How Doctors are Completely Propagandized by Their Schooling and Cash Incentives

Becoming a physician is very challenging. However, it does not necessarily lead to doctors that think critically. The best way to make a lot of money as a doctor is never to question the bedrock assumptions of the profession. And most doctors want to make a lot of money, that is what most of them do.

The Corruption of Physicians

One of the problems in improving the quality of pharmaceutical research is both the poor critical thinking and the corrupt state of most physicians. However, before physicians can become physicians they start their lives as heavily propagandized medical students. The act of attending medical school is actually where the corruption of physicians begins. They learn to think in terms of pharmaceutical health, seeing problems in terms of drug solutions. They also come out with an excessive level of respect for “peer reviewed” journals. However, peer reviewed journals only publish articles that fit with the narrow-minded medical orthodoxy. The medical orthodoxy is primarily determined by money and power over real science. Science is often falsified to support the convenient medical orthodoxy. Peer reviewed would never publish research long term health maintenance because the medical profession in the US is all about selling surgery, patentable medicines and expensive diagnostic treatments, so that is what the articles are written about.

Medical Education Does Not Teach Critical Thinking Skills

The great mis-conceptions is that US medical schools are the best in the world. Of course, its primarily Americans who think this, and Americans have a strong tendency to think they are number one in the world for everything. How America can have the best medical schools in the world, but only the 37th best overall healthcare must be a mystery for the ages to physicians. However, while physicians exit medical school thinking they are something akin to a god, I have observed extremely doctrinal thinking on the part of many physicians, that has made me question any advice I might get from them in the future.

Why don’t we hear more about medical failures? Is this because it may cause us to question treatments that are given out today?

A book medicine would prefer that you forget about, Feminine Forever was paid for by Wyeth and proposed hormone replacement therapy. A botched analysis, estrogen therapy drastically increased the rate of cancer among women. Our society continually asks about a “cure” for cancer. One way to cure cancer is to stop causing it.

Learning to Subordinate Yourself to Concentrated Power

Part of medical school is teaching real things about biology and the body, but another part is about teaching respect for the institution of medicine and for the approaches that the medical establishment has to offer. Of the physicians I have met, extremely few seem to understand much at all about medical history, and don’t seem at interested about the times medicine got it wrong. The profession in general projects an image of absolute omniscience which does not square with the historical facts. It was only a few decades ago that homosexuals received shock therapy to “cure” them. For some time people with severe psychological problems received frontal lobotomies. The medical establishment made some extremely obvious errors in how it offered hormone replacement to women. Still with all the highly expensive medicine, one of the biggest problems is that physicians do not wash their hands sufficiently, and nurses are intimidated from telling them to do so because the medical profession is so deeply hierarchical. Hospital cleaners are paid just over minimum wage, so patients which receive $100,000 operations die of sepsis because of the extraordinary elitism of the medical profession reduces the incentives to keep hospitals sufficiently clean.

Here are some common mental features of physicians.

1. Enormous egos
2. Poor critical thinking skills, but with egos too large to do anything about it. Physicians think that because they have mastered a narrow technical expertise that they have the ability to think critically, when in fact the two have little to do with each other.

Are Physicians Healthy?

Something strikes me as hypocritical about physicians. Most physicians I have met do not do a very good job of maintaining their own bodies. This reinforces that physicians don’t take health maintenance seriously, but are primarily about fixing sickness. Udo Erasemus (a famous health maintenance specialist) dropped out of medical school because he felt that the students were primarily there to make a killing in compensation and that the medical school he attended had no interest in health, but only wanted to study sickness. Some facts about physicians:

1. Most doctors are out of condition and have poor diets
2. At some stage in their lives, most physicians are guilty of over-consuming pharmaceuticals themselves

Dr. Weil, a doctor who focuses on natural methods has the following to say about medical training in the US.

Conventional medical education denies you of sleep. It feeds you junk food. It gives you no time to exercise. It teaches you nothing about stress reduction; instead, it demands that you stuff your emotions.” A typical doctor’s working life is just more of the same, Dr. Weil says: cost-conscious hospitals and HMOs demand crazy hours, provide substandard food, and require doctors to project an Olympian aura of perfection, when, in fact, they are just as human as the people in their care.

Interestingly, physicians don’t seem to have much to say about this. It is well known that sleep deprivation drastically reduces performance, yet that is exactly what is done to medical residents. This is based partially upon hospital greed and partially upon a system of brutal indoctrination that attempts to convince the physicians that they are superhuman. Senior physicians feel that since they were “hazed” that the next generation should not get off easy. My step brother was an ER doctor and returned to his medical school at SFSU for a get together. He was sitting at a table with physicians that he had graduated with and one of their ex-professors came by the table to say hi. He told me he, and the other ex-students wanted him to leave because “we all felt like punching him in the fact” for the way he had treated them during their residency.

