Several books about this have appeared recently and are reviewed by Marcia Angell here. It’s a good review, especially a good summary of the books, but I was really surprised by this:
Members of medical school faculties who conduct clinical trials should not accept any payments from drug companies except research support, and that support should have no strings attached, including control by drug companies over the design, interpretation, and publication of research results.
She expects a researcher who depends on drug companies for research support to be honest? Why? If you don’t get favorable results your grant won’t be renewed. Under this system it will be survival of the most corrupt. A reformer proposed this.
I think it’s a lot like too much humanitarian aid. Supply free milk to a needy area for too long and you wipe out the local dairy industry. Judging from this stunning proposal, the drug companies have wiped out whole medical schools. The doctors who work in them are no longer capable of doing independent research. This is worse than corruption, it’s enfeeblement.
Furthermore, the pharmaceutical-medical school conglomeration suppresses new ideas that utilize treatment that does not enrich the drug companies. A decade ago, I found that the use of natural amino acid precursors could patially remit a fatal neurodegenerative condition. That I was having favorable results permeated the patients being studied at my local prestigious medical school.
The investigators were furious that their patients were taking my treatment. They were concerned that this intervention threatened the study, the health of their patients was incidental. All attempts to reason with these professors were futile.They issued an ultimatum, “If you continue the precursor treatment we will cast you off, you will be dropped by our institution.”
Marcia Angell should call researchers by their proper name, “whores.”
Pietr, this is an aspect of clinical trials I didn’t know about. Patients in clinical trials are not allowed to seek other treatments?
What was the amino acid precursor? and what was the neurodegenerative condition?
How did the professors doing the study convey their incredible request?
Pietr Hitzig, I read your posts and it makes me sick. You sit here and talk about what you did in the medical community when in reality all you did was kill people with your fen/phen protocol.