A 23 minute TV expose on Big Pharma by ALJAZEERA (see video at bottom of this page)
This piece pulls no punches exposing the rampant fraud, fatal drug side effects, off label marketing, criminal practices and “absolutely jaw dropping” payouts Pharma makes to psychiatrists/doctors.
“There is so much money to be made in stealing from the United States Healthcare system,” says Patrick Byrnes, Taxpayers Against Fraud.
Lewis Morris, US Department of Health states, “One of the things we are now looking at is going after the executives in these companies and holding them personally accountable.”
Sharon Ormsky, FBI Financial Crimes Unit states, “Pharmaceutical fraud is one of our top three threats — everybody is touched by these frauds in the extent that when you look at the billions of dollars that go into healthcare for the United States, a good percent, 3-10% of that is believed to be siphoned off into fraud—that’s money that could be going to very needy patients.”
Now the U.S. government is fighting back. In the last two years alone, the government has fined six of America’s top ten pharmaceutical companies for fraud. Investigations are ongoing against another three. In this period the industry has had to pay out over 5 billion dollars in fines, and topping the list is drug giant Pfizer, having recently settled civil & criminal charges resulting in $2.3 billion dollars —the biggest fraud case, the biggest criminal case, the biggest false claims act in U.S. history. ALJAZEERA also exposes Pfizer’s “interesting way of doing business. Witnesses in the case revealed just how the company persuaded doctors to prescribe its drugs. It entertained them in strip clubs, it told them that the blues teenagers feel when they don’t make the football team was signs of treatable depression and it paid them to endorse Pfizer drugs. One doctor received $150,000 in a year.
Also highlighted is the current scandal regarding antipsychotic drugs, including state law suits, dangerous documented side effects and how federal investigators are now looking into claims drug company Johnson & Johnson illegally marketed their antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children, paying “some of the most influential doctors in the field” in order to accomplish this. And leading that pack sits none other than the [now] infamous psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been “credited” with the huge increase of children prescribed psychiatry’s most powerful/dangerous drugs, antipsychotics, while receiving millions in Pharma kickbacks that he failed to disclose. Biederman is shown on tape being questioned under oath, and when asked “What rank are you?” Biederman responds, “Full Professor.” When asked “What comes after that?” Biederman responds, “GOD.”
This is a 23 minute expose well worth watching.
This is one of the best exposé’s on Big Pharma we’ve seen:
People & Power —Drug Money, produced by ALJAZEERA. This piece pulls no punches exposing the rampant fraud, fatal drug side effects, off label marketing, criminal practices and “absolutely jaw dropping” payouts Pharma makes to psychiatrists/doctors.
* “There is so much money to be made in stealing from the United States Healthcare system,” says Patrick Byrnes, Taxpayers Against Fraud.
* Louis Morris, US Department of Health states, “One of the things we are now looking at is going after the executives in these companies and holding them personally accountable.”
*Sharon Ormsky, FBI Financial Crimes Unit states, ”Pharmaceutical fraud is one of our top three threats — everybody is touched by these frauds in the extent that when you look at the billions of dollars that go into healthcare for the United States, a good percent, 3-10% is believed to be siphoned off into fraud that’s money that could be going to very needy patients.”
Now the U.S. government is fighting back. In the last two years alone, the government has fined six of America’s 10 pharmaceutical companies for fraud. Investigations are ongoing into another three. In this period the industry has had to pay out over 5 billion dollars in fines, and topping the list is drug giant Pfizer, having recently settled civil & criminal charges resulting in $2.3 billion dollars —the biggest fraud case, the biggest criminal case, the biggest false claims act in U.S. history. ALJAZEERA also exposes Pfizer’s “interesting way of doing business. Witnesses in the case revealed just how the company persuaded doctors to prescribe its drugs. It entertained them in strip clubs, it told them that the blues teenagers feel when they don’t make the football team was signs of treatable depression and it paid them to endorse Pfizer drugs. One doctor received $150,000 in a year.
Also highlighted is the current scandal regarding antipsychotic drugs, including state law suits, dangerous documented side effects and how federal investigators are now looking into claims drug company Johnson & Johnson illegally marketed their antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children, paying “some of the most influential doctors in the field” in order to accomplish this. And leading that pack sits none other than the [now] infamous psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been “credited” with the huge increase of children prescribed psychiatry’s most powerful/dangerous drugs, antipsychotics, while receiving millions in Pharma kickbacks that he failed to disclose. Biederman is shown on tape being questioned under oath, and when asked “What rank are you?” Biederman responds, “Full Professor.” When asked “What comes after that?” Biederman responds, “GOD.”
