Tag Archives: drug makers

What Benefit? Antidepressants & The Placebo Effect—60 Minutes Exposes the Facts

We all know about the placebo effect. But a Harvard Medical School professor has applied the same theory to antidepressants and his findings are likely to rile drugmakers. Why? He filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain unpublished clinical trial data and found that, when combining results with published data, the various antidepressants were no better than dummy pills.

“These are the studies that show no benefit of the antidepressant over the placebo. What they did was they took more successful studies – they published most of them – and they took their unsuccessful studies, and they didn’t publish that…. If they were mildly or moderately depressed, you don’t see a difference at all. The only place where you get a clinically meaningful difference is at these very extreme levels of depression,” Irving Kirsch tells 60 Minutes.

U.S. to Force Drug Firms to Report Money Paid to Doctors

Manufacturers of prescription drugs and devices will have to report if they pay a doctor to help develop, assess and promote new products — or if, for example, a pharmaceutical sales agent delivers $25 worth of bagels and coffee to a doctor’s office for a meeting. Royalty payments to doctors, for inventions or discoveries, and payments to teaching hospitals for research or other activities will also have to be reported.

The new standards carry out legislation championed by Senators Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin. The legislation was included in the 2010 health care overhaul.

“The goal is to let the sun shine in and make information available to foster accountability,” Mr. Grassley said.

Doctors rarely face consequences for drug kickbacks

Two years ago, drugmaker Eli Lilly pleaded guilty to illegally marketing its blockbuster antipsychotic Zyprexa for elderly patients. Lilly paid $1.4 billion in criminal penalties and settlements in four civil lawsuits. But a doctor named as a co-defendant in one suit – for allegedly taking kickbacks to prescribe the drug extensively at nursing homes – never was pursued.

Harvard Expert Ties Mental Illness “Epidemic” to Big Pharma’s Agenda

For any mental illness or passing mood swing that may trouble a person, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — better known as the DSM — has a label and a code. Recurring bad dreams? That may be a Nightmare Disorder, or 307.47. Narcolepsy uses the same digits in a different order: 347.00. Fancy feather ticklers? That sounds like Fetishism, or 302.81. Then there’s the ultimate catch-all for vague sadness or uneasiness, General Anxiety Disorder, or 300.02. That’s a label almost everyone can lay claim to.Drug companies are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers. Called “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) by the industry, these are the people who through their writing and teaching influence how mental illness will be diagnosed and treated. They also publish much of the clinical research on drugs and, most importantly, largely determine the content of the DSM. In a sense, they are the best sales force the industry could have, and are worth every cent spent on them. Of the 170 contributors to the current version of the DSM (the DSM-IV-TR), almost all of whom would be described as KOLs, ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.

Behind the Psychopharmaceutical Industrial Complex; Pharma-funded front groups masquerading as “patient advocates”

As a main component of the Psychopharmaceutical Industrial Complex, the so-called “patient advocacy” organizations have become the leading force behind the American epidemic of mental illness over the past two decades. Drug makers, and their foundations, funnel millions of dollars to these non-profits every year. In return, the leaders recruit their members as foot soldiers to carry out the latest marketing campaigns and to provide a fire-wall so that no money trail can be tracked back to the drug companies.