By Stuart Chaifetz

The Dark Side of Big Pharma IV

Fraudorama

Fraud is a pretty powerful word. When something is painted as being a fraud, we immediately begin to dismiss it as being illegitimate, corrupt and deceitful.

It’s also a dangerous word to use, because the person wielding it can be dismissed if there is no evidence to back up their claim. It’s not something that I throw out casually and I am not at all comfortable simply accusing someone, or in this case members of the Pharmaceutical industry, of fraud.

By Stuart Chaifetz

The Dark Side of Big Pharma III:

Institutional Review Boards

The first line of defense against dangerous practices occurring in Human Clinical Trials are Institutional Review Boards (IRB). These boards are meant to monitor and approve research that has been taken to the human level, and, specifically, to protect the rights of people who are being tested.

Thankfully, with these IRB’s Elliot Ness style of Untouchability, there are never any problems and corruption doesn’t exist at all within the biomedical/human research community.

Right.

By Stuart Chaifetz

The Dark Side of Big Pharma, Part II

Because animal biology is so different than ours, and drugs react differently on different species, nine out of ten animal tested drugs fail when taken to the human level. This 90% failure rate means that when drugs are sent for human clinical trials, researchers are literally experimenting on human beings.

While we know of the poor translation of animal data to human use, there is a lot about human clinical trials that is not well known, such as what happens when experimental drugs are given to human test subjects, who watches out for these people, is it an honest process, and how do business concerns factor in?

I’ll be exploring all of these questions and their ramifications in the coming weeks. First though, let’s take a look at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the government agency that investigates human clinical trials, and what information they have that sheds some light on these studies.

By Stuart Chaifetz

The Dark Side of Big Pharma: Part 1 - Hitting Us Where it Hurts

I’m kicking off another multi-part blog series, this time focusing on the actions of Pharmaceutical companies.  

As anyone who has a dog or cat knows, when you take them to the vet for a shot or medication, by the time you pay the bill, all that is left in your wallet is either a small puff of dust, or a credit card wilted and bruised from the electronic fiscal beating it had just taken.

In the past couple of months I’ve felt this personally. Both of my dogs, Theseus and Tiberius, have had to make trips to the vet that left me wondering if that was an antibiotic my dog had, or did they just pump liquid gold into his backside. It turns out that it was both.

By Stuart Chaifetz

In the spirit of the Summer movie season, and its long history of producing sequels and trilogies, I would like to offer a third and final take on stories of research ‘breakthroughs’ being front page news, while failures are either never reported, or are dumped into the business section (grab a keg of soda and a garbage bag full of popcorn that cost more than the computer I am writing on if you really want to get that movie theater experience while reading this).

In the course of my research on this issue, I found one exception to the rule that is stated above: For the first and perhaps last time, in May of 1998, scrutiny was poured over a front page story that over-promoted a supposed cure for cancer.

By Stuart Chaifetz

Front Page Hype - Back Page Reality

Part II

In my last blog, I wrote about how news stories of supposed research breakthroughs burst through on the front page, while deaths due to pharmaceutical drugs are usually sent to the business section.

I want to focus a bit more on some of those front page headlines, but first, a comment on why I believe these type of stories have become so prevalent, yet there is almost never any follow up to see if these ‘miracle cures’ actually work.

It’s because our memory retention is awful. You, me, reporters and the media, politicians, all of us; unless a story touches us deeply and personally, we tend to forget what the media craze of the day is once it is replaced by the next one.

By Stuart Chaietz

Front Page Hype - Back Page Reality

Part I

When animal experimenters create monkeys with glowing feet (as we recently saw) or whatever the horror of the week is, the story is carried front and center in newspapers and on television. When no new breakthroughs occur - or worse - when people become ill or die from drugs tested on animals, the stories, if carried at all, are usually tucked away in the business section. Placed here, the major aspect of interest becomes the decline of the value of the pharmaceutical company, not of the individuals who have died or of the effect on their families.

A case in point is this story, from Monday, reporting on a drug called Tysabri, and that a tenth patient taking it has “developed a potentially deadly brain infection.” Something as serious as this should get prime news retail space, but when you look on the news site where it’s posted, you have to follow this path to find it: “Home > Business & Finance > Industries > Healthcare > Article.”