This is one of the best exposé’s on Big Pharma we’ve seen:
People & Power —Drug Money, produced by ALJAZEERA. This piece pulls no punches exposing the rampant fraud, fatal drug side effects, off label marketing, criminal practices and “absolutely jaw dropping” payouts Pharma makes to psychiatrists/doctors.
* “There is so much money to be made in stealing from the United States Healthcare system,” says Patrick Byrnes, Taxpayers Against Fraud.
* Louis Morris, US Department of Health states, “One of the things we are now looking at is going after the executives in these companies and holding them personally accountable.”
*Sharon Ormsky, FBI Financial Crimes Unit states, ”Pharmaceutical fraud is one of our top three threats — everybody is touched by these frauds in the extent that when you look at the billions of dollars that go into healthcare for the United States, a good percent, 3-10% is believed to be siphoned off into fraud that’s money that could be going to very needy patients.”
Now the U.S. government is fighting back. In the last two years alone, the government has fined six of America’s 10 pharmaceutical companies for fraud. Investigations are ongoing into another three. In this period the industry has had to pay out over 5 billion dollars in fines, and topping the list is drug giant Pfizer, having recently settled civil & criminal charges resulting in $2.3 billion dollars —the biggest fraud case, the biggest criminal case, the biggest false claims act in U.S. history. ALJAZEERA also exposes Pfizer’s “interesting way of doing business. Witnesses in the case revealed just how the company persuaded doctors to prescribe its drugs. It entertained them in strip clubs, it told them that the blues teenagers feel when they don’t make the football team was signs of treatable depression and it paid them to endorse Pfizer drugs. One doctor received $150,000 in a year.
Also highlighted is the current scandal regarding antipsychotic drugs, including state law suits, dangerous documented side effects and how federal investigators are now looking into claims drug company Johnson & Johnson illegally marketed their antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children, paying “some of the most influential doctors in the field” in order to accomplish this. And leading that pack sits none other than the [now] infamous psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been “credited” with the huge increase of children prescribed psychiatry’s most powerful/dangerous drugs, antipsychotics, while receiving millions in Pharma kickbacks that he failed to disclose. Biederman is shown on tape being questioned under oath, and when asked “What rank are you?” Biederman responds, “Full Professor.” When asked “What comes after that?” Biederman responds, “GOD.”
The Huffington Post
By Dr. Peter Breggin
July 7, 2010
Today I am reproducing for my readers a letter that we recently received from a woman I will call “Janice.” My wife Ginger reads and responds to most of the many communications that come to us each day through email and the networking sites she has joined. Several times a week we will get a communication that tells us that our reform work “saved my life.” I have never talked about this before because it seems self-serving, but people need to know how lifesaving it can be when health professionals dare to be honest about the hazards of psychiatric drugs and the value of empathic therapeutic approaches.
This week we received several more such letters but one stood out with its dramatic and heartfelt detail. Janice vividly portrays how she suffered not only from the disabling effects of the drugs, but also from the stigma of psychiatric diagnosis that discouraged her and made her well meaning family insist that she remain on drugs. As it seems to be in Janice’s case, the vast majority of the adults labeled “bipolar” that I see in my practice are suffering from antidepressant-induced mania in addition to whatever original life trauma led them to be diagnosed in the first place. I document several similar stories and provide the background science in Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime.
Notice how much courage and motivation Janice received from a single doctor verifying for her that her problems were due to psychological trauma and not to an alleged psychiatric disease. This should lend inspiration to health care practitioners who choose to speak honestly to their patients about the origins of their emotional problems in the story of their lives.
Janice went off psychiatric drugs cold turkey and suffered greatly as a result. I never recommend this. But unfortunately too few health care providers have any idea about the merits of withdrawing from psychiatric drugs and how to help patients go about tapering off psychiatric drugs in way to minimize the withdrawal effects.
Janice’s story moves from tragedy to triumph. I offer it to you for the inspiration that it provides and I wish to thank Janice for the trust she has shown in sharing her story with us, and in allowing us to publish it anonymously.
The Huffington Post
By Dr. Peter Breggin
June 21, 2010
“I have a biochemical imbalance.”
