Erick Turner, a psychiatry professor at the Oregon State Health
and Sciences University, woke up one day and realized that he was
acting as a shill for pharmaceutical corporations. Worse, he was
promoting drugs that not only provide very little benefit, but
also do great harm. In spite of the benefits paid to him,
including accommodations and thousands of dollars, and the ego
satisfaction of being recognized as a "Very Important Person" by
his fellow physicians, his conscience wouldn't let him continue.
So, Dr. Turner turned on his pharmaceutical masters. He spoke out
against the products he'd been promoting. In the January 2008
issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, he published an
article telling the truth about one class of drugs, SSRI
antidepressants, such as Prozac and Paxil. In interviews, he has
spoken even more broadly, stating that the lack of efficacy of
SSRIs is the "dirty little secret" of the psychiatric world.
Dr. Turner's odyssey began in 2004, when he started selling his
reputation by giving "doctor talks", as they're called in the
industry. These lunches or dinners are lavish affairs, provided by
pharmaceutical corporations. A doctor who is appealing, for either
his or her background or appearance and style -- preferably both
-- speaks about the wonders of a particular drug. Erick Turner's
particular appeal was having been a researcher at the National
Institute of Mental Health for seven years, and then a clinical
trials reviewer at the FDA.
He was trained by Eli Lilly to give talks, which required that he
use only the visuals provided by the pharmaceutical firm and stay
with their talking points. Then, Turner was sent to do doctor
talks. The money he made wasn't significant to him, $500-750 per
talk, a small amount in terms of his total income. However, as he
put it, "In the beginning, I think I got narcissistic
gratification. They fly you somewhere else in the country and pick
you up in a limo, and you stay in a nice hotel you could never
afford otherwise."
Within 18 months, though, Turner began to feel pangs of
conscience. As he put it, "I guess you could say I bit the hand
that fed." He published a paper in PloS Medicine that argued for
online publication of all clinical trials produced for the FDA.
Although he went from drug company advocate to critic overnight
with his argument against pharmaceutical hiding of data, the
article was... well, it was ignored. His article was met with a
big yawn in the medical world.
Turner quit giving the doctor talks and started to search for
hidden drug trial data. At first, he found some in hidden-away
parts of the FDA's website. He then looked to researchers for
data, and got it from a Seattle researcher and one at the
University of Nevada at Las Vegas. "I literally went down to a
Kinko's," Turner stated, "and photocopied them."
The studies he'd found consisted of 74 clinical trials, with 51%
showing results that were better than placebo and 49% with
negative or mixed results. In other words, about half the trials,
though they'd been produced for drug corporations and most likely
were attempting to produce the desired results of showing
benefits, did nothing of the sort.
Armed with the smoking gun proof of negative trials being hidden,
Turner produced a paper, "Selective Publication of Antidepressant
Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy" for the New England
Journal of Medicine. This time, he wasn't ignored.
Daniel Carlat, assistant professor of psychiatry at Tufts
University School of Medicine, himself once on the dole with Wyeth
Pharmaceuticals, argues, "The fact that the negative trials can
just be hidden away means that practicing doctors can get a very
false notion of efficacy data for a drug. That's the real crisis
here."
The question that must be answered is how pervasive the
pharmaceutical firms' hiding of negative studies is. It's obvious
from Erick Turner's exposé that SSRIs are generally useless. What
about other drugs? History shows us that the same must be true.
Take, for example, Vioxx, an NSAID used for arthritis and other
chronic pain. It causes heart attacks and has killed over 60,000
people in seven years. Could its manufacturer, Merck, have
withheld information from doctors and the public?
Did Wyeth withhold information about Fenphen, two drugs combined
to act as a single weight loss drug? It killed people by causing
pulmonary hypertension.
What information was withheld by Hoechst Marion Roussel on Seldane?
It was a wildly popular prescription antihistamine, which was
withdrawn because it caused heart arrhythmia.
The number of drugs withdrawn because of their risks, which were
likely known by the manufacturers, is stunning.
