Finally, Some Common Sense

Finally, after decades of being manipulated and deceived by the major pharmaceutical companies into publishing what amounted to free advertising, the editors of some of the world’s elite medical journals have said, “Enough!”

Set to be announced on September 12th, the editorial policies of such publications as the Canadian Medical Association Journal, The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journals of both the British and American Medical Associations are going to radically change.

No longer will these journals publish studies that are wholly sponsored by drug companies. The policy change will require a guarantee that the research was conducted by an independent source. The powerful and extremely well funded pharmaceutical companies appear to have been fudging data to render the results of drug studies to seem more favourable and the medical media is fed up with this practice. To quote a deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, “We’ve had it up to here…with the tricks people have played, people working with pharmaceutical companies or the companies themselves.”

Apparent methods of deceit which led to this dramatic change in medical attitude are tactics such as suppression of data and results from drug trials unfavourable to the desired result, manipulation of data, releasing of only partial results, re-writing and re-publishing the same results to enhance the overall perception of a study, submitting papers written by company employees under the names of outside researchers, and restricting objective outside access to results of drug trials and studies. This is the stuff of Hollywood. It seems that medical journal editors have been forced to the absurd level of having to enquire if the author of a study is actually the one who wrote it!

The most common offense is the hiding of data. These are powerful and potentially dangerous drugs that will be taken by innocent people the world over who have trust, albeit often naïve trust, in their doctor. To these people their doctor represents the world of science and has their welfare uppermost in his/her mind. And yet, so-called science, it seems, has been lying, cheating and defrauding the public for years. Small wonder that medical mistakes are the third largest cause of death! (See a previous article by this author dated April 3, 2001.)

The issue that ultimately brought this to a head is a study of the popular arthritis drug Celebrex. This was a six-month investigation comparing Celebrex to two other older arthritis drugs and the effects of each on internal ulceration and bleeding. Based on the so-called results of this study, Celebrex has been looked upon as a treatment of choice by thousands of physicians for all sorts of joint and muscle ailments. I’ve called this drug the ‘flavour of the day’ for a year or more.

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