Merck Caught in Massive Scientific Fraud as In-House Authors were Disguised as Independent Scientists

hamid-

The issue is not with merck alone. Strangely enough, merck and a variety of its competitors are owned by a small conglomerate of private investors. Not surprisingly, some of the senators who oversee the FDA sit on the board of this investment group.

Consider the following: user fees are an option available to ALL companies looking to approve a new drug. In fact, the user fee option is a product of the FDA oversight committee. In short, it allows companies like merck to conduct the research that will decide the approval of their drugs for the FDA.

As you'll note this is all available on the FDA website and with enough digging you can see that the FDA has very little power indeed. Many companies looking for approval are practically required to conduct their own tests under the user fees option. The FDA simply does not have the funding to test for everyone. As you might have guessed, the senate oversight committee is responsible for FDA funding as well.

...Just another case of a corrupt government, whose members are more interested in profit than people, @!$%#ing the American people, whose ignorance prevents their protest. Why does merck want the hearings pre-empted? So the senate won't find itself pressured to change the user fee policy and, thereby, loose billions in profit.

Great seed.

That "Bias" is called corporate, class manipulation, deception, for profit, class property over human rights. Bankrupt Merck and prosecute these criminals. In this case human rights violated means murdering people for control, corporate and imperial control, just as the Amerikan empire and its multinaitional companies that enslave the world, maim, scar the world, and then carry out aggressions, death squads for corporate companies. This is the rot of class rule, and Merck only expresses one form among many.

watch how they scour the PDR

I find it far more interesting how well they scour the always the very perfect, very attractive drug rep's more then the PDR or ever calling a local Pharmacy for feedback. I trust the pharmacy people more then the doctors, those are the ones that hear what works and what does not.

hamid.nyc:

What confounds me is how gullible the Doctors are.

Don't be confounded. I studied a BSc in zoology and genetics, and the medical students did part of their first year courses through our department. Once I was a postgraduate student I was charged with tutoring and lecturing them. What I learned was that they were not being taught any sort of critical thought in the medical school, and testing them on critical thought actually angered them. The medical establishment has achieved many things, but it is populated by rote-learning and dogma, not logic.

The medical establishment has achieved many things, but it is populated by rote-learning and dogma, not logic.

If that isn't the truth!! Once they're trained, the model is aimed at medicating symptoms.

In fairness though, we need to remember very many even most health care providers are in a system stretched thin and it is straining them too.

They are overworked and overwhelmed by the flurry of paperwork and demands to be processing patients like cashiers ringing produce through the check out.

Like the bulk of the public they believed in and trusted the oversight of our regulators. Live and learn the bums in Congress would sell out their grandmothers for a fee or hold on power or both.

It's not news to those who watch the FDA that the place is run at the pleasure of petrochemicals. It's corporate media's growth that has let it get so far out of control though.

Glance at the pdf 63 page FDA Science and Mission at Risk the internal report that's been floating around Newsvine and cyberspace since fall/winter 2006. Lucky us it's public now! :~)

You bet your sweet bippie hamid. Gone are the days when the biochem majors got those jobs, now the newscasters and drug reps are all selected for pep!!

Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales As an ambitious college student, Cassie Napier had all the right moves - flips, tumbles, an ever-flashing America's sweetheart smile - to prepare for her job after graduation. She became a drug saleswoman

Ms. Napier, 26, was a star cheerleader on the national-champion University of Kentucky squad, which has been a springboard for many careers in pharmaceutical sales. She now plies doctors' offices selling the antacid Prevacid for TAP Pharmaceutical Products.

Ms. Napier says the skills she honed performing for thousands of fans helped land her job. "I would think, essentially, that cheerleaders make good sales people," she said.

Anyone who has seen the parade of sales representatives through a doctor's waiting room has probably noticed that they are frequently female and invariably good looking. Less recognized is the fact that a good many are recruited from the cheerleading ranks.

Known for their athleticism, postage-stamp skirts and persuasive enthusiasm, cheerleaders have many qualities the drug industry looks for in its sales force. Some keep their pompoms active, like Onya, a sculptured former college cheerleader. On Sundays she works the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. But weekdays find her urging gynecologists to prescribe a treatment for vaginal yeast infection.

Some industry critics view wholesomely sexy drug representatives as a variation on the seductive inducements like dinners, golf outings and speaking fees that pharmaceutical companies have dangled to sway doctors to their brands.

But now that federal crackdowns and the industry's self-policing have curtailed those gifts, simple one-on-one human rapport, with all its potentially uncomfortable consequences, has become more important. And in a crowded field of 90,000 drug representatives, where individual clients wield vast prescription-writing influence over patients' medication, who better than cheerleaders to sway the hearts of the nation's doctors, still mostly men.

"There's a saying that you'll never meet an ugly drug rep," said Dr. Thomas Carli of the University of Michigan. He led efforts to limit access to the representatives who once trolled hospital hallways. But Dr. Carli, who notes that even male drug representatives are athletic and handsome, predicts that the drug industry, whose image has suffered from safety problems and aggressive marketing tactics, will soon come to realize that "the days of this sexual marketing are really quite limited."

Why pay for an education when a boob job is a better career investment?

There's a saying that you'll never meet an ugly drug rep,

I have heard that from two doctors before and seen it over and over again when I have done IT support work at medical groups. The drug reps are always just perfect. Not a flaw.

I can now spot them in a second. Its just amazing. High Paid Cheerleaders.

So that's what happens to cheerleaders. They become President of the United States or drug reps.

OK.

So let's build a bionic doctor.

His education is top-notch, which means that in addition to memorizing everything in the PDR he had a few professors encouraging his questioning nature. His ultimate downfall is that, like most doctors, he is a man. As such, he earns more than his female counterparts. THis most certainly places him in the highest positions within the medical industry and directly in the cross-hairs of Drug Reps.

Hetero or Homosexual, men are more likely to be taken in by the promise of sex (consider that the majority of advertising in the US is aimed at the male sex drive). Additionally, by being in the decision-maker positions and having financial control in the medical facility, our bionic doctor is more likely to be the sole decision point between you and companies like merck.

As it turns out, the best doctor we can imagine is still not able to resist decades of marketing research and his own biological drive toward sex. So the question becomes: At what point will we require some kind of patient review board, which would allow us to examine the practices and budgets of the doctors that are making decisions for us?

...With the results of the Patient Review Board posted online, one could choose the best doctors and, through the laws of supply and demand, put the others out of business. But wait, your healthcare insurance chooses you doctors for you and your employer chooses your healthcare... so you really have no say at all. What we really need is some kind of policy review board that would allow us to review the policies and budgets of the people deciding for us. We could call it: democracy, government by the people.

Maybe, I'm just crazy...

The economics of medicine are perverse and often baffling.