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Big Pharma: There is nothing evil about making money 

...But, there is a clear difference between misleading promotion and honest communication.  If I question a drug rep about off label indications of a drug, a straightforward response  harms no one.  In fact, it may give me new knowledge that I could use to help a living and breathing patient.  Relax, patients.  I am well aware that pharm reps are sales folks and are not my primary resource for pharmaceutical education.  But good reps have deep knowledge of a very narrow medical issue – their products – and often know stuff that I don’t.   They may, for example, know of side effects of their medicines that are not widely known.

Keep in mind that most of the medicines that we physicians prescribe are off label, which is entirely proper and is acceptable to the FDA.  At present, the only folks in the country who can’t discuss off label use of drugs with me are the reps.

Recently, a federal appeals court set aside the conviction of a drug rep concluding that his marketing a drug for off label use was permissible under the freedom of speech doctrine. This ruling only applies to the region under the jurisdiction of the Second Circuit, but this will not be the last legal word on this issue.   More details appear in the New York Times/a> piece that reported the decision.
WWhere should the line be set here?  I’m not sure, but I think the current FDA boundary is overly restrictive.   We need a dose of leniency and a tincture of common sense from Big FDA.

 

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/03/big-pharma-evil-making-money.html/a>

Big Pharma exec turned Whistleblower

Dr. John Rengen Virapen, former Eli Lily & Co executive who after 35 years of service decided to quit and speak out about Big Pharma's method for profit and the benefit of symptomatic diseases that people live with for the duration of their lives.

I have spent 35 years of my live working in an industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and they do nothing but annihilate the population of this world. And why do they do that? Because they want to make money, money, money, money, money.

They don't care about your lives. They only care about their wallets. My hands are just as dirty as these people. The pharma industry gave me a good job and I felt that I was in medicine because that is what I studied.

So I started as a salesman and as I moved up in my career where I eventually became a director for a company in Sweden. The affiliate company of one of the largest and most evil pharma corporations in the world, Eli Lilly & Company. Because I was part of the evil. I had a career. I did a lot of bad things; they fired me. I started my own company. I worked for several other pharma companies, big ones. There were people dying from taking medication that was legalized because I had bribed the Swedish government to get this lasso for Prozac in Sweden. Now can you imagine that? Sweden is reputably one of the cleanest, most transparent countries in the world. They have the Nobel prize of medicine.

The Americans, they love the prestige of the Nobel prize. That is why it was important for them to get the registration of Prozac.

What is the pharma industry doing to us. They're the most powerful industry in the world. They sleep in the same bed with governments. They use corruption to get what they want. Corruption involves money. They have lots and lots and lots of money and that is how they make their money. They also kill more people than the wars we have in the world.

We need the pharma industry because there are some good things out there but most of it is rubbish. They are not interested in curing any disease you may have. They're more interested in making you get diseases. They're interested in symptomatic treatment. They want patients who are diabetics, cardiology patients, parkinson's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, arthrosis, because you live a long time and the drugs you have to take you take that for the rest of your life.

The press works also with the pharma industry just like the government does. The pharma companies use the media to implant its dirty work on you.

Don't take for granted what your doctor is telling you because the doctors these days, they don't know much about medicine and they don't care much about their patients. They think about how much they can get paid. And this is how the pharma industry reigns, stays in power. They buy the doctors. They pick them up when they are in medical school, pay their tuition, train them because the doctors don't get information from anywhere else except the pharma industry.

And I know what goes on. I was a salesman the pharma company used to tell me "Never talk side effects." They taught of something called "f.a.b." - features, advantages, and benefits. I also know that they hide the dangerous side effects because I was in charge of a clinical study for fluoxetine or Prozac. When the doctors came rusing into my office one day because we were running a small trial in one of the largest hospitals in Stockholm. The first week they started the trial two of the patients tried to commit suicide and this is a major side-effect of these psychotropic drugs. They call them the SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

The pharma industry by law is not obliged to give out information like that.

Have you guys hears of ADHS or ADHD? But all these years that I've been in medicine, nobody can come and tell me up till now what ADHD is. Syndrome makes it a sickness. Since they can't prove that this is a sickness they change the "S" to "D" calling it "disorder". And when it comes to that kind of disorder, for example, how do they measure serotonin in the brain of a child? Do you know how to do it, doctor? With a ouija board. That's one way. You get the psychiatrist to sit down with their little bow-tie. Psychiatrists, these are mad people. [applause] They sit every year and they sit in a room and then make up what they call the "bible" for psychiatry, the DSM. If this bible was so good, and so needed, and does an exact job, why did they change this, the rules in this bible during the last few years so many thousands of times?

Full version found: http://1phil4everyill.wordpress.com/2...

http://youtu.be/s-8ItXRMPfA

GlaxoSmithKline whistleblower speaks out about bribery of doctors

Published on Jul 16, 2012 This exclusive interview with former GlaxoSmithKline employee and whistleblower Blair Hamrick reveals insider details of GSK's operations, for which the company recently pleaded guilty to felony crimes and paid a $3 billion settlement with the U.S. government. In this Health Ranger Report video, Blair describes his firsthand knowledge of the "bribery" of physicians, the push for off-label marketing of drugs for unapproved health conditions, the illegal marketing of drugs to children, how 80 percent of physicians were willing to be "on the take," and much more.

http://youtu.be/y_RJ9QPG70U

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