A Real-World Dr. Evil: Big Pharma's Conspiracy to Game Medical Literature
Posted by freedomforall 6 months, 1 week ago to Business
Excerpt:
"Once upon a time we’d killed babies with morphine syrups, and destroyed lives by treating laryngitis with heroin. Eventually we wised up. Yet now, a single publication was being cited, over and over again, to contradict everything we’d learned through a century of tragic experience. This publication, called “Porter & Jick” after its authors, was receiving hugely respectful attention from hundreds of other doctors and scientists, writing in hundreds of other medical journals.
Porter & Jick was even enjoying glowing write-ups in mainstream media. TIME magazine called it a “landmark study,” one that showed fears of opioid addiction had been “exaggerated,” and were “basically unwarranted.” Scientific American said Porter & Jick’s “extensive study” was evidence for a new modern understanding that “morphine taken for pain is not addictive.”
So, what was this landmark, game-changing, extensive study?
Brace yourself: It was a letter to the editor, and just five sentences.
Five sentences!
The letter’s authors were Jane Porter, a grad student, and Hershel Jick, a physician. Porter and Jick reported reviewing 11,000 patients in “our current files” at a Boston hospital who were treated with an opioid and finding only four cases of “reasonably well-documented addiction,” whatever any of that means. As evidence goes, it’s so low-quality for decision-making purposes that it borders on useless. And that’s okay, by the way: When your research findings are too weak to merit a full publication, eking a letter to the editor out of them is a common tactic in publish-or-perish academia. Everyone understood this at the time; upon publication the Porter & Jick letter was thus promptly and appropriately ignored; and that should have been the end of it."
----------------------------------------------
See also attached images of this purposely misleading rubbish quoted by Time and [UN]Scientific American.
"Once upon a time we’d killed babies with morphine syrups, and destroyed lives by treating laryngitis with heroin. Eventually we wised up. Yet now, a single publication was being cited, over and over again, to contradict everything we’d learned through a century of tragic experience. This publication, called “Porter & Jick” after its authors, was receiving hugely respectful attention from hundreds of other doctors and scientists, writing in hundreds of other medical journals.
Porter & Jick was even enjoying glowing write-ups in mainstream media. TIME magazine called it a “landmark study,” one that showed fears of opioid addiction had been “exaggerated,” and were “basically unwarranted.” Scientific American said Porter & Jick’s “extensive study” was evidence for a new modern understanding that “morphine taken for pain is not addictive.”
So, what was this landmark, game-changing, extensive study?
Brace yourself: It was a letter to the editor, and just five sentences.
Five sentences!
The letter’s authors were Jane Porter, a grad student, and Hershel Jick, a physician. Porter and Jick reported reviewing 11,000 patients in “our current files” at a Boston hospital who were treated with an opioid and finding only four cases of “reasonably well-documented addiction,” whatever any of that means. As evidence goes, it’s so low-quality for decision-making purposes that it borders on useless. And that’s okay, by the way: When your research findings are too weak to merit a full publication, eking a letter to the editor out of them is a common tactic in publish-or-perish academia. Everyone understood this at the time; upon publication the Porter & Jick letter was thus promptly and appropriately ignored; and that should have been the end of it."
----------------------------------------------
See also attached images of this purposely misleading rubbish quoted by Time and [UN]Scientific American.
check out this Austin Powers-themed motivational video. It was made by the opioid manufacturer Cephalon, Inc. for its sales staff, and discusses how they will market their new dissolve-in-the-mouth fentanyl tablet. Cephalon was able to patent generic fentanyl as Fentora® by adding in Alka Seltzer®-style “plop plop fizz fizz” effervescence. It was also able to patent generic fentanyl as Actiq® by making it into a lollypop. Feel free to eye-roll in disgust, but that’s how you make a cheap drug expensive: Tweak how the medication gets delivered into the body, and claim it’s now a completely new substance, worthy of a new patent. (Remember this. It will come up again and again.)
The 2006 Fentora® motivational video, shown to a New York jury in 2021 over the strenuous objections of the Cephalon legal team, edits new audio into scenes from the cult classic movie Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. “Gentlemen! I have a plan. It’s quite brilliant,” says Dr. Evil. “We are going to roll out a blockbuster marketing campaign, focusing on ‘effervescent speed’ — a concept so nebulous, so indecipherable, it will absolutely help drive prescriptions … to Fentora®!”
---------------------------------------------
And that's genocide.
Punishable by death and seizure of all company and officer assets and re-use of assets to cure the addicts.