In fact while training for and practicing fancy but unnecessary medical procedures, physicians violate some of the more elementary health maintenance activities such as diet and exercise on a routine basis. While physicians who consider people who turn down white flour products or take many vitamins to be “excessive” think nothing of performing extremely questionable operations and prescribing drugs with little to no benefit and outrageous side effects. This demonstrates how inconsistent doctors often are and how they seem to design their philosophy around whatever feathers their bed.

Completely Propagandized

Physicians will often refer to the FDA when discussing what has been approved, without noting the fact that the FDA has been completely captured by industry. I am amazed how little physicians seem to know about how the FDA actually operates. You will never hear from a doctor that the FDA receives over $500,000 per drug evaluated by the pharmaceutical company, or that the same physicians who are responsible for reviewing drug data also work as consultants for the same pharmaceutical companies whose drugs they are responsible for reviewing.

Here is list of things about the FDA you will never hear from 95% of the physicians out there.

• The FDA often uses the the phrase “the industry is our client,” (i.e. not taxpayers)
• The number of drug recalls is increasing as the approval time on drugs is decreasing
• The FDA has been called out by several people that work within it as overly influenced by drug companies.
• Original research is never sent to the FDA, instead the pharmaceutical companies keep the research and release what they like to the FDA for their analysis.
• New drugs are not compared against old drugs, but against a sugar pill.
• The FDA has no responsibility to perform a cost benefit analysis on drugs. So if a drug improves a condition .05% vs. a sugar pill, but costs $5000 per month, the drug walks out with an approval unless it causes egregious side effects. However, the drug companies actually rig the tests to reduce the appearance of side effects, or actively hide the side effects from the FDA which have no access to the original research.
• 87% of all drugs approved by the FDA are “me-too” drugs and simply attempt to extend the patent on what is an old drug.

Physicians greatly undermine their credibility by supporting completely useless treatments. Two of these are anti-depressants and chemotherapy. Neither of these treatments have any evidence behind them, however physicians still state that the treatments can be useful. They continue to say that they are making progress in chemotherapy, but this is a lie, and it is easily proven as a lie. I recently listened to a physician decry the lack of good news on anti-depressents and that he was concerned that it might influence people away from taking them. Not once did he mention that no research has ever demonstrated anti-depressents in influencing depression one way or another. It increasingly seems that the actual facts are completely secondary to the official medical doctrine. And this is the heart of the matter, physicians just don’t question their profession sufficiently.

Conclusion

The credibility of physicians has been greatly reduced the more that I learn about them. It is not possible to have such a sick medical system and have the main actors in it be untouched by the corruption, and unscientific work that I continue to read about and observe. The fact is that doctors are a big part of the problem. I have always noticed physicians to have an attitude problem and to take a dim view of patients that ask too many questions. However I have come to realize that most of them are simply running on autopilot, passive dispensing advice from medical journals and from pharmaceutical reps who show up with free samples and push their breasts into their face. In this way they are not that different than better trained stockbrokers, just pitching a line of bullshit created in the Manhattan office. Since most of them are not aligned with what is true, they are not worthy of the respect that they receive.

There are many areas that could be improved with regards to physcians, but one of them is to reduce the compensation they receive, because right now too many physicians are only physicians because they had wealthy parents and wanted to make a lot of money themselves to maintain their extravagant lifestyles. The US is the only country that so elevates the physicians above ordinary people to a pedestal on which they can not be questioned. To be frank, a lot of what physicians do is not that difficult, and a lot of it is actually false and contributes very little to the health of the nation. Just ask Costa Rica and Czechoslovakia, the have health care systems that work about as well as the US, but at only $500 per person vs. $8000. They also have a lot fewer arrogant doctors strutting around.

Reference

Interview with Dr. Graham of the FDA, Sweet Deception

Is Cancer All that Complicated?

The Official Story

The way cancer is presented to the population in the US is kind of interesting. The official line of reasoning is that cancer cannot be controlled through lifestyle decisions and better body maintenance, but that cancer can affect anyone at anytime. Secondly, that one only needs to be “aware” of cancer, and that early detection is the first step against cancer. However, is finding something before it gets worse the first step, or is prevention the first step? It would seem that if prevention is possible, then prevention is the first step. This is left out of all the glossy pamphlets and advertisement programs.

Not surprisingly, many of these companies are selling detection, and then they sell the cancer treatment (none of which are proven to work with very much effectiveness). So for them, which is all medicine in fact, this is where the story begins. Where an institution says something begins can always tell you something about their bias. Where the story begins is essentially how they want to shape the story. More often than not, the beginning is actually quite a ways further back. However, that would mean performing root causes analysis and telling of the whole story, restricting the institution’s ability to shape reality. Here are all the things that large institutions leave out when explaining cancer to the population.

