How the destitute and the mentally ill are being used as human lab ratsMatterBy Carl ElliottJune 29, 2014
MatterBy Peter AldhousJune 29, 2014
I don’t know Peter Aldhous, but most of us do know Carl Elliot of Fear and Loathing in Bioethics as a tireless crusader for the case of Dan Markingson and what it says about the state of Clinical Trials. As is my custom, I don’t clip out pieces for the really good articles. They deserve being read in their full original form. I think both of these articles are important, but I particularly appreciated the first one because it covers things that I ran across along the way and didn’t know what to do with. Carl actually went to the Clinical Research Centers in question and interviewed the people recruited there [see the clinical research industry: the CRCs…, hiding uptown…]. When I ran across places like South Coast Clinical Trials and The Clinical Trials Guru I was at something of a loss for words. And, by the way, one has to throw in another article into this mix from three years ago, Deadly Medicine, by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele in Vanity Fair [still available online]. Whatever you visualize when you read a clinical trial in a journal, it’s probably not right…
Pharma knows no limits in what it will do to sell or maintain a standard, a standard they set, regardless of the vulnerability of the patient:
http://blogs.wsj.com/pharmalot/2014/07/28/astrazeneca-battles-pediatrician-group-over-preemie-drug-guidelines/?mod=WSJBlog
Doctors become complicit when they do not follow the evidence in mandating testing or medications in an effort to secure financial gain or power:
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/07/moving-annual-visits-21st-century.html
Pharma will use any marketing tool in an effort to convince the public that new and better is on the way:
http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2014/07/28/hyping-cancer-genotyping/
The FDA cannot be relied upon to follow through on recommendations of its own staff:
http://cardiobrief.org/2014/07/14/fda-once-again-reaches-conclusions-at-odds-with-its-own-staff/
While many good doctors would like to spend time with patients, and have reliable information to help, the financial drivers of a modern practice, along with the corrupted information they receive based on financial gain makes what we term modern medicine a corrupted system.
We should not be surprised that medicine is no longer a profession but nothing more than a marketing ploy where in true TV fashion we hear the words: but just wait.
Steve Lucas
Madhukar Trivedi recently gained a foothold in the Dallas homeless community under the guise of program evaluation research. You can read about it here:
http://tinyurl.com/klfus7h