A further article about the reprehensible practice of ghostwriters, on the payroll of drug companies, writing articles for medical journals

Documents recently released in federal court cases against the drug company Wyeth have exposed one of the dirty secrets in the world of medical journals: the widespread practice of ghostwriting. While doctors are named as the authors of articles about treatments and diseases, behind the scenes is a paid writer who is largely responsible for crafting the piece. Not only is the ghostwriter on the payroll of a drug company with interests in the topic, the company often reviews the manuscript before the physician sees it.
Read article in the St. Petersburg Times (Florida/USA)

Publisher opens inquiry into article on Wyeth drug

The medical publisher Elsevier is to investigate a U.S. senator's recent allegation that one of its journals published an article on hormone replacement therapy that was improperly ghostwritten by a drug company promoting the product. The senator, Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, had raised questions about the May 2003 "Editors' Choice" article in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, published by Elsevier, which is part of the Dutch-British publishing giant Reed Elsevier.
Read article in the International Herald Tribune

Drug Maker Said to Pay Ghostwriters for Journal Articles

Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company, paid ghostwriters to produce medical journal articles favorable to its female hormone replacement therapy Prempro, according to Congressional letters seeking more information about the company’s involvement in medical ghostwriting. At least one article was published even after a federal study found the drug raised the risk of breast cancer.
Read article in the New York Times (USA)

Big Pharma - promoting diseases as multi-billion dollar markets for patented drugs?

Here is an extract from the Dr Rath Foundation (The Dr. Rath Health Foundation) newsletter which I received today:

February 26, 2008

Court Considers Protecting Drug Makers From Lawsuits
WASHINGTON — Less than a week after issuing a sweeping ruling that bars most lawsuits against medical device makers, the Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in the first of two cases that could determine whether drug makers receive similar protection.
Read article in the New York Times (USA)
Comment: Needless to say, the ruling that is being sought here is a last desperate attempt to avert the imminent collapse of the pharmaceutical investment business with patented drugs. Whatever the Supreme Court eventually rules in these cases, the truth about the pharmaceutical industry – including its toxic chemotherapy and antiretroviral drugs - will remain unchanged: While pretending to deliver health to the world, its entire existence is based on promoting diseases as multi-billion dollar markets for patented drugs.

February 25, 2008

Wyeth, Pfizer Ordered to Pay $2.75 Million Over Drugs
Hormone-replacement drugs made by Wyeth and a Pfizer Inc. unit caused an Arkansas woman's breast cancer and she deserves at least $2.75 million in damages, jurors ruled in the companies' first loss in federal court. Jurors in Little Rock, Arkansas, deliberated 12 hours over two days before finding the combination of Wyeth's Premarin and Pharmacia & Upjohn's Provera menopause drugs helped cause Donna Scroggin's cancer. The former factory worker had a double mastectomy after taking hormone-replacement drugs for about 10 years.
Read article at bloomberg.com

In OK! magazine pictures, Katie Price (Jordan) appears to be promoting infant formula milk rather than breastfeeding

Breast-feeding lobby criticises Jordan for infant formula 'stunt' - Independent on Sunday

Extract:

"Pictures of the model Katie Price, also known as Jordan, feeding her new baby Princess with infant formula during World Breastfeeding Week have angered the National Childbirth Trust, which has condemned OK! magazine for carrying the photos, which clearly show the model using SMA baby milk.

The next page of the magazine is given over to an advertisement for SMA formula designed for older infants. Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company that makes SMA, said it was merely a coincidence that the advert had appeared in the same edition as the photos of Jordan and her baby.

The NCT condemned the promotion as "appalling". Its chief executive, Belinda Phipps, said: "It is an extremely cynical way of getting round the ban on advertising infant formula."

The pro-breastfeeding group Baby Milk Action, which campaigns to inform mothers about the benefits of breast-feeding, plans to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority and Trading Standards about the advert, alleging that product placement is being used in order to get round a ban on promoting infant formula for babies under the age of six months."

