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14 Conspiracy Theories That The Media Now Admits Are Conspiracy Facts
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Pharma invents, doctors perscribe, the morals of doctors is hard to regulate. SSRI's such as Prozac do work and have improved the lives of millions of people. Culturale differences in terms of consumerism in the US has affected perscription rates and everyone in the chain are resonsible to different degrees but the doctor has the final say. That doesn't mean we should listen to bull from alt medicine website questioning the effectiveness of these treatments
Adequate testing is done on these drugs, but no system is perfect and fraud can occur
Why didn't Elan just bribe the FDA then if there is a big conspiracy
I wasn't throwing out requests for you to fetch info for me, your hysterical posts (speed to babies) lack substance from a medical / scientific point of view and a bit of education would soften your stance on big pharma and hopefully turn you off those ridiculous alt medicine sites
JH,
Prozac woul be in the top 10 most dangerous medications that you were looking for....so would Xanax, Percocet and even Motrin.
As for the claim of "speed to babies"....Ritalin is being prescribed to toddlers:
"Methylphenidate (MPH) (Ritalin) possesses structural similarities to amphetamine and its pharmacological effects are more similar to those of cocaine though MPH is less potent and longer in duration of action."
Would you give this sh!t to your daughter just because she throws a few tantrums because maybe she's been spoilt??? I doubt it.0 -
Thanks Monty. Yes fair points and yes we need some medical expertise here.
Edit: Is off label prescribing properly monitored by the FDA in the US? Should it be allowed? Is it causing deaths?
Maybe someone can enlighten us..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-label_use
off label is monitored by the FDA, its not more of a health risk as all drugs have toxicology data submitted before they can be approved the risk involved is not linked to the illness really but to the properties of the drug i think in most cases and this would be wighed up agaisnt the effect of the illness. Generally the off label uses show up as an unexpected side effect (they can be good as well as bad) when clinical trials are in place for a specific illness so its not as shady as you might think.
FDA investigates (you'lll see cases on their website) whether the drug companies encourage off label use without any statistically valid info to show a benefit just to increase sales. Its an area that is abused as it doesn't really harm the patient but does improve sales.0 -
I imagine that there's a link between this and the consumerist culture there - a product for every need, even needs you don't know that you have. You could even argue that it's an extension of consumer culture into the healthcare domain.jackiebaron wrote: »It's just that there's a drug culture in the US that has been fomented and harvested by the pharmaceutical industry so now it's almost as if the patient knows best. A drug is peddled on TV for every single Michael Mouse malady when a balanced diet or more fibre or more exercise or more sleep or less sugar would simply do the trick.0 -
jackiebaron wrote: »JH,
Prozac woul be in the top 10 most dangerous medications that you were looking for....so would Xanax, Percocet and even Motrin.
As for the claim of "speed to babies"....Ritalin is being prescribed to toddlers:
"Methylphenidate (MPH) (Ritalin) possesses structural similarities to amphetamine and its pharmacological effects are more similar to those of cocaine though MPH is less potent and longer in duration of action."
Would you give this sh!t to your daughter just because she throws a few tantrums because maybe she's been spoilt??? I doubt it.
Most pyhscoactive drugs are ampethamine based, they would all have to have a similar structure otherwise they wouldn't interact with the correct receptors in your brain, its the subtle changes in structure that determine whether it has a benefical effect. Lidocaine is used by dentist because though structurally similar to cocaine the slight difference make it suitable for medical use
An analogy would be if your cousin was dodgy should you be judged on it?
I don't think we are on the same wavelenght here?? I'm saying that these drugs are scientifically sound, comparing them to recreational drugs is pointless and shows a lack of understanding of chemistry and biochemistry, I personally would not give Ritalin to child without alot of consideration and expert opinion, but not beacuse its a cousin of cocaine taht has nothing to do with it and is just sensatinalism. I believe Ritalin does have a medical use and th einfo is there to back the claim up. Whether the person needs in in the first place is the question
Basically I'm agreeing with you to some extent but don't diss the chemistry (without proof) just because you don't like how its being used. Prozac et al when properly used have improved society greatly.0 -
jackiebaron wrote: »JH,
Prozac woul be in the top 10 most dangerous medications that you were looking for....so would Xanax, Percocet and even Motrin.