“My kid is ADD.”
“I’m Bipolar.”
“I suffer from Clinical Depression.”
“I have Panic Disorder.”
Is there anything wrong with diagnosing ourselves or even accepting the mental health diagnoses of psychiatrists, family doctors, psychotherapists and other health professionals?
Psychiatric diagnoses are seductive. They seem to give us important information about ourselves and our emotional ills. They provide a key to what psychiatric drug we may need. It seems rational and scientific. In reality, psychiatric diagnosing is a kind of spiritual profiling that can destroy lives and frequently does.
First, there’s the obvious cookie cutter problem. People can’t be easily fit into the prefabricated labels contained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from whence all official diagnoses emanate. Diagnoses frequently change, often in an effort to justify this or that drug. It’s not realistic, enlightening or empowering to reduce yourself or your child to one of these diagnoses. Psychiatric diagnoses are simplistic.
Consider this: Psychiatric diagnoses are always negative. There are no such diagnoses as “Exceptionally Able to Face Stress” or “Remarkably Resilient” or “Courageously Independent in the Face of Abuse.” That’s how I like to think about the people that I try to help–as heroes or potential heroes in their own life stories. I never want them to sum up, categorize or symbolize their lives in such a demeaning fashion as a psychiatric diagnosis.
But that’s only the beginning of the problem. These diagnoses imply that you or your children have a disease, especially an underlying biochemical imbalance. This can be discouraging and disempowering. Having a psychiatric diagnosis tends to make us feel helpless to transform our lives or the lives of our children for the better. It makes us feel less responsible for our own psychological and spiritual recovery and for that of our young and dependent children.
Medical diagnoses are real. When you learn you have pneumonia, diabetes or even cancer, you quickly discover that there are potential remedies. There are scientific tests and studies to diagnose the disease and to evaluate its treatment. Medical diagnoses don’t demean your mind and your soul, they describe your bodily impairments.
Psychiatric diagnoses are not genuinely medical; they are not based on biological defects or disorders. There are no objective tests. They are not about the body; they are about the mind and spirit. The medical aura that surrounds psychiatric diagnoses give them a false validity. Psychiatric diagnoses are not rooted in science but in opinion.
Psychiatric diagnoses take power and authority over your life, and the lives of your children, out of your hands. They place that power and authority in the hands of health professionals. Often it takes but a few minutes in an office to transform you or your child from a complex human being into a product on the psychiatric assembly line–and endless assembly line that can lead to a ruinous lifetime.
Perhaps worst of all, these diagnoses almost inevitably lead to the prescription of psychiatric medication to you or your child. Psychiatric drugs are toxins to the brain; they work by disabling the brain. None of them cure biochemical imbalances and all of them, every single one of them, cause severe biochemical imbalances in the brain. The adverse effects of these drugs on the brain and mind are stunning. In my recent scientific books and articles, including Medication Madness, I have demonstrated they cause medication spellbinding. Spellbound by psychoactive drugs we cannot adequately judge the impairments they create in our brain and too often we mistakenly feel “improved” when in fact our feelings have been dulled or artificially jacked up, and our judgment about ourselves and our lives have been impaired.
The Huffington Post
By Dr. Peter Breggin
May 23, 2010
It has been a routine week in my clinical and forensic practice. I evaluated a malpractice case involving a woman on the West Coast whose family doctor from a decade earlier kept prescribing Prozac to her for ten years without ever seeing her again. When she ran into emotional difficulty, she called this doctor who simply raised the dose and added a new drug, still without seeing her for a decade. This woman, a respected professional and parent in her community, then landed in a hospital where her adverse drug reaction was mistaken for a mental illness, more psychiatric drugs were added, and she soon killed herself in a most horrendous fashion.
In this same past week of routine events, one of my own patients came to the office for an emergency session. He had sought my help to come off a cocktail of psychiatric drugs that had been prescribed for him during a personal crisis. We had recently cut back on his tranquilizers and he had become unable to sleep all night. He was feeling anxious and scared. “Am I going crazy, or is it drug withdrawal?” It turned out to be a withdrawal reaction that was easily handled by a slower taper of his medication. A very bright, creative young man, he had a series of traumatic events in his background. He needed counseling and encouragement, not a psychiatric diagnosis and drugs.