Jordan possibly does not understand/realise the harm that formula milk causes to babies in poor countries. - As the article goes on to tell us:

"In developing countries, the World Health Organisation estimates that 1.5 million children die every year because they are not breast-fed, largely due to malnutrition and a lack of sterile water with which to prepare the formula."

But whether in poor or a rich country, here are many reasons why, if you are able to manage it, breastfeeding is best for your baby. Here is a reason you probably do not know about. - Human breast milk is very low in salt/sodium.

A low sodium intake at the beginning of a baby's life helps to protect the baby from becoming obese. The longer you continue to breastfeed, the better the protection from obesity and the stronger your baby's blood vessels will be. - six months would be good; longer still would be better still. - A low salt intake is best for mothers too...(o:

Read about the damaging effect (obesity) of high sodium intake on children on my webpage http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/children.html

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
How to Lose weight!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - wider implications

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods

Associated health conditions

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Pros and cons of taking HRT - mostly cons...

The truth about HRT - Guardian

Extract from a l-o-n-g article:

"In 1966, one of those epoch-changing books was launched on a generation of women around the age of 50. It told them that they did not have to lose out on the hormonal revolution. In fact, it implied it was their duty not to lose out. Forever Feminine, by In 1966, one of those epoch-changing books was launched on a generation of women around the age of 50. It told them that they did not have to lose out on the hormonal revolution. In fact, it implied it was their duty not to lose out. Forever Feminine, by Dr Robert Wilson, a gynaecologist in Manhattan, told them that the menopause was a disease that could be treated. They could stay well, beautiful and sexually active - they could, in fact, continue to please their husbands - if they took hormone therapy. They must simply replace the oestrogen their bodies had stopped producing.

It was the beginning of a myth that has resolutely refused to die - that HRT will undo the ageing process. Over most of the past four decades, women have been prescribed HRT for all sorts of reasons, not just to stop menopausal hot flushes and night sweats and strengthen their bones, but to improve their sex life, their hair, their skin and their morale. For a long time it was almost a case of, well, why not?

Wilson's book was funded by Wyeth, one of the biggest manufacturers of HRT. But that fact did not emerge until 2002, when his son admitted it to the New York Times just the day after a major trial - astonishingly, the first randomised controlled trial on the effect of HRT on women - was stopped three years early. The trial, known as the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), was set up after repeated calls from women's health activists to find out whether, as drug companies and doctors believed, HRT prevented heart disease. Shockingly, it found the opposite to be true. By far the most common form of treatment, which combines oestrogen and progestin, actually increases the risk of heart attacks, blood clots and strokes. The investigators pulled the plug when they found that women taking it also had a greater chance of invasive breast cancer. The WHI is one of the two biggest and most important studies ever carried out on the effects of HRT. The other is the Million Women Study in the UK, which has published a series of papers on breast cancer and other risks with HRT. The latest bad news from this hugely respectable study, published in the Lancet in April, is that HRT must have caused 1,000 deaths from ovarian cancer between 1991 and 2005.

So that means HRT has now been linked to ovarian cancer, invasive breast cancer, womb cancer (if you just take oestrogen), stroke, blood clots and coronary heart disease. This is just not an elixir of youth. Oh yes, there is a medical case for taking it if you are having a miserable menopause, flushing beetroot red at embarrassing moments and waking up with the sheets soaked - when you can sleep at all - at night. But the relief you get for those things, which don't in themselves kill you, has to be set against the alarming array of pretty nasty possible side effects., a gynaecologist in Manhattan, told them that the menopause was a disease that could be treated. They could stay well, beautiful and sexually active - they could, in fact, continue to please their husbands - if they took hormone therapy. They must simply replace the oestrogen their bodies had stopped producing.

If only doctors warned women to avoid eating salt and salty food while taking HRT (and many other drugs with the harmful side-effects of causing sodium and water retention) the majority of the possible and actual ill-effects would not happen.