As for the claim of "speed to babies"....Ritalin is being prescribed to toddlers:
"Methylphenidate (MPH) (Ritalin) possesses structural similarities to amphetamine and its pharmacological effects are more similar to those of cocaine though MPH is less potent and longer in duration of action."
Would you give this sh!t to your daughter just because she throws a few tantrums because maybe she's been spoilt??? I doubt it.
Anyone like to comment on AZT. The treatment for HIV. The disease that was meant to have killed us all at this stage but is mysteriously confined to poor sub saharan areas, drug users and poor people. Is there any truth to the suggestion that drug companies charities and others are profiting from AIDS research money. Also more worryingly that AZT can actually induce the illnessess that confirms an AIDS diagnosis. Prozac too is an other questionable drug. Its like giving someone alcohol to cheer them up.0 -
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@ed2hands
I'm not being condescending, saying giving speed to babies highlights your lack of understanding.
Drugs are classed into different families due to their structure similarities within these classes the effects of these drugs vary but a common strucutre must be maintained.
In fairness if you can't grasp that concept, no point in me giving more detailed scientific replies0 -
@ed2hands
I'm not being condescending, saying giving speed to babies highlights your lack of understanding.
Drugs are classed into different families due to their structure similarities within these classes the effects of these drugs vary but a common strucutre must be maintained.
In fairness if you can't grasp that concept, no point in me giving more detailed scientific replies
No probs jh.
I'll cool the jets a bit. Appreciate you giving this your attention.
I'll rephrase my posts in future to say "giving amphetamine based substances to babies"0 -
jh sorry i don't have time for a list of drugs like you asked. Jackie gave you a few there anyway.
What about statins? Put me straight on these by all means. Every day it seems you read something contradictory.
http://www.imt.ie/opinion/2011/03/gps-stop-prescribing-statins-like-smarties.html0 -
jh sorry i don't have time for a list of drugs like you asked. Jackie gave you a few there anyway.
What about statins? Put me straight on these by all means. Every day it seems you read something contradictory.
http://www.imt.ie/opinion/2011/03/gps-stop-prescribing-statins-like-smarties.html
Did you read my reply to jackie? I'm not saying ye are wrong about over prescribing of drugs, its how ye phrase your arguments I don't like.
Does ADD exist? I don't know, maybe in some cases. If a child has ADD for definite then there is nothing wrong in giving them Ritalin (again it is not speed!).
I suppose the main problems with mental issues is its the doctors judgement rather than a blood test etc that decides. The drugs do work its whether certain patients needed it in the first place?? Are you and Jackie saying Prozac is not appropriate in any case and all the scientific info cases of fraud?
How you phrase things is important for example
"Baby perscribed Viagra" -sounds bad
Baby with circulatory problems recieves emergency care of some viagra, because it increases blood flow- completely justified. This did happen and was widley reported. Saying "speed to babies" et al doesn't allow a reasonable debate and distracts from the real issues.
TBH I know nothing on statins, but so far the good outweighs the bad.0 -
jackiebaron wrote: »The pharmaceutical industry in the US is a horror show. A scandal. A kid jumps around climbs trees, gets excited, does generally .. you know...what kids do....and all of a sudden he's got ADHD according to his clueless parents and the know-nothing shrink that they send him to. Solution: Stick him on Ritalin for the next 10 years. Then when the levels of dompamine in his brain have been so fcuked with that he has come downs worse than Ecstasy-heads at noon on Sunday then they stick him on Prozac. Half the kids is america are drugged up to the friggin' eyeballs for no good reason.
They give them Ritalin (which has similar effects and side effects as cocaine use) just because they are deemed to be hypreactive (maybe cut down on the gallon dosage of Pepsi you give them each day) or obese (Pepsi again!) or depressed (maybe get them playing outside instead of glued to a TV away from the sunlight playing violent video games), etc.
Must be difficult to be glued to those violent games indoors while climbing those trees.0 -
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Hello again.
I see you're not content with poisoning just one thread with your own particular brand of social darwinisms.
I won't be answering your dumbass question.
How about you come back when you're interested in dicussing the topic seriously and not puking out your odious pompous trollish garbage.
ed2hands banned for one week.0 -
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Yeah, pointing out inconsistencies in other's rhetoric has no place in discussions like these.0
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People who believe that mainstream news organisations are 'legit', and don't ever ask themselves what is not being reported, deserve no sympathy.
