Corruption--A Real Medical Epidemic!
Lyle Loughry, November 2008
Corruption has become so endemic and intellectual integrity so compromised in pharmaceutical research that drug companies and their collaborators in government (and universities) can now get away with open fraud.
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) researched the connection between authors of clinical guidelines and the pharmaceutical industry. Over HALF of them received financial support from the pharmaceutical industry to conduct research. And 38% of them served as employees or consultants for a pharmaceutical company. Hmm...so how do you suppose they rated the drug? This represents a massive confidence game, a criminal fraud perpetrated on you and me, and the American public, engineered behind closed doors by the fake food industry and the pharmaceutical conglomerates. Both have so much money to spread around Washington that they practically own Congress, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. To heck with the public health and welfare--their goal is to get everyone hooked on prescription drugs and manufactured, plastic food.
The saddest fact of all is that the medical profession is falling for it, allowing itself to be manipulated into acting as an accessory to this crime. Of course, they're paid plenty to be accomplices. It's terrible!
One would like to believe that the prescriptions written by your doctor are carefully considered, and among a number of choices your doctor has, he chooses the best of the lot. In many instances, that is not what your doctor does. What follows is the unveiling of one of the primary reasons you should never say to your doctor, "Whatever you say, Doc ," and why you should take much more of the responsibility for your own health. I'm at a point in my life where I choose not to go to a physician unless I absolutely have to . . . and thank God, I absolutely haven't had to since the early 1970s, nor has my wife. I don't want to mislead you, the other side of this coin is to pursue what you can do to improve and maintain your health, to minimize any need for doctors. Fortunately, we still live in a country that allows you to do that. In the event this is news to you, please consider the following article, and learn more about this corruption.
Doctors Prescribing Influenced
by Big Pharma's Psychological Tactics
Lyle Loughry, July 2007
According to a recent NewsTarget Insider Alert , the American Medical Association earns tens of millions of dollars selling database information that allows drug companies to target doctors for psychological influence campaigns. The routine bribery of physicians by drug reps, and the complicity of the AMA in enabling the bribery, is a dirty little secret that exposes modern medicine as just one more corrupt business. It remains perfectly legal to bribe physicians in 48 states without having to disclose the payments, gifts or free vacations given to the doctors!
According to a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), only five states and the District of Columbia require that pharmaceutical companies report gifts they make to doctors, and only Vermont and Minnesota require disclosure by pharmaceutical companies, and make that data available to the public. According to the study author, Joseph Ross, of the geriatrics department of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, "even in these jurisdictions the laws are so poorly enforced that the details of these transactions remain a de facto secret. What we really found was laws that simply aren't working," According to the researchers, suspicious reporting abounds, and lack of detail is routine. 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.
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. Pharmaceutical companies spend Of the more than $15 billion each year reportedly spent on promoting prescription drugs in the United States, 5 billion of that amount is spent on "detailing" -- an industry term for drug company representatives' one-on-one promotion to doctors. According to former Eli Lilly drug rep, Shahram Ahari, "It's my job to figure out what a physician's price is. The price varies from doctor to doctor, but at the most basic level, everything is for sale and everything is an exchange." 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. 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, DC
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. 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."
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. The source of the 1-to-10 ranking data is prescription tracking. 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 US 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 ." 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.
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. To many people, most MD's have, in effect, sold out to Big Pharma's influence (often without even realizing it). Many see much of medicine today as little more than a system of organized crime pretending to be a system of health care, and are speaking out about it.
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