The cat is now out of the bag regarding SSRIs. If they work, it's
only rarely. The known risks are extensive and appalling. Most, if
not all, school shootings involved the use of SSRIs, or their
next-generation offshoot, SNRIs. Suicide rates increase after
starting them. Weight gain is often a problem, indicating a
potential link to diabetes. Sleep disturbances and sexual
dysfunction are fairly common. Many people have a great deal of
difficulty withdrawing from these drugs. None of these problems
were revealed during pre-approval clinical tests, but the fact
that they're common begs the question. How many trials showing
these dangers were suppressed?
Ultimately, the real question is how many people have died or
suffered irreversible harm from ingesting the products of drug
manufacturers? How much information is being hidden by the
pharmaceutical manufacturers, all in the interest of obscenely
high profits?
How innocent are doctors in all this? It's quite clear that they
have been deeply involved in the cover-up. Whether they benefit
from gifts or boosts to their egos from doing bogus doctor talks,
or simply fall for the cute sales reps -- recruited primarily from
the ranks of cheerleaders -- so that they close their eyes to
pathetically weak statistics, how believable is it that they don't
know? When thousands of people outside the medical profession can
find out the truth about pharmaceutical poisons, why do the
doctors seem to be largely unaware?
You might think that Dr. Erick Turner, the man who exposed the
withholding of negative information by drug manufacturers, would
have stopped prescribing the SSRI drugs that he focused on. But
that's not the case. Although he says that he doesn't give
patients false hope about their efficacy, he still prescribes
them.
It's no wonder that doctors are so disconnected from reality. From
the time they're in medical school, they're bombarded with
pseudo-information from pharmaceutical manufacturers. They receive
gifts to such a degree that a Lancet study found "approximately
50% of the items that residents carry have pharmaceutical company
origins".
When doctors enter private practice, it's hardly surprising that
they often become billboards and prescription machines for
pharmaceuticals. As Dr. Jay S. Cohen wrote, "No wonder patients
complain that many doctors look like walking advertisements for
the drug industry."
Pharmaceutical corporations are so pervasive that, as described by
the Washington Post in 2002, "In the days leading up to the
American Psychiatric Association's meeting in Philadelphia [2002],
pharmaceutical companies mailed attendees hundreds of free phone
cards, as well as invitations to museums, jazz concerts and fancy
dinners... And in several dozen symposiums during the week long
meeting, companies paid the APA about $50,000 per session to
control which scientists and papers were presented and to help
shape the presentations."
Is it any wonder that doctors have become so utterly disconnected
from their responsibility to protect their patients from harmful
drugs? It's no wonder that they seem to be so unable and unwilling
to look at drug company reports critically. It's no wonder that
they have become little more than drug pushers, forever pressing
the latest pills on their patients, without considering the risks
and the obvious suppression of information about the products they
prescribe. It's no wonder that when, finally, after a few years of
prescribing a particular poison, they're informed that it's been
recalled, they immediately jump on the bandwagon of yet another
highly-promoted, research-suppressed so-called "wonder" drug. And
then, they repeat the pattern yet again.
The pharmaceutical industry has so controlled the medical industry
-- and with the doctors' full cooperation -- that even the doctor
who blew the whistle seems to have no idea how to proceed without
prescribing the very medications that he knows are ineffective in
most cases.
About the author, Heidi Stevenson, Fellow, British Institute of
Homeopathy
Gaia Therapy (http://www.gaia-therapy.com)
The author is a homeopath who became concerned with
medically-induced harm as a result of her own experiences and
those of family members. She says that allopathic medicine is the
arena that best describes the motto, "Buyer beware."
Iatrogenic disease is illness, disability, and death caused by
medical practice. It is common, resulting in huge costs to society
and individuals. It's possible - even common - to suffer an
iatrogenic illness without realizing its source. Heidi Stevenson
provides information about medically-induced disease and
disability so members of the public can protect themselves.
bravenet.com
