Marketing pharmaceuticals

Merck published fake medical journal

Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles--most of which presented data favorable to Merck products--that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.

four of the 21 articles featured in the first issue he reviewed referred to Fosamax. In the second issue, nine of the 29 articles related to Vioxx, and another 12 to Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions regarding the MSDA drugs. "I can understand why a pharmaceutical company would collect a number of research papers with results favourable to their products and make these available to doctors," Jelinek said at the trial. "This is straightforward marketing."


Read more: Merck published fake journal - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scien...1#ixzz0wVO0j1ta

Arthritis drug Vioxx ‘not fit for sale’, says Australian judge

The Federal Court case heard allegations that Merck created a “hit list” of doctors critical of the drug who needed to be “neutralised”; trained sales representatives in a Men in Black-style workshop to overcome doctors’ concerns that Vioxx caused heart attacks and writing songs (“Go Vioxx, go Vioxx, go Vioxx!!!”) to Ricky Martin-style music to motivate sales staff


"I have never been happy with the attack on Vioxx:"

Let me summarize that evidence briefly: Less than one half of one percent of people taking Vioxx get heart attacks and most of them are in frail health anyway. But that tiny rate of heart attacks is still 2 to 4 times greater than the rate observed with some other Cox2 inhibitor drugs. And here is the kicker: Even though Vioxx takers get more heart attacks, they DON’T DIE of them at a rate higher than that seen among patients on other Cox2 inhibitors.

The fact is that all Cox2 inhibitors have troublesome side-effects but the side effects differ somewhat. So patients and their doctors should have a choice: A patient not doing well on one Cox2 inhibitor might do well on Vioxx. But that option has now been taken away. A patient might well have been ready to accept the slightly elevated risk of a non-fatal heart attack in order to have their arthritic pain relieved without other side-effects



http://www.bloggernews.net/123971

there are 348 physicians in the US who make over $100,000 per year giving lectures for drug companies, and that many of them lack board certification or have undergone various disciplinary actions.

The picture shows that most do not have academic credentials or research backgrounds, and in some cases are working primarily as hired guns to promote the company’s viewpoint. Obviously the drug companies want academics from prestigious schools to be their pitchmen, but when push comes to shove, they will take someone who will pitch their products over someone who is going to give a balanced view.


http://www.beforeyou...rom-propublica/


The Ohio medical board concluded that pain physician William D. Leak had performed “unnecessary” nerve tests on 20 patients and subjected some to “an excessive number of invasive procedures,” including injections of agents that destroy nerve tissue.

Yet the finding, posted on the board’s public website, didn’t prevent Eli Lilly and Co. from using him as a promotional speaker and adviser. The company has paid him $85,450 since 2009.

New York’s medical board put Dr. Tulio Ortega on two years’ probation in 2008 after he pleaded no contest to falsifying records to show he had treated four patients when he had not. Louisiana’s medical board, acting on the New York discipline, also put him on probation this year.

Yet during 2009 and 2010, Hastik made $168,658 from Lilly, Glaxo and AstraZeneca. Ortega was paid $110,928 from Lilly and AstraZeneca.


http://www.propublic...plinary-records

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines

Petersen confirms almost all the vile practices I have observed during my 25 years as a ghost writer and editor working in pharmaceutical advertising and "medical education."

Even sophisticated physicians don't realize that course material for Continuing Medical Education (CME) is nearly always based on marketing objectives: The ghost writer creates the content based on the product that the sponsoring drug or device manufacturer wants to sell. The controlling power of the manufacturer is whitewashed as an "educational grant" by the "healthcare communications" company owned by the pharmaceutical advertiser.

Doctors learn the doctrine according to Big Pharma and are usually none the wiser (in fact, considerably fooled). Likewise, the speakers at CME seminars--and every word of their presentations--are carefully screened and selected by the pharmaceutical product representative. It's bogus, it's all staged, it's totally corrupt; yet, doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and other healthcare professionals are actually required to rack up a certain number of CME hours, in order to renew their professional licenses. In other words, they must learn how to practice bad medicine, in order to practice, at al


Amazon: Our Daily Meds

Menopause, as Brought to You by Big Pharma

Part of the Premarin saga shows how a drug maker successfully and cannily expanded a franchise whose central ingredient is horse estrogens into a billion-dollar panacea for aging women. Yet several hundred pages of court documents also raise questions about another aspect of Premarin’s trajectory: how Wyeth worked over decades to maintain the image and credibility of its hormone drugs even as the products were repeatedly under siege.