More once 'wacky' theories will be revealed in the future of course.0 -
Does ADD exist? I don't know, maybe in some cases. If a child has ADD for definite then there is nothing wrong in giving them Ritalin (again it is not speed!).
.
According to the DSM III-R Published in 1987 "suicide is the major complication" of withdrawl from Ritalin and similar drugs.
I don't see how it's good for children.
The most common side effects of methylphenidate are nervousness, drowsiness and insomnia. Other adverse reactions include:[44]- Abdominal pain
- Akathisia
- Alopecia
- Angina
- Appetite loss
- Anxiety
- Blood pressure and pulse changes (both up and down)
- Cardiac arrhythmia
- Diaphoresis (sweating)
- Dizziness
- Dyskinesia
- Dysphoria or Euphoria
- Formication
- Headaches
- Hypersensitivity (including skin rash, urticaria, fever, arthralgia, exfoliative dermatitis, erythema multiforme, necrotizing vasculitis, and thrombocytopenic purpura)
- Lethargy
- Libido increased or decreased
- Nausea
- Palpitations
- Pupil dilation[45]
- Psychosis
- Short-term weight loss
- Somnolence
- Stunted growth
- Tachycardia
- Xerostomia (dry mouth aka cotton mouth)
Then a little further down
"A small study of just under 100 children that assessed long-term outcome of stimulant use found that 6% of children became psychotic after months or years of stimulant therapy."
Again I fail to see this treatment is good for children who may be no more than little spoilt brats.
Originally published in The Journal of College Student Psychotherapy, Vol. 10(2) 1995, pp. 55-72
The Hazards of Treating "Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder" with Methylphenidate (Ritalin)
http://www.breggin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=123
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
A child is given the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), also called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) when he is considered overactive, cannot pay attention and cannot sit still, ALL VERY subjective symptoms. ADD is diagnosed four times more frequently in boys because boys mature more slowly than girls and because boys are put in classes at school with girls of the same age, so the boys, being less mature, appear to be hyperactive. Irritability anger and mental confusion may also be present so these children are then labeled as having a "Learning Disability." However, these symptoms are virtually identical to the symptoms of hypoglycemia, low blood sugar which is caused by the up and down swings of insulin resulting from eating too much refined sugar.
http://www.becomehealthynow.com/ebookprint.php?id=6670 -
All drugs have side effects and that list could apply to a whole host of different medicines. Its the occurence of the side effects thats important, just listing them doesn't give a balalnced account of the safety or lack of of a drug
The use of Ritalin depends on whether you believe ADD exists, I'm not sure and its up to a doctor to decide if its of benefit to the patient
Hypoglycemia would be easy to spot with a blood test i can't see how a doctor would confuse the two0 -
I wouldn't call most of these conspiracy theories. Most of these are pretty mainstream beliefs, which nobody really denied. There have been suspicions about mobile phones for example, but the proper scientific evidence has never been available. I wouldn't call it a coverup.
I would be more interested in an official cover-up of an event, the official story of which the conspiracy theorists questioned, and later the conspiracy theory viewpoint became accepted. Sort of like if one of the millions of people involved in the 9/11 coverup, came out and admitted responsbility, or video footage appeared showing the assination of jfk by someone other than Oswald; or even better, a picture of an FBI agent with an alien.
Wikileaks gave ample opportunity for something like that, but nothing.0 -
A Primal Nut wrote: »
Wikileaks gave ample opportunity for something like that, but nothing.
Well, there wasnt nothing.
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/01/10DUSHANBE82.htmlCLASSIFIED BY: Ken Gross, Ambassador, EXEC, DoS. REASON: 1.4 (b), (d) ¶1. (C) Summary: In a platitude-ridden meeting, Dushanbe Mayor Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev said upcoming elections would be free and fair, that contributions to the Roghun Dam were voluntary, and that the losses suffered by the United States in Afghanistan were felt by Tajiks as their own. Ubaidulloev asked for help in getting Tajik students admitted to Harvard University, but effectively declined to help find a new location for an American Corner in Dushanbe. He asserted the existence of life on other planets, caveating this by noting that we should focus on solving our problems on Earth. End Summary.