• Many common household items are carcinogenic (such as cosmetics, and household chemicals)
• Communities in industrial areas that have poor zoning (such as in Houston and most of Louisiana) have much higher cancer rates than other areas that are not heavy in industry
• Companies get away with polluting the environment all the time and do so on a constant basis creating an increasingly cancer causing environment
• Consumption of simple sugar is highly related to cancer, and to growing cancer after it begins
• Most cancer research does not go to investigating cancer (most researchers believe it is not really possible to cure cancer) but is used as a cover for other research. It just happens that it is easy to get money for cancer research
• In 1964 the World Health Organization estimated that 80% of cancers were due to synthetic carcinogenics. Chlorine is a major cancer causing agent in it isolated form (if not bound to other elements) and free Chlorine is the main component in Splenda

Cute pillows and a lot of fake research and ineffective treatment with almost no focus on prevention as well as colossal groupthink has defined the “fight against cancer.” The cancer issue demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate the US population into believing things that are bad for them, but great for chemical manufacturers and the medical establishment.

This is probably one of the best descriptions of cancer that I have been exposed to and it is from the book Suicide by Sugar

An unhealthy person may get cancer because he or she has suppressed his or her immune system with diet and distress. The cells that have been damaged by the environment will not have any checks and balances and will therefore continue to grow, so cancer may develop. Cancer, simply put, is a disease where damaged or abnormal cells of any type grow out of control.

I have already made the general case that mineral imbalances caused by sugar and other dietary insults affect the proper functioning of hormones on which the immune system and other body systems depend. When it comes to cancer, this immune suppression should be the first reason to completely avoid sugar during treatment. If the immune system heals and starts working, just imagine how much more effective any forms of cancer therapy will be.

People get cancer for different reasons. Some smoke too much. Some breathe in a lot of the polluted air in our cities. Some drink water that is either polluted or in some cases overly chlorinated. Other causes or risk factors for cancer may include sun exposure, viruses like the human papillomavirus, toxins, asbestos, food contamination, pesticides and others.

Research has also shown that diets high in protein and low in vegetables, like many of the variations of the western diet, are linked to higher rates of cancer. Age is also a factor because the longer a body functions, the more likely something will happen to damage or mutate cells. Therefore, older people have a higher risk of developing cancer. Lastly, some people are just born with the genetic susceptibility for cancer, and if they lead a lifestyle that continually challenges their immune system, they will be more likely to develop cancer.

References

http://www.fwhc.org/health/nocure.htm

Suicide by Sugar, Nancy Appleton PhD

Efficiency of Pharmaceutical Industry

How efficient is the current pharmaceutical industry? Some say it can’t be analyzed and not to worry about it. We disagree.

How Pharmaceutical Research is Managed in the US

In order to understand who so much goes into pharmaecutical research, but so little comes out in terms of beneficial drugs, its important to understand how drugs research is funded and who performs the research.

NIH vs. Pharmaceutical Companies

There are two research paths in the pharmaceutical industry. One is the NIH, which spends roughly $30 billion per year on basic research. The other is pharmaceutical companies which most perform and run clinical trials, but also perform research in assaying chemicals found by NIH supported university research. This comes to roughly $25 billion per year. Pharmaceutical revenues are roughly $240 billion per year. Most the costs that the pharmaceutical companies incur are “marketing” related costs (over-paying doctors for clinical trials in order to get them to prescribe drugs, buying off top university research professors, patenting and re-patenting drugs, pharma reps for distributing company propaganda, lobbying in congress, television advertizing etc..). As can be seen, some of these marketing costs are actually pay offs. Under a system where the NIH took over final drug development and clinical trials (which a monkey can do) patents could be removed from the drug business altogether. The production of drug companies is terrible. For the $240 billion in yearly expenditures, US drug companies produce roughly 7 innovative drugs, and most of these are very narrow drugs which do not cure ailments but extend the life of late stage terminal diseases. 78% of drugs are simply extending the life of old drugs which could come off of patent, or copying another drug that already exists. Secondly the cost of clinical trials is greatly increased by the fact that a good portion of the payment to doctors is in fact a payoff to prescribe drugs, and in 78% of the cases, the drugs they are performing a trial on are not new chemical compounds. For this reason we estimate that pharmaceutical companies only do actually $2.5 billion in research on new drugs. (and a number of these drug tests are falsified) However, they claim $240 billion in drug revenues.

Handing it All Over to the NIH

If the NIH took over clinical trials, it could do so at a cost of only $27.5 billion dollars. These unpatented discoveries could then be released to the generic manufacturers. There would be not advertizing, no pharma reps (doctors can read journals for their medical information, or if they don’t have time (and most of them don’t) they can go to Consumer Reports Health.com which provides a quick rundown of the benefits of drugs in an easy to read and digest format). This would allow the doctor to begin working for the patient rather than the pharmaceutical industry when prescribing drugs. It would also allow the doctor to being looking for other factors related to health problems rather than taking a narrow minded drug approach because that is where their bread is buttered.