Pfizer representatives say court documents paint an unfair picture of Wyeth’s practices and that plaintiffs’ lawyers have cherry-picked documents for out-of-context comments to sway juries.

Still, the documents offer a snapshot of Wyeth’s efforts. Taken together, they depict a company that over several decades spent tens of millions of dollars on influential physicians, professional medical societies, scientific publications, courses and celebrity ads, inundating doctors and patients with a sea of positive preventive health messages that plaintiffs’ lawyers say deflected users’ attention from cancer concerns.

Even as evidence mounted of an association of the drugs with cancer — first in the 1970s with Premarin and endometrial cancer, then in the 1990s with Prempro and breast cancer — Wyeth tried to contain the concerns, the court documents show. (A note handwritten in 1996 by a Wyeth employee responding to a new report of breast cancer risks associated with hormone therapy said: “Dismiss/distract.”)

http://www.nytimes.c...s...rss&emc=rss

Prempro is bio-identical for horses - NOT WOMEN. My sister was given the drug and died of uterine cancer last December. They said due to high estrogen in her system. Speaking of estrogen - MEN - are getting breast cancer in higher numbers. For women, breast cancer used to be 1 in 70 - now its one in 7 due to estrogen dominance. They are not necessarily getting the exposure from drugs but common things in day to day life which absorb through the skin and mimic estrogen: things like perfumes in shampoo, cleaning solutions containing chlorinated solvents and esters, petrochemical derevatives (plastics), pesticides, herbicides, and many artificial fertilizers, just to name a few. World wide - especially in developed countries - sperm counts have dropped by over 50% due to exposure to estrogenic man made compounds. Theoretically, if the sperm count trends continue at the same pace of the last 50 years, the last male to father a child may have already been born.
Mary Anne

More doctors are becoming outraged about drug company mass marketing

More money was spent advertising Vioxx than Pepsi
Politicians have been co-opted

Big Bucks Big Pharma
1:08:22
Big Bucks, Big Pharma pulls back the curtain on the multi-billion
dollar pharmaceutical industry to expose the insidious ways that illness is used, manipulated, and in some instances created.
Focusing on the industry's marketing practices, media scholars and health professionals help viewers understand the ways in which Direct-To-Consumer pharmaceutical advertising glamorizes and normalizes the use of prescription medication, and works in tandem with promotion to doctors.

http://video.google....09197405993027#

Edited by stocks, 18 March 2011 - 10:42 AM.

Arthritis drug Vioxx ‘not fit for sale’, says Australian judge

The Federal Court case heard allegations that Merck created a “hit list” of doctors critical of the drug who needed to be “neutralised”; trained sales representatives in a Men in Black-style workshop to overcome doctors’ concerns that Vioxx caused heart attacks and writing songs (“Go Vioxx, go Vioxx, go Vioxx!!!”) to Ricky Martin-style music to motivate sales staff


"I have never been happy with the attack on Vioxx:"

Let me summarize that evidence briefly: Less than one half of one percent of people taking Vioxx get heart attacks and most of them are in frail health anyway. But that tiny rate of heart attacks is still 2 to 4 times greater than the rate observed with some other Cox2 inhibitor drugs. And here is the kicker: Even though Vioxx takers get more heart attacks, they DON’T DIE of them at a rate higher than that seen among patients on other Cox2 inhibitors.

Attack on Vioxx Not Justified

There is a ridiculous article which claims, in effect, that the executives of Merck & Co should have been hanged, drawn and quartered for releasing the anti-arthritis drug Vioxx.

The attack on it was underpinned by a practice that I have often criticized on this blog: Looking at relative risk to the exclusion of absolute risk. If the absolute risk is tiny, the relative risk seems of only academic interest to me. There are risks in everything we do so something that has only a tiny absolute risk attached to it should be one of our better options in life, it seems to me.

Anyway, I will comment here only on the one big study that was most used to condem Vioxx. The VIGOR study compared Vioxx with an accepted "safe" drug in its class: Naproxen.

And it found that using Vioxx raised the absolute risk of a heart attack by one third of one percent -- from .01 to .04% I would have interpreted that finding as showing that both drugs were low risk with only trivial differences between them but medical researchers love their relative risk statistics. Without a heavy focus on RR, most of their findings would be trivial so RR is almost a religion with them.