AFGHANISTAN ¶2. (SBU) On January 13 Ambassador called on Dushanbe Mayor and Chairman of the upper house of Parliament Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev at his parliamentary office. The Mayor began the meeting with a lengthy discourse on Afghanistan, thanking the United States for its contributions and sacrifices there, and saying that U.S. activities there were very important "as we enter the third millennium and the 21st century." Ubaidulloev thought the main task there was to build a sense of national identity among ethnically disparate groups, and said the United States was an example for this. He noted that "war is very dangerous", and said "we know there is life on other planets, but we must make peace here first."
Never made the six-one news tho...0 -
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No. So we have to take the fact that of the hundreds of millions of people who take prescription drugs to manage or cure serious illness, and a few hundred thousand will have adverse reaction to this drugs,
"The most commonly used types of prescription drugs in the United States by age were:- Bronchodilators for children aged 0-11.
- ADD stimulants for adolescents aged 12-19.
- Antidepressants for adults aged 20-59.
- Cholesterol lowering drugs (statins) for adults aged 60 and over.
Over the last decade the percentage of Americans who took at least one prescription drug in the past month increased by 10%. The use of multiple prescription drugs increased by 20% and the use of five or more drugs increased by 70%. By 2007-2008, one-half of Americans used at least one or more prescription drugs; and 1 out of 10 used five or more. One out of every five children used at least one or more prescription drugs compared with 9 of every 10 adults aged 60 and over."
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db42.htm
Posted that not just to outline how much prescription drug use has risen, but it also shows that the most prescribed drugs are ADD drugs like Ritalin, anti-depressants and statins that are given to relatively healthy people ie those without a serious illness. Of course there are also many taking drugs for serious illness like cancer, diabetes, hepatitas etc, but out of those hundreds of millions you cited, they are not all as you stated above. Far from it. Also you're confusing adverse reactions with deaths. There are far more than a few hundred thousand adverse reactions. (side effects)
Back to improper testing.
It's very well known in medical circles that published research is manipulated to make their drugs look more effective than they really are.
Despite the wonderful advances and treatments created over the years, it's also true to say that the whole industry has been corrupted from top to bottom; research, testing, trials, publications, the lot. A good chunk of information that doctors receive from pharma publications and read about in medical journals is flawed and exaggerated. Simple as that.
So called peer reviewed articles are not so much as close to a guarantee of effectiveness of or accuracy in medical matters. Far from it.
Many medical studies are hopelessly biased. Researchers wanting certain results are getting those results by manipulation because of pressure to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded. I'm not saying it's all corrupted, but it's definitely widespread.
It's known that small "non-randomised" studies are skewed most of the time apparently. Even the large randomised studies have been shown to be inaccurate a lot more than people would like to think. Vioxx is just one example of one drug that was "proved" safe by large studies before the **** hit the fan. Clinical trials are corrupted, and anyone high up in the industry who says otherwise are clueless or lying. Consequently a huge amount of prescription drugs are less effective than they are reported to be.
Now yes of course there are plenty of decent researchers, doctors and drug salesmen, but as long as careers remain dependant on producing falsified research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, the scientists and profiteers will keep delivering exactly that. Publication bias is rife, and researchers will pander to their paymasters to provide results they want. Not very scientific is it?
Then the marketing guys take over and, well... you know the rest.
The US is the worst as everyone knows, and hopefully it will never be as bad as that here, as someone pointed out on another thread. Hopefully some of the decent European legislators of sound mind that listened to reason and took a stand against Monsanto and co. and banned GM in their respective countries, will stand against the mass advertising and marketing ploys from infecting the media here.
Leaving aside the sucessful meds of which there are many, a massive amount of pharma drugs do not work. Ronseal it aint. They do not do what it says on the tin. A small reduction in symptoms if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you suffer from horrible side effects and mess your health up even more not to mention many being strongly addictive and expensive; very many are lifetime scripts.
Oh and let's not forget: they can kill you.
It's snake oil. Anti-depressants like Prozac and Paxil are considered by many no more effective than a placebo for many cases of depression. In fact they compound the problem. You won't be seeing that taken seriously in the lofty halls of medical journalism any time soon though.