Meanwhile, my wife Ginger has been handling the flood of mail we get from our books, websites, and public appearances. People email and call the office identifying themselves as “bipolar” or “clinically depressed.” Or they describe their children in the same terms, as well as “ADHD.” By the time they contact our office, their lives or those of their children have been deeply complicated, compromised and sometimes ruined by psychiatric drugs. They can no longer separate their original emotional problems from their complex array of drug side effects. They devote themselves to adjusting their diagnoses and their drugs instead of addressing their lives. After yet another week like this, Ginger tells me, “You’ve got to write about our Psychiatric Civilization.”
The culture is so imbued with biological psychiatry — which is to say, modern psychiatry — that self-defined patients diagnose themselves, sometimes with the help of a one-minute TV ad. They visit their family doc, give him the diagnosis, “I think I have an anxiety disorder,” and get the appropriate drug. If they arrive a few minutes early, or the doctor is a few minutes late, they’ll get a chance to get educated by a flat screen TV in the waiting room which instructs them about the symptoms of the psychiatric diagnosis de jour as well as its treatment with a propriety drug.
AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP will pay Washington state nearly $10 million for improperly marketing Seroquel, a drug used to treat schizophrenia and manic depression.
Federal and state officials say that AstraZeneca illegally paid for doctors to attend meetings at resorts, where those doctors would “advise” the drug maker about marketing messages for unapproved uses. Medical professionals were also paid to serve as authors of promotional articles and to conduct studies for unapproved uses of the drug.
An investigation shows that as a result of these activities, misleading information was distributed about Seroquel, reports the state Attorney General’s Office. This led health providers to wrongly prescribe the drug to children, adolescents, and dementia patients in long-term care facilities – costing publicly funded programs millions of dollars.
Seroquel and other drugs are purchased for recipients of Medicaid, a government program for low-income consumers. Seroquel is approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, and other conditions.
A government investigation showed that between Jan.1, 2001, through Dec. 31, 2006, the drug was wrongly promoted to treat aggression, Alzheimer’s, anger management, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dementia, and sleeplessness. Sequoel isn’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat these conditions.
As Dr. Allen Frances read through the list of proposed changes to psychiatry’s bible of mental sickness, alarms started ringing in his own mind.
“I was surprised,” the renowned U.S. psychiatrist says, “that the proposals managed to be much worse than my most pessimistic expectations.”
By the time he was finished reading, Frances had calculated that the recommendations contained within the first draft for the fifth and latest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – a hugely influential book used daily by doctors worldwide, psychiatry’s official classification of all the ways humanity can go “mad” – could unnecessarily trigger wholesale “epidemics” of mental illness and expose millions more adults and children to potentially harmful psychiatric drugs.
Frances, more than most, knows the kind of surprises that may be lurking.
He chaired the task force that wrote the current edition of the manual – referred to as DSM-IV – which Frances says is a book that unintentionally contributed to vast and sudden increases in the diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and childhood bipolar disorder (manic depression), after it made changes in those definitions.
Rates of bipolar disorder alone jumped 40-fold in the U.S. after the definition was broadened to suggest that children don’t have to experience the typical manic symptoms seen in adults to be diagnosed bipolar – and that depression in kids can be a persistent irritable mood.
Pharmaceutical Giant, AstraZeneca LP and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP will pay $520 million after being fined by the federal government for illegally marketing the anti-psychotic drug, Seroquel.
Seroquel, also known as quetiapine fumarate, was approved by the FDA in 1997 to treat psychotic disorders. By October 2006, its use had expanded for use for bipolar depression and mania.
The Department of Justice alleges AstraZeneca illegally marketed Seroquel for uses other than those approved by the FDA such as Alzheimer’s disease, anger management, anxiety, ADD, dementia, depression, PTSD, mood disorders, among other uses considered “off-label.”
In 2008, Bloomberg reported that teenagers and the elderly were increasingly being given a class of anti-psychotic drugs not cleared by regulators. In adolescents, the medications are given for depression, autism and hyperactivity, and in the elderly for dementia and insomnia.
Half of Seroquel sales in 2006 were reportedly for off-label use.
In doing so, the company submitted false claims for payments from federal insurance programs including Medicaid, Medicare and TRICARE programs, Veterans Affairs, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program.