Generic drug companies have low profit margins and low costs of doing business. It cost no more than ½ again as much to provide generic companies with a good profit for manufacturing and distributing the drugs. This would mean the total drug cost to Americans would not be more than $32.5 billion x 1.5 = $45 billion. This would reduce US health care costs by roughly $200 billion per year. This would require that most the old drugs, which should come off patent because they have been artificially extended through the abuse of patent law, need to fall into the public domain. It also means that the major pharmaceutical companies essentially go away and become small generic manufacturers with no ability to influence health care policy. For all the calculations see the image below.

The Excel spreadsheet of this analysis can be downloaded from the orange widget in the lower right hand side of this blog.

How Easy Would it Be?

What is amazing is how easy this policy change would be (practically, not politically). The NIH can easily run clinical trials and do it far better than pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies should not running clinical trials, or even paying for clinical trials at all. Universities used to perform more clinical trials, but big pharma has increasingly begun to use private practice doctors or trial mills that they completely control. They then receive the studies, and compile them and then send only the ones the like to the FDA, where they have already positioned executives from their company into the top roles through political appointment.

Better Quality Drugs

Another issue that could be changed with an NIH takeover is better drugs could be developed. We could even decide as a society to give another 5 to 10 billion to the NIH, there would be so much excess created by removing the pharmecuetical companies, which could lead to even more useful drugs and more money for the actual workers, medical researchers. Because of greed and narrow self interest, big pharma is pushing mostly the wrong drugs to clinical trials. Right now drugs that are not very socially beneficial are developed because they are the most profitable. The major category being lifestyle drugs. Pharmaceutical companies don’t develop drugs that support that overall objectives of the health care system, but rather develop drugs that are very profitable. By having the NIH take over drug development, social goals in public health can begin to come to the forefront.

Other Sources: CEPR and Dr. Marcia Angell

In case anyone thinks these are just the musings of one source, it should be considered that we got this idea from Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard Professor of Medicine, and the CEPR, which is probably the best progressive think tank in the country. An interview with Marcia Angell is included below:

Both of these sources have proposed what we have proposed above. Our main contribution is the spreadsheet above. What is interesting is that without using the high level math estimation of CEPR, we came to about the same conclusion as their estimates. That is drugs should cost no more than $50 billion in the US under and NIH plan. Furthermore the quality of drugs developed would greatly increase.  However, it’s important to note that drug research is generating a declining number of new drugs, so the research area may be in a way subject to diminishing gains.

The Excel Spreadsheet

To interact with the spreadsheet yourself, download it from the file box towards the lower right of this screen where all the documents are kept.

References

The estimate of the percentage of drugs spent on “me-too” drugs or re-patenting old drugs is from Marcia Angel.

The Plan

Drug companies should no longer be permitted to control the clinical testing of their own drugs. There is too much evidence that this practice biases the research in favor of the sponsor’s drug. It also distorts the type of research done, since companies are more interested in increasing sales than in obtaining medical knowledge. We really don’t need one more study of whether a new drug is better than a placebo for some slightly different use, but drug companies sponsor them because they help to expand the market. O ensure that clinical trials serve a genuine medical need and to see that they are properly designed, conducted, and reported, I propose that an Institute for Prescription Trials Drug Trials be established within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to administer clinical trials of prescription drugs. Drug companies would be required to contribute a percentage of revenues to this institute, but their contributions would not be e related to particular drugs (as is the case with the FDA user fees). The institute would then contract with independent researchers in academic medical centers to conduct drug trials. The researchers would design the trials, analyze the data, write the papers, and decide bout publication. The data would become the joint property of the NIH and the researchers, not be controlled by the sponsoring company. – Dr. Marcia Angell

CEPR

The distortions resulting from these huge gaps between price and marginal cost should cause an honest neo-classical economist great pain. At the onset, the lost consumer surplus from patent and copyright protected pricing is enormous. The basic rule on this issue is that the size of the deadweight loss is proportional to the square of the gap between price and marginal cost. The United States alone is projected to spend $210 billion this year on prescription drugs. In the absence of patent protection, the same drugs would probably cost no more than $50 billion.”

“Drug patents also distort the direction of research by pushing it in the direction of patentable results. Research directed at finding cures or treatments based on diet, exercise, or environmental factors will not be pursued in a health care system that relies exclusively on patent monopolies to finance research. This neglect can be offset by government funding targeted specifically towards these areas, but the patent system will direct resources elsewhere.”

