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.
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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