Statins for gazillions of healthy people who have no history of heart disease? Statins for children now??
Now i'd say it's pretty bloody important that medical scientists and their corporate swine fat cat employers are regulated properly considering how many people swallow their crap every day. The FDA in the States don't seem to care a damn as apparently da public "demand" the products. Yea the public demand it after being brainwashed into believing the **** works. So to some it's all their fault now is it? Marvellous.
And when the countless occurences of fraud, lies and criminal negligence come to light, it seems there's always a scapegoat; big pharma try to blame the doctors for over-prescribing it, and of course the doctors blame the makers for pushing it or the patients for wanting it. And that's just when the causes of sickness/death can be traced back to the drug. Consider how many unreported long-term side-effects, complications and deaths there are to add to these.
But of course there's a solution to these side-effects isn't there? Yea, you guessed it...another drug. Cha ching!!
Oh yes, Big Pharma has all the answers because they are our saviours and are improving and prolonging our lives. They have helped the lives of countless millions so should be forgiven for poisoning the rest of us so they can eek out a living.
It's an ugly truth but the main priority for the pharmaceutical industry is not mankinds health and wellbeing, rather making wads and wads of cash by pushing useless and potentially dangerous chemical crappola. The very clear goal is to have everyone on some sort of medication or other. Doctors are lied to and decieved and plenty are blinded by loyalty to their profession.
Unsafe drugs are massively overprescribed in full knowledge of the dodginess of the research backing them. That unfortunately for us is an undisputable fact. Conspiracy theory it is not!
A couple of links to relating to testing:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/279/15/1200.short
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/294/2/218.full.pdf+html0 -
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Sorry, extraterrestrial life wouldn't be the single biggest discovery ever? It wouldn't make the six o'clock news? Are you for real?
It'd be the single most enormous thing ever to happen in history probably, it'd make the six one news for years afterwards.0 -
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@ed2hands
Some bold statements but a bit too generalised
Which drugs do not work and how did you come to that conclusion?
At what level above placebo is acceptable to you and more importantly to a possible patient? Depends on the illness
SSRI's have being proved to be effective I thought its how easy prescriptions are given thats the issue? As you say yourself prozac no better than placebo for "many cases of depression". Prozac works in the right circumstances
While your right about the over-prescribing of drugs, you shouldn't say they don't work in the first place without some proof0 -
@ed2hands
While your right about the over-prescribing of drugs, you shouldn't say they don't work in the first place without some proof.
Which drugs do not work and how did you come to that conclusion
Fair point and fair question. Well let's start with statins. I've read from many sources about how they're being prescribed to those with no history of heart disease.
They apparently work well for people with heart disease, although there are questions being raised about whether the original studies were not flawed and their potential dangers were underestimated (details about that in first link i think). Will leave a couple of sources below.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/blogs/btw/warnings-about-statins-grow-louder-27364/
http://chriskresser.com/the-truth-about-statin-drugs
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/HeartHealth/cholesterol-busting-statins-study-raises-concerns/story?id=11037926
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/HeartHealth/cholesterol-busting-statins-study-raises-concerns/story?id=11037926
http://www2.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab004816.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/19/us-statin-benefits-idUSTRE70I19120110119
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/HeartHealth/cholesterol-busting-statins-study-raises-concerns/story?id=11037926
Others spring to mind. Ritalin i feel is shamefully overused for and i would consider it another one that not only doesn't work (more a case that they're just not required); it can cause physical and psychological damage.
I realise that many psychologists and doctors say Ritalin is "successful" in the majority of cases. I'm just struggling to understand what they mean by successful...
The existence of "off-label" prescribing in this area to me is really worrying. Am vehemently against it as you probably know at this stage.
SSRI's don't really work IMO. Will go into that in a sec.
And lastly for the moment, not sure if this fits into the drugs that don't work section but it's a very interesting story. Worth a read:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121609815At what level above placebo is acceptable to you and more importantly to a possible patient? Depends on the illness
SSRI's have being proved to be effective I thought its how easy prescriptions are given thats the issue? As you say yourself prozac no better than placebo for "many cases of depression". Prozac works in the right circumstances
I personally have my doubts about the effectiveness of SSRI's based on what i've read and this goes back to the testing and overprescribing issues aswell. I do appreciate your POV that many do benefit from them in one way or another; either for it's placebo effect or IMO that they mask the true problem but unfortunately in many cases eventually exasperate it. Regardless, out respect for sufferers, am reluctant to delve into it too much here other than to repeat what many professionals suspect.0 -
"Can any medical-research studies be trusted?