Some time back I remarked on a new childhood “affliction” to be dealt with by the judicious use of drugs and psychiatrists: “Oppositional Defiant Disorder.” If you had four or more of the following as a child, you were ODD, and I guess I was, too:
1. often loses temper [check]
2. often argues with adults [check]
3. often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults’ requests or rules [check]
4. often deliberately annoys people [check]
5. often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
6. is often touchy or easily annoyed by others
7. is often angry and resentful
8. is often spiteful or vindictive
To qualify as ODD, those “disturbances” must cause “clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning.” But of course that can mean almost anything. Talking back. Fighting back. Asking a lot of questions. Standing up for yourself in a hostile environment.
In those days teachers and jocks simply bullied you into submission. Now it’s all white coats and Ritalin.
Creativity? Lateral thinking? Oddball hypotheses? Questioning authority? For goodness sake, tell your kids to leave it at home, for their own good. That’s what the Internet is for.
In any case, it looks as though I was onto something. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is going through another update. The first version of the DSM, published in 1952, listed 128 disorders (including homosexuality, delisted in 1973). DSM-IV, appearing in 1994, listed 357–almost three times the original number. And DSM-5, scheduled for publication in 2013, may swell the list even more.
Dr. Allen Frances chaired the committee that wrote DSM-IV. He has, to put it mildly, had a change of heart, after having had more than a quarter-century to observe the human tragedies that resulted:
Frances says [DSM-IV] unintentionally contributed to vast and sudden increases in the diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and childhood bipolar disorder (manic depression), after it made changes in those definitions.
Rates of bipolar disorder alone jumped 40-fold in the U.S. after the definition was broadened to suggest that children don’t have to experience the typical manic symptoms seen in adults to be diagnosed bipolar — and that depression in kids can be a persistent irritable mood.
U.S. health regulators have warned Pfizer Inc. over a series of failures that led to the overdosing of at least 13 children in a clinical trial of its antipsychotic drug Geodon, according to a letter made public on Tuesday.
The FDA, in an April 9 warning letter to the world’s largest drugmaker, said Pfizer “failed to ensure proper monitoring of the investigation” for a product.
The agency did not name the drug in the public version of the letter, but Pfizer confirmed it related to the use of Geodon in children with bipolar disorder.
It said the company did not properly monitor the study and, “as a result of inadequate monitoring, widespread overdosing of study subjects at multiple study sites was neither detected nor corrected in a timely manner.”
Several children given overdoses experienced tremors, restless legs and other complications, the letter said.
Pfizer recognizes the issue’s seriousness and is committed to addressing the concerns, it said. Pfizer reported many items cited in the letter as many as four years ago, it said.
Since then it “has instituted several new measures designed to improve monitoring and execution of clinical trials, including our oversight of clinical investigators,” it said.
The Market Oracle
By Michael Stathis
April 15, 2010
Is there any reason why Pfizer shares are down today?
Just yesterday, shares were trading at ~ $17.30. Today, with the DJIA up by 0.7%, Pfizer is down by nearly 1%.
A clue to this sell-off MIGHT be due to the anticipation by investors of increasing pressure to change the way drugs are prescribed. This could also trigger several lawsuits down the road.
Recently, another study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association discussing elevated suicide risks associated with the use of anticonvulsant drugs. Anticonvulsants have been approved by the FDA for people diagnosed with epilepsy.
Of course, this is not the first study showing anticonvulsants raised the risk of suicide.
In 2008, the FDA required all anticonvulsant drugs to have a warning label that disclosed a two-fold increased risk of suicide. However, warning labels are rarely effective. They simply enable drug companies to continue to sell what many experts feel to be dangerous drugs, while having the safeguard of a disclaimer.
When patients receive a prescription for a drug to address a medical condition, they assume it’s a safe drug; otherwise, it wouldn’t be approved for use. And their doctor certainly wouldn’t prescribe it if it weren’t safe, would he?
According to DEA and FDA regulations, physicians are free to prescribe any drug for any condition they see fit, known as off-label use. As a result of off-label usage, anticonvulsants are prescribed for many different medical conditions like bipolar disorder, pain and migraine headaches. As you might imagine, in some cases, off-label use has accounted for a big chunk of drug sales.
The class of drugs prescribed most by physicians for off-label uses are the antipsychotics (Prozac, Xanax, Zyprexa, etc). The FDA has approved these drugs to treat a variety of neurologic conditions such as depression and bipolar disease. However, drug companies have used many methods to get physicians to prescribe them for a wide range of off-label uses.
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