feel it is in the public interest to call
attention to the fact that eminent doctors and research scientists have
publicly questioned the claimed significance of these experiments.
Distinguished authorities point out:
1. That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes
of lung cancer.
2. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the
cause is.
3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.
4. That statistics purporting to link cigarette smoking with the
disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern
life. Indeed the validity of the statistics themselves is questioned by numerous
scientists.
We accept an interest in people's heath as a basic responsibility,
paramount to every other consideration in our business.
We believe the products we make are not injurious to health.
We always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task
it is to safeguard the public health. For more than 300 years tobacco has given
solace, relaxation, and enjoyment to mankind. At one time or another during
those years critics have held it responsible for practically every disease of
the human body. One by one these charges have been abandoned for lack of
evidence.
Regardless of the record of the past, the fact that cigarette smoking
today should even be suspected as a cause of a serious disease is a matter of
deep concern to us.
Many people have asked us what we are doing to meet the public's
concern aroused by the recent reports. Here is the answer:
1. We are pledging aid and assistance to the research effort into all
phases of tobacco use and health. This joint financial aid will of course be in
addition to what is already being contributed by individual companies.
2. For this purpose we are establishing a joint industry group
consisting initially of the undersigned. This group will be known as TOBACCO
INDUSTRY RESEARCH COMMITTEE.
3. In charge of the research activities of the Committee will be a
scientist of unimpeachable integrity and national repute. In addition there
will be an Advisory Board of scientists disinterested in the cigarette
industry. A group of distinguished men from medicine, science, and education
will be invited to serve on this Board. These scientists will advise the
Committee on its research activities.
This statement is being issued because we believe the people are
entitled to know where we stand on this matter and what we intend to do about
it."
Doctors' involvement in the tobacco deception
The statement -- signed by presidents of major tobacco interests including
Phillip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and R.J. Reynolds -- was designed to
launch the "controversy" which I mentioned earlier. In fact, there was no controversy. The research results were
clear: smoking had been proven harmful -- not just to mice, but to people who
had for years been advised that smoking offered health benefits.
The TIRC promised to convene "a group of distinguished men from
medicine, science, and education" and it did so. Early members of the
TIRC's Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) included: McKeen Cattell, PhD, MD,
professor of pharmacology from Cornell University Medical College; Julius H.
Comroe, Jr., MD, director of the University of California Medical Center's
cardiovascular research institute and chairman of University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Medicine; and Edwin B. Wilson, PhD, LLD, professor of vital statistics,
Harvard University.
According to the New York State Archives, the TIRC's functions "included
both the funding of research and carrying out public relations activities
relating to tobacco and health." Faced with mounting evidence that smoking
was harmful, "it became evident that this was not a short-term endeavor,
and that it was difficult to manage both scientific research and public
relations in one organization. As a result the Tobacco Institute was formed to
assume the public relations functions, and the Council for Tobacco Research
(CTR) was formed and incorporated to provide funding for scientific
research."
Whether or not individual doctors supported smoking, lending their names to the
TIRC gave it credibility. The Center for Media and Democracy has reported that
many of the scientists who were members of the Scientific Advisory Board
privately "disagreed with the tobacco industry's party line." According
to the center's website: "In 1987, Dr. Kenneth Warner polled the SAB's 13
current members, asking, 'Do you believe that cigarette smoking causes lung
cancer?' Seven of the SAB members refused to answer the question, even after
Warner promised individual anonymity. The other six all answered in the
affirmative. 'I don't think there's a guy on the [Board] who doesn't believe
that cigarette smoking contributes to an increased risk of lung cancer,' one
said, adding that the SAB's members were 'terrified' to say so publicly out of
fear of involvement in tobacco product liability lawsuits."
If it was fear that kept doctors on board with the TIRC and its renamed
version, CTR, it did not stop them from handing out research grants. The Center
for Media and Democracy describes some of the early grants: "Research
projects attempted to show that both lung cancer and smoking were caused by
some other 'third factor,' such as a person's psychological makeup, religion,
war experiences or genetic susceptibility. One research project asked whether
the handwriting of lung cancer patients can reveal characteristics associated
with lung cancer. Another looked for enzyme markers predicting susceptibility
to lung cancer."