That question has been central to John Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.
His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.
He first stumbled on the sorts of problems plaguing the field, he explains, as a young physician-researcher in the early 1990s at Harvard. At the time, he was interested in diagnosing rare diseases, for which a lack of case data can leave doctors with little to go on other than intuition and rules of thumb. But he noticed that doctors seemed to proceed in much the same manner even when it came to cancer, heart disease, and other common ailments. Where were the hard data that would back up their treatment decisions?
There was plenty of published research, but much of it was remarkably unscientific, based largely on observations of a small number of cases. A new “evidence-based medicine” movement was just starting to gather force, and Ioannidis decided to throw himself into it, working first with prominent researchers at Tufts University and then taking positions at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health. He was unusually well armed: he had been a math prodigy of near-celebrity status in high school in Greece, and had followed his parents, who were both physician-researchers, into medicine. Now he’d have a chance to combine math and medicine by applying rigorous statistical analysis to what seemed a surprisingly sloppy field. “I assumed that everything we physicians did was basically right, but now I was going to help verify it,” he says. “All we’d have to do was systematically review the evidence, trust what it told us, and then everything would be perfect.”
It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.
But beyond the headlines, Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.
This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”
Perhaps only a minority of researchers were succumbing to this bias, but their distorted findings were having an outsize effect on published research. To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously. Imagine, though, that five different research teams test an interesting theory that’s making the rounds, and four of the groups correctly prove the idea false, while the one less cautious group incorrectly “proves” it true through some combination of error, fluke, and clever selection of data. Guess whose findings your doctor ends up reading about in the journal, and you end up hearing about on the evening news?
Researchers can sometimes win attention by refuting a prominent finding, which can help to at least raise doubts about results, but in general it is far more rewarding to add a new insight or exciting-sounding twist to existing research than to retest its basic premises—after all, simply re-proving someone else’s results is unlikely to get you published, and attempting to undermine the work of respected colleagues can have ugly professional repercussions....."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/
That's only a small portion of article.Highly recommend to read it.0 -
@ed2hands
Alot to take in there,
Prozac is an SSRI, it has the in -vitro data to back that claim up. So I would say its integrity as an SSRI is not in question, but prescribed in error no benefit would be seen. You need distinguish between incorrect use and efficacy. You are suggesting a more holistic approach to mental health issues which is fine but SSRI's would still have a role to play. If someone comes to a doctor in distress ,prozac will calm them down ie adjust serotoin levels as it is supposed to. Then a more detailed look at root causes can be investigated. You can't look at root causes if the patient is in a high level of distress or depression you must control the symptoms before you look at the cure. How do you measure depression all you can do is take the patients word for it. Most people on prozac would be doing some cognitative therapy i'd say. OCD is treated quiet succesfully this way afaik.
In terms of medical trials, the industry regulates itself to a certain degree. If a company is developing new SSRI's or whatever type of family of drugs it will use the current best drug as it s reference for comparison. If they can't reproduce the IC50's of a rivals product they will be very quick to highlight it.
Most whislteblowing comes from within the industry and I think the level of fraud you suggest would not be benefical to the companies in the long term (some big fines recently, common misconception about the profitability of big pharma, these fines hurt). I don't doubt that it doesn't go on but not to the extent you think (i mean that the benefits clinically are not exaggerated as high as you think), i'd say the %'s are quiet small otherwise the frontline line of doctors and nurses would spot the lack of clinical benefit quickly0 -
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Well, we've got the mayor of a town in Tajikistan stating it in a meeting and in the parliament or something for some very odd reason. Not exactly the gold standard in terms of solid evidence, wouldn't you agree?The point that some folk in positions of apparent power, are aware of Et existance, it's was leaked in a cable and didn't make the news.0 -
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Monty Burnz wrote: »Well, we've got one Afghan guy stating it in a press conference or something for some very odd reason. Not exactly the gold standard in terms of solid evidence, wouldn't you agree?
I wouldn't agree that it was a press conference.0
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