“However, there are alternatives and they already exist. The most obvious alternative is direct government funding of drug research. This already occurs on a massive scale. In fact, the $30 billion that the United States federal government pays each year to support bio-medical research at its National Institutes of Health (NIH) is approximately 20 percent larger than the $25 billion that its pharmaceutical industry claims to spend on research. While this research is primarily directed towards more basic science (in order not to interfere with the efforts of the drug industry), there are many instances of new drugs being developed almost entirely through NIH support. It also requires some extraordinary claims about epistemology to argue that public funding of NIH is an efficient mechanism for supporting basic research (a contention strongly supported by the pharmaceutical industry), but somehow would prove to be a boondoggle if the agency took on the responsibility of developing new drugs and bringing them through the FDA approval process.”

“Since half of this money may go to research copycat drugs of little social value, the savings from eliminating drug patents in the United States may be more than 10 times as large as the spending necessary to replace the useful research performed by the pharmaceutical industry”  - CEPR

New Drugs Brought to Market

“Even worse is the fact that there are very few drugs in the pipeline ready to take the place of blockbusters going off patent. A fact that is the biggest problem facing the industry today. And its darkest secret. All the public relations about innovation meant to obscure precisely this fact, the stream of new drugs has slowed to a trickle, and few of them are innovative in any sense of that word. Instead, the great majority are variations of oldies but goodies—“me-too” drugs. Companies are merging to combine their pipelines or co-marketing the same drug while scrambling to find drugs to license from the government, universities, and biotechnology companies. But these sources are themselves experiencing difficulties in coming up with new drugs. Of the seventy-eight drugs approved by the FDA in 2002, only seventeen contained new active ingredients and only seven if these were classified by the FDA as improvements over older drugs. The other seventy-one drugs approved that year were variations of old drugs or deemed no better than drugs already )n the market. In other words, they were me-too drugs. Seven of seventy-eight is not much of a yield. Furthermore, of those seven, not one came from a major U.S. drug company. – Dr. Marcia Angell

Dr. Marcia Angell on Health Care Reform

On Bill Moyers

Its always a treat to see Dr. Marcia Angell on any health topic. Here she is on Bill Moyers on PBS.

Cancer Research is an Industrial Policy to Subsidize BioTech

Chomsky Figures It Out Again

Every now and then you hear something that completely adjusts your viewpoint. For us, many of these occasions occur when listening to Noam Chomsky. He gave a talk at MIT called the Militarization of Space, which discussed how industrial subsidy works by taking money from taxpayers and performing early research, private industry then come by and make private profits off of these investments. Examples include the following:

1. Commercial aircraft based upon military investment in bombers
2. Semiconductors based upon government research into integrated circuits
3. The internet, based upon DARPA and university investment
4. Computers based upon government research into air defense
5. Pharmaceuticals based upon taxpayer research which is then given away to industry through “public-private partnerships.”

(hold, on we will get to the cancer research implication)

This subsidization of privileged industries always has some ridiculous pretext. During the space race, which was partially a cover for the development of solid fuel rockets that were eventually used to carry a nuclear payload — called Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), people from the very top get on board to confuse and mystify the public.

“We don’t go to the Moon because it is easy, we go to the Moon because it is hard.” – John F Kennedy

Here is a direct quote:

In the early 60′s it shifted to a space cover, so it is extremely important to put a man on the moon for no known reason other than to provide massive funding for high technology industry. There was no other purpose. When people got bored watching some cloun stumbling around on the moon for no purpose, they change the story. There was also a story about competing with the Russians.

Things are changing, pentagon funding is declining, but NIH funding is increasing. Its generally understood that the cutting edge of the economy was electronics based, and in order to get the public to pay the costs and take the risks for that, The best way to do it is through the Pentagon, the space program or something like that. The cutting edge of the future is expected to be biology based, so genetic engineering, biotech, and so on. If you look at the spin offs from MIT, they were small electronics firms, which then got bought up by Ratheon and IBM, now they are little biotechnology firms. They will get bought up by the big pharmaceutical companies. So you have to get the public to pay the costs and take the risks. So you have growth of the NIH funding. However, there must be a new pretext. You can have a defense pretext such as protection from bioterrorism, and so on. But the main pretext has been, we are going to cure cancer or something like that. Now if you talk to the scientists working on molecular biology in the cancer institute, they don’t really think they are going to cure cancer, but you can sell it to congress and the public that way. and then go and do your work on big molecules.

