Drugs Peddlars and the Wall Street

Now this is something I have been waiting for. At last found an article with some facts about the drug companies and how they deal. This is a good lesson for any young enterprising drug dealers.

This is about a drug called Satins.

"How could this be, if statins lower the risk of heart attack, at least for some people? Preventing a heart attack does not necessarily mean that a life is saved. In many statin studies that show lower heart attack risk, the same number of patients end up dying, whether they are taking statins or not. "You may have helped the heart, but you haven't helped the patient," says Dr. Beatrice Golomb, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of a 2004 editorial in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology questioning the data on statins. "You still have to look at the impact on the patient overall."

"The letter we sent to the NHLBI also called for an independent panel to review the evidence," Goozner notes, "since the NLHBI panel that made the recommendations had been dominated by physicians with ties to statin manufacturers." Indeed, the National Institutes of Health later admitted that eight of the nine experts on the panel had received financing from one or more of the companies that make statins. (None of the panelists had publicly disclosed their ties to manufacturers when they made their recommendations.)

Just how much "financing" were the panelists receiving? According to the Los Angeles Times, from 2001 to 2003 Dr. Bryan Brewer, a leader at the National Institutes of Health, and "part of the team that gave the nation new cholesterol guidelines in 2004," had accepted "about $114,000 in consulting fees from four companies making or developing the cholesterol-lowering drugs."

But "this is relative peanuts compared to Dr P. Trey Sunderland III, a senior psychiatric researcher at the NIH, who took $508,500 in fees from Pfizer, Inc. whilst collaborating with them and endorsing their drug [Lipitor]," says Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, who is a member of The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (THINCS) -- a growing group of scientists, physicians, other academicians and science writers from various countries.

Dr. Abramson, who is a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, charges that the study that accompanied the updated 2004 guidelines "knowingly misrepresented the results of the clinical trials that they supposedly relied upon to formulate their recommendations. The problem is that the experts claimed to rely on scientific evidence, but they act as if empowered to ignore the evidence when it is not consistent with their beliefs."

This is a serious allegation. Keep in mind that statins are the most popular drugs in the history of human medicine. Worldwide sales totaled $33 billion in 2007. More than 18 million American now take them."

Learn the lot here.


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