So they treated these essentially trivial results in a most frightening way: saying that Vioxx was FOUR TIMES as likely to give you heart attacks as its alternative. And if you ignore that all the risks involved were tiny, that does sound alarming. In fact, however, it was the usual medical research practice of making mountains out of molehills. My recommendation from the data would have been that VIOXX is safe, except perhaps for people with known heart problems

But that's not all. While the heart attack rate with Vioxx was elevated, the overall mortality was not! In other words, Vioxx was not more likely to kill you than its control. It may have led to a few more heart attacks but it REDUCED your risk of dying from other causes. So even in relative risk terms it is a safe drug. When you're dead you're dead. It does not matter what you died of -- so overall mortality should have been the dominant criterion for evaluating Vioxx. That it was essentially ignored just shows how hysterical people can get about drug companies. They pick on trivialities to bring down what they hate as "Big Pharma".

Merck was unfairly persecuted by small minds and Vioxx should still be available to those it helped. Arthritis is a most disabling condition and for some people Vioxx gave better relief than other drugs in its classs.

I could go on and discuss the other nitpicking associated with the VIGOR study but Humpty Dumpty is now well and truly off his wall so I see no point in going further. I do however feel very sorry for the people at Merck and also sorry for the people who were denied the chance to continue with something that was best for their disability. Vioxx would not have once been so widely used without it being a very helpful drug.


http://john-ray.blogspot.com/

Study in crony capitalism: ObamaCare and Big Pharma

According to the trove of e-mails that the WSJ published today, there appears to be a direct quid pro quo payoff to the drug companies for some badly-needed PR efforts
on behalf of the administration, in exchange for limiting the amount that Congress would seize from drug companies:

The business refrain in those days was that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. But it turns out Big Pharma was also serving as head chef, maître d’hotel and dishwasher. Though some parts of the story have been reported before,
the emails make clear that ObamaCare might never have passed without the drug companies. Thank you, Pfizer.


http://hotair.com/ar...and-big-pharma/

Is there a cure for corporate crime in the drug industry? - BMJ Editorial

Effective enforcement of regulations requires more resources and determination to impose robust sanctions

Nearly 30 years ago, Braithwaite’s Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry showed that unethical and corrupt behaviour was endemic in the sector. Sadly, there is growing evidence that little has changed. Recent research suggests that violation of the law continues to be widespread. Most new medicines offer little or no therapeutic advantage over existing products, so promotion plays a huge role in achieving market share. In a crowded and competitive marketplace the temptation for companies to resort to misleading claims is great. According to Gøtzsche (doi:10.1136/bmj.e8462),1 as of July 2012, nine of the 10 largest drug companies were bound by corporate integrity agreements under civil and criminal settlements or judgments in the United States. The corporate activity that has led to recent government investigations has involved unethical and unlawful practices that are well beyond mere administrative offences.


http://pharmagossip......PharmaGossip)

Ben Goldacre is the British physician who has done important, debunking work about everything from homeopathy to vaccine scares in his book Bad Science and in his Guardian newspaper-column of the same name.

Now, Goldacre has turned his gaze to the pharmaceutical industry. With Bad Pharma, his new book, he painstakingly documents how “good science has been perverted on an industrial scale.”

Pharmaceutical companies frequently hide unflattering studies and selectively publish positive ones, which means a lot of science never sees the light of day and the medical community has a skewed view of the evidence base for treatments. As well, trials are sometimes flawed by design and done on unrepresentative patients so that outcomes are more favourable. Drugs are then marketed to doctors in ways that reflect a distorted reality. Meanwhile, regulators are asleep at the switch and the medical establishment is failing to address these well-documented problems. Medicine is, indeed, broken.

Q: What was it like to move from covering straight-up quackery—like ear candling and homeopathy—in Bad Science to the more covert and complex tactics the pharmaceutical industry sometimes uses to distort science?

A: Quacks and drug companies both use exactly the same tricks to get customers but drug companies use a more sophisticated version of them because they are bamboozling a more sophisticated audience, which is doctors, and to an extent (health) regulators. The thing they have in common is the interplay between why they distort evidence, but also their motivation for distorting it and how they commit themselves to doing things and saying things which seem to be very helpful and untrue.


http://www2.macleans...ook-bad-pharma/