Cancer as a Pretext for Moving Public Money to Biotech Industry

Cancer is the new cover for industrial policy. Cancer is used to scare the public into providing public resources to research something that will never be cured, in order to provide a gift to private biotech companies. What is also unmentioned is that cancer is strongly related to the exposure of artificially created chemicals, which were previously invested in in order to provide “better living through chemistry.” What is guaranteed is that the public will fund this policy, and will receive no patents or income from this policy (all of which will go to private industry) and the ordinary citizens will have no say over how a very dangerous technology (biotech) is regulated. Another beneficiary of all of this biotech research will be agricultural seed and herbicide companies such as Monsanto and Dow. Biotech is not merely a benign technology, it has a number of uses that have the potential of getting completely out of control. Monstanto has already created terminator seeds that only grow for one generation and are sterile after that (promoting more seed purchases from Monsanto) this seed will cross with fertile natural seed, possibly sterilizing large areas of agriculture. There are many other negative ramifications to biotech that are not being explained to the public. Furthermore Monsanto and others virtually own the EPA. Secondly, this biotech industry is highly unregulated. In fact, the major companies would deny consumers the right to know if the foods they buy have been genetically modified.

Great Movie on The Problems with GMO Food

The Future of Food

The recent movie Food Inc. is getting a lot of great press. However, an older movie focusing on GMOs in food is an absolute must see for those interesting understanding how the patent process is misused by agricultural companies. Monstanto, one of the worst companies on the planet, is showcased yet again for its atrocious behavior and utter misuse of the legal system to crush farmers and maximize their own profits. The movie also describes how both monoculture agriculture as well as genetic modification is putting us all at severe risk. However, all of this is supported by biotech private public partnerships at universities. Universities don’t even perform research on the risks anymore because they have been bought off with funding. The discrepancy is amazing. For research that looks into the risks of GMO crops, at one lab at Berkley, there was $2000 in funding. Meanwhile, reseach on GMO at Berkley that was seen as promotional got $25 million in funding. Some interesting facts from the movie:

• 80% of the seeds are provided by just 4 seed companies – which are also herbicide companies.
• Biotech companies have a full propaganda offensive of which the Council
  for Biotechnology is one. They have created a coloring book for
  children to get them to think that GMOs are good for them.
• The large feed companies have developed seeds with terminator genes. These seeds only last one generation and are then sterile. If these seeds cross fertilize with other plants, which they will, they will kill the naturally occuring seeds.
• GMO don’t even have to be labeled, even though 85% of the US population is in favor of GMO labeling.
• Corporations are fighting labeling because they know that GMOs have side effects, and they do not want the trace-ability to their food. A database of labels would create liability for corporations.
• In Europe, all genetically engineered food must be labeled.

Notice the quote by Phil Angell, Director of Corporate Communications – Monstanto

Monstanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food, our interest is in selling as much as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.

However, Monstanto executives have a revolving door with the FDA and are extremely effective and stopping any testing at the FDA. Monsanto is speaking out of both sides of its mouth on this topic.

Recommended Sources in this Area

What we learned is that the FDA has been bought off by the industry. The EPA which oversees insecticides is also on board with GMOs. Since universities can not be trusted on this topic due to its funding, the one source that seems reliable in this area is The Center for Food Safety. We spent some time going through the site and were impressed.

To see the film site, goto this link

http://www.thefutureoffood.com/

Why Private Universities Should Not Exist

Would like fries with your education and research results sir?

Why Stanford Works Against the Public Interest

On several occasions we have discussed how Stanford repeatedly takes positions that are bad for the average person and how they house and fund a neo-con and neo-liberal fake economics research “institute” on their campus. The Hoover Institute is a place that combines both bad economics, with bad policy and with the worst possible ethics. Their poster boy for behavior is Donald Rumsfeld, who they made a senior fellow after his 2nd Pentagon performance.

However, it was not until recently that we understood Stanford’s elitist and unethical past goes back to its founding. This excerpt is from the book University Inc.

The Edward Ross case at Stanford was particularly important in mobilizing the faculty. Ross was a highly regarded economist and the secretary of the American Economics Association. After Leland Stanford died in 1893, his window, Jane Stanford, assumed control of the university founded by a Republican railroad magnate — who had built his empire on the backs of cheap immigrant labor — Ross dare to call for municipal ownership of utilities and a band on Asian immigration. He also spoke out in defense so socialist Eugene V. Debs and was a proponent of free silver when most economists of the time were gold Republicans. For years Jane Stanford pressed the university president, David Jordan to silence Ross, and eventually to fire him. – University Inc.

The reason Stanford works against the public interest is simple…Stanford is funded by concentrated power. Thus is reflects its interests in its teaching and research. Professors who don’t tow the line can go and teach someplace else. The Hoover Institute is just one example, but a country club and corporate loving philosophy runs through the entire institution. The reason is simple; Stanford has no charter to serve any interest higher than its corporate donors. All of its education and research must be interpreted in this light. This is why they recently took $100 million from Exxon to produce research minimizing the importance of global warming.