After three decades, the AMA finally admits smoking is harmful
After the 1964 Surgeon General's landmark report on the dangers of cigarettes,
the CTR stepped up its work, providing materials to defend the tobacco industry
against litigation. The same year -- three decades after medical research
demonstrated the dangers of cigarettes -- the American Medical Association
finally issued statement on smoking, calling it "a serious health
hazard." It was not until 1998 that the CTR was shut down -- and only
after the tobacco industry lost a major court case brought forward by states
across the country.
Allan M. Brandt, a medical historian at Harvard,
writes about the role that medical research played on both sides of the smoking
debate in his new book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly
Persistence of the Product that Defined America. After reviewing research,
court transcripts and previously restricted memoranda from tobacco companies,
Brandt summed up the misleading nature of "expert" medical testimony
in tobacco litigation: "I was appalled by what the tobacco expert
witnesses had written. By asking narrow questions and responding to them with
narrow research, they provided precisely the cover the industry sought."
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Brandt acknowledged
that his research is a combination of scholarship and health advocacy --
pointing out the means by which the American public was intentionally misled
for most of the twentieth century. As Brandt stated, "The stakes are high,
and there is much work to be done."
The medical conspiracy continues today
It is my belief that just as private industry and the medical community
conspired to deceive the public on tobacco (and thereby profit from the
public's ignorance of tobacco's extreme health hazard), the same story is
repeating itself today in the cancer industry, the sunscreen industry, and the
pharmaceutical industry. In each case, so-called "authoritative"
doctors insist that whatever they're pushing is safe for human consumption, and
that the public should buy their products without any concern about safety.
And yet these industries are much like the tobacco industry in the fact that
they primarily seek profits, not health. Medicine today is in the business of
making money, and that goal is achieved by selling chemical products to
consumers regardless of their safety or efficacy. Big Medicine is the modern version
of Big Tobacco, and over the last several decades, the American Medical
Association has proudly supported both cigarettes and pharmaceuticals. In my opinion, the AMA is indirectly responsible for the
deaths of millions of Americans -- not just from pushing cigarettes but also
for continuing to push dangerous pharmaceuticals while discrediting nearly
everything in natural medicine or alternative medicine. The AMA is a truly evil
organization, in my opinion, that I believe has directly and knowingly contributed
to the suffering and death of Americans for more than 75 years.
Read
my story, What the AMA hopes you never learn about its true history to learn
more. In a just society, AMA leaders would be arrested and tried for their
crimes against humanity, just as top FDA officials should be.
The cancer industry, similarly, is extremely dangerous to the health and safety
of Americans thanks to its outright refusal to support anti-cancer nutrition
(vitamin D, broccoli sprouts, spirulina, rainforest herbs, etc.) as well as its
refusal to fight for the removal of toxic chemicals from consumer products and
the workplace.
In studying the history of product commercialization by medical groups,
what we consistently find is a series of cons perpetrated against consumers,
masterminded by profit-seeing medical groups that conspire with corporations to
maximize profits at the expense of public health. Nothing has changed today,
either. The AMA isn't pushing cigarettes anymore, but it's still pushing deadly
pharmaceuticals that will one day be regarded as just as senseless as smoking.
Let's face it: pharmaceutical medicine is hopelessly outdated, ineffective and
dangerous. Nobody intelligent today actually believes that pharmaceuticals help
people heal. In fact, the more drugs people take, the worse their health
becomes! Modern medicine is actually harmful to patients!
Medical science is slow to change, and slow to give up its closely-guarded
(false) beliefs. In time, however, virtually everything now supported by the
medical industry (the FDA, AMA, ACS, etc.) will be regarded as insanely harmful
to human health. One day, future scientists will look back on medicine today
and wonder just how such an industry of evil and greed could have gained so
much power and authority. The answer is found in "groupthink" and the
strange knack for humans to defer to anyone in an apparent position of
authority, regardless of whether such authority is warranted."
(Emphasis by Justice Lover)
sondaughtersdad