- which of those drugs is being prescribed to me based on tainted research that’s bought and paid for by the drug company who made the drug

- which drug is being prescribed to me because physicians have been ‘educated’ by drug company sales reps during their ‘detailing’ call route visits (studies show that even a few minutes with a smooth-talking rep actually changes doctors’ prescribing habits)

- which drug is being prescribed to me because my doctors have read medical journal articles commissioned by the drug company and their hired stable of medical ghostwriters and unethical docs who fraudulently claim to be the actual authors for submission to the journals.

And neither do any of my doctors know which drugs are which! As one American doc said: “It’s like steroids in sports - you don’t know who’s using and who’s not!”

There is simply too much money involved in Big Pharma for them to NOT do whatever it takes to push their product over the competition, ethical or otherwise. As it is, drug companies spend 2-3 times more on marketing than they do on research and development.

As a Canadian, I’m watching the tidal wave of patient death/injury lawsuits in the U.S. with great anxiety (not good for heart patients!) because I now believe this is only the tip of the iceberg we’re observing.

Meanwhile, I get some cold comfort from ranting at http://www.ethicalnag.org

cheers,
Carolyn Thomas

A woman who worked at a Peoples Medical Centre in my area made a wall clock out of those colourful pens you see in doctor’s surgeries and chemist shops; all from drug companies and the like. It was like a wall mural - quite large! Amazing! It was very sobering to see the numbers and colours of these ‘give aways’ from drug companies?

I’ve just read Side Effects by Allison Bass, a journalist from the Boston Globe. Interesting to get background on the FDA move (in the Bush Snr. Era) to a user pays model (as the TGA is in Australia..wtf?) and the vast sums of money Big Pharma is funnelling into these organisations, and of more concern directly to the people sitting on these committees - just sign a conflict of interest waver.

The way people killed and harmed themselves after commencing Prozac (and other SSRIs) are horrific. I was reading thinking - how terrible but that happened 20 years ago in the US… Pretty naive of me to think it has been different here - hundreds of Australians died from Vioxx. Had the FDA spent double the time approving the drug (Pharma pushed the FDA to halve it’s approval time) would the result have been different?

The side-effects of SSRIs such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil. Safeguarding profits by maintaining low risk profiles is abhorrent. There’s far too many things I found upsetting in this book to mention here - read it.