Private Companies Want Zero Freedom of Speech and Zero Transparency

There is a serious problem with any private company doing research. Private companies do not respect or support freedom of speech. There is zero freedom of speech in private companies and people are fired all the time for taking the unpopular or ethical view. Furthermore, private companies also have no respect and do not act in a transparent manner. A freedom of information request cannot be submitted upon a private company; only a government body is required to respond to freedom of information requests.

Stanford is only interested in research and speech that advances the interests of their corporate donors. Stanford has an extremely aggressive legal department who will sue into submission anyone who voices opinions, no matter how supported by research, that might anger their donors.

Private Institutions as Hierarchical Tyrannies

Thus the problem is that private companies are highly undemocratic and run essentially as hierarchical tyrannies. Everything for a private company is either proprietary or a trade secret. In fact, according to their corporate charter, they have a fiduciary responsibility to take as much information from the public sphere, while giving as little back as possible. If a CEO were to have his company make a contribution to the public good (that could not be used as a PR stunt to increase the company’s image or otherwise benefiting the company.) he could be sued by shareholders for not maximizing the shareholders’ stock price. Private companies undermine science at every turn. For instance, it was GE that took the case of patenting on oil eating bacteria to the Supreme Court, which resulted in the verdict that life could be patented. That one decision has now mushroomed into the patenting of sequences of the human genome, and patenting remedies that have been known for 1000s of years. Biotech companies are now great employment centers for lawyers, as every area of human DNA must be legally researched before it is scientifically researched in case someone else “owns” it and would lay claim to the research results. Monstanto and other seed companies now patent seeds that they never genetically modified, just because they were the first to submit a claim upon the patent office. This is the type of research, and ethics, you get from private companies who by charter have zero public interest function.

Since they only have an interest in taking from the commons, they should be removed from the position of being able to steal so much government supported research, while contributing nothing back but falsified research studies that support the profits of a product they either already make, or intend to take to market. Here is the essential question. How can an institution that supports neither freedom of expression or transparency be taken seriously in making a contribution, any contribution to objective teaching or objective research? The answer is it can’t.

Private Takeover

Universities not only own private universities they are taking over public universities as well. Many UC schools used to take 50% of their funding from the government that number is now down to around 35%. The question would be, if the university takes less than 50% of its funding from California or the federal government, why is it still called the University of California. If it were named the University of Merck or Exxon, would this impact the interpretation of the results of its research? We think it would. This is precisely why private companies have the best of both worlds. They fund research that they control the outcomes to (though legal agreements, funding certain programs, placing industry representatives on committees — and these are just a few of their techniques) while pretending that the university that they are buying the research from is objective.

In and Out Burger University

This is not to say private companies cannot create their own research institutes for their narrow minded and parochial needs, only that they should not be accredited by the state. For instance, In and Out Burger has a university in Southern California. However, you can’t get a four year degree there. Also, they don’t pretend to do any research and they don’t teach graduates how to work at Wendy’s. In and Out Burger University is far more honest than the vast majority of universities in the country that pretend to be one thing, while heavily influenced by private corporate power. Intel does a lot of research on new microprocessors and that is fine. However, let’s not pretend Intel could publish an objective study of how their microprocessors compare to their competitors. Furthermore, if they pay a university to perform this “study,” it does not make it any more valid.

Private universities should be impossible to incorporate. Private universities mean the values and research interests of those with the most money predominate. There is nothing wrong with the wealthy doing research independently, but why the need to pervert the public sphere with the parochial viewpoints of the ultra wealthy? Are the values of Leland Stanford or Bill Gates, men who cheated and stole their way to the top, the values we want guiding our research?

Naive

The word “naïve” is used repeatedly by conservatives who want to make another person feel stupid, without actually presenting any evidence. This is why the term is used by John Bolton, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and by right leaning propagandists generally. We will use the word accurately here. For those proposing that private companies and universities can engage in “partnerships” that can meet the standards of academic freedom…they are naive.

Medical Corruption Ok, But Mexican Corruption is Wrong

Medical Corruption

We are finding area after area in medicine that is corrupted by money. This includes the following:

• Medical researchers who are paid to assign their names to pre-written papers
• A massive number of side effects not reported to the FDA
• A comp system that promotes doctors to perscribe the most expensive drugs
• Free samples designed to get patients on the most expensive drugs
• Pharmaecutical companies that illegally extend their patents
• Misleading TV advertizing for me-too or copycat drugs

What Kind of Corruption is Ok?

Something we can’t figure out is why corruption is accepted in some areas of society, but rejected in others. Why is the corruption of say, Mexican cops is understood as bad while corruption at American institutions is considered ok? It could be because it feels better to think other countries have corruption, while yours is not. After all, Saddam Hussain had to be releived of WMDs that he did not have, while the country with the most WMDs in the world (the US) got to keep theirs.

Maybe corruption only counts if you are brown and have low social status, but ok if you are well educated and white. Corruption is ok if you are well dressed, but bad if you are unattractive. As Chris Rock once said — “its all right cause its all white.”

Mexican cops are corrupt. They take money from people and accept payment on the spot, rather than taking people in to jail, at least for minor offenses. Every American knows this is wrong.

This particular physician is paid by pharmaecutical companies to perscribe the most expensive medications to patients. Instead of perscriping a generic statin, he perscribes Crestor. Instead of a generic alpha blocker, he perscribes Flomax. He also receives several free trips to Hawaii per year, a $300,000 drug testing and perscription comp from several pharmaceutical companies who’s drugs he perscribes as well as frequent visits from extrodinarily beautifal pharma reps. However, before you judge consider this. He has a medical degree.  He is white, and has nice teeth and great hair. The college ring on his finger is from an ivy league school and he drives a Porche. Is this really corruption? Not according to American sensibilities. Americans have a different word they use for people like this. The term is “successful.”

FDA MedWatch Site is Designed to Misinform

One of the greatest pieces of evidence that the FDA has been purchased by big pharma is the MedWatch alerts on the FDA website. MedWatch is a broken drug side effect mechanism whereby physicians sometimes and infrequently report side effects to big pharma. Big pharma then decides if they want to send the side effects to the FDA. The FDA then publishes the information about the side effects. A very small portion of the overall side effects are reported in the US.

The FDA Website

The website should easily be able to explain the problems and side effects with drugs, however, it has been deliberately made extremely difficult to read and has numerous PDF documents that need to be downloaded and is unnecessarily complex.

By comparison, it was child’s play to find the same information on Consumer Reports Health.org.

It even has a simple rating for how effective the drug is. This drug called Coumadin or Warfarin has extremely dangerous side effects.

Big pharma should be very happy with the poor quality of the FDA’s website. This promotes patients to only seek the advice of their doctor, and this advice has been purchased already with direct compensation, gifts, speaking and consulting contracts.

We wrote a little note to the FDA, and have placed it below.

____________________________________________________

Hello,

Your website it terrible and hard to find information. It appears as you hire either a lot of people who don’t understand web design, or you are purposely making drug reactions hard to find because you have been paid off by pharmaceutical companies.

If you would like, I will take over your entire drug reporting database and using a blog format, I will develop a better site, as one person, than you have put together with the entire FDA. That is how pathetic and your site is. You can pay me a small amount per year, but unlike you, I won’t accept pharmaceutical money or work for Merck after a year taking a big VP position.

I wrote your site up here is the link.

http://badresearch.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/fda-medwatch-site-is-designed-to-misinform/

Rgds,

Shaun

Flomax A Waste of Money According to Consumer Reports

Flomax is part of a category of drugs called alpha blockers. They expand vasculature. They are an old drug and probably should be off of patent. However, a copycat drug called Flomax has spent a large amout of money on getting consumers to go with this brand.

Here is a quote from Consumer Reports Health on the topic of Flomax:

How much do men really need to spend to treat the symptoms of enlarged prostate? For most men, doxazosin—a generic alpha-blocker—works just as well and is as safe as the heavily-advertised drug Flomax (a brand-name alpha-blocker). But the kicker here is the difference in price: doxazosin can cost $10 or less a month, whereas Flomax can set you back up to $246.

Our new Best Buy Drugs report is based on a systematic review of more than 60 studies, and the results clearly show that no one alpha blocker is better than another at relieving enlarged prostate symptoms. This type of research, known as comparative effectiveness, is the basis for all our Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs reports.

But why doesn’t the public know that an effective, safe and cheaper drug already exists to treat the symptoms associated with this condition? One reason is advertising. And lots of it.

When it comes to Flomax, what the ads won’t tell you is that another drug—actually several drugs—already exist to treat the symptoms of enlarged prostate and they work just as well.

Flomax—actually considered to be a “me too” drug, one that isn’t a breakthrough drug and that is very similar to drugs already on the market for a specific condition—is a great case study on how that much advertising can result in more prescriptions written.

In 2008 alone, the makers of Flomax, Boehringer Ingelheim, spent more than $115 million advertising the drug to consumers—14 percent more than they did the year before, according to figures from Nielsen Media Research. All that advertising paid off. Flomax was among the top 20 most-commonly prescribed drugs that year, with 11 million prescriptions written, up almost 5 percent from the year before.

And here is the most jaw-dropping part: Consumers and their insurance companies shelled out more than $1.2 billion dollars for Flomax last year—a whopping 23 percent increase from 2007.

So the question is….why is this drug being perscribed?

See the full article here:

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/health/2009/06/say-no-to-flomax-and-save-up-to-3000-a-year-try-doxazosin-for-enlarged-prostate-best-buy-drugs.html?resultPageIndex=1&resultIndex=1