See my webpage:
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/obesity_and_the_salt_connection.html
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Pharmaceutical companies, aligned with patient groups they give funds to, want to be able to advertise their drugs directly to the public in Europe.

Drug firms and patient groups join in fight to overturn advertising ban - Guardian

Further about pharmaceutical companies wanting to advertise their drugs directly to the public in Europe.

Extracts:

"Drug companies in Europe, faced with declining sales and a shortage of new products, appear to be making ground in their attempt to enlist a major new ally in their struggle for profits - the patient.

Sales soared in the US after companies were allowed to advertise their prescription medicines on TV and radio and in magazines and newspapers. Patients in America began demanding more drugs and specific, expensive brand-name drugs from their doctors. Now the firms want to target the UK in the same way, and are strongly challenging a ban on direct consumer advertising in the EU.

This has been tried before. In 2002, there was an attempt to persuade the European parliament to allow companies to launch "disease awareness campaigns", which critics believed would encourage people to believe they were sick and lead to demand for new drugs from doctors.

Then, as now, industry was aligned with certain patient groups which it funds."

"The European parliament refused to weaken the advertising rules five years ago. But the industry, with the backing of drug company-funded patient groups and a few vocal MEPs, has again succeeded in persuading the European commission that the rules need reform, and it is now discussing how this could be done."

"Recent scandals, such as the heart deaths linked to the arthritis painkiller Vioxx, "are potent reminders that pharmaceutical companies often minimise or even fail to disclose adverse effects", they said.

"In a fiercely competitive marketplace, pharmaceutical manufacturers naturally have an obligation to their shareholders to realise profits from sales. They must therefore promote their own drugs rather than other preventative or treatment options. As a result, pharmaceutical companies are utterly incapable of providing the reliable comparative information needed by patients.""

"GAMIAN-Europe

The Global Alliance of Mental Illness Advocacy Networks was founded by the drug company Bristol Myers Squibb in March 1997, bringing together 12 organisations including Depression Alliance from the UK. GAMIAN-Europe, registered in Belgium, does not detail its funding on its website, apart from acknowledging drug company grants for specific projects. It told the Guardian that nearly half (45%) of its €234,000 (£160,000) income in 2006 came from Eli Lilly, manufacturers of Prozac. Other antidepressant makers also contributed. Lundbeck sponsorship was 26% of the group's income, Pfizer 11%, GlaxoSmithKline 6% and Wyeth 1%. Just 2% came from membership subscriptions."


Lose weight, lower your blood pressure and lower your risk of developing cancer and other illnesses by eating less salt! - Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Should women take a contraceptive pill that stops periods?

Pill that ends periods sparks health row - Independent

Extracts:

"The imminent launch of the first contraceptive pill which promises to free women from the constraints of menstruation has pitched specialists on both sides of the Atlantic into a battle over what is "natural" and safe.

Lybrel, the first pill designed to eliminate the fertility cycle, putting an end to the mood swings and discomfort associated with periods, is expected to win a licence from the Food and Drug Administration in the US this month. In the UK, where it will be marketed as Anya, the US manufacturer Wyeth has applied for a licence which it expects to be granted next year.

The drug is designed to be taken continually unlike other oral contraceptives which are taken for 21 days a month with a break of seven days during which the woman has her period, preserving, albeit artificially, the biological rhythm.

The argument about whether the latest lifestyle choice to be offered to women is good for their health has already begun. Writing in the British Medical Journal, Paula Derry, a health psychologist from Baltimore, questions the wisdom of menstrual suppression and argues it is unnatural and potentially damaging.

Long-term safety has not been established and the argument that menstruation is obsolete is "illogical and unscientific", she says.

Her stance is supported by research in the US which has found many women view their periods as symbols of fertility and health. Rather than loathe them, they have a complex love-hate relationship with them. "

"Is menstruation obsolete?

Yes, says Professor Anna Glasier, head of sexual health, Lothian

"When I took the pill I took it continuously. Who wouldn't? Who would want periods? The idea that menstruation is normal is wrong. Since time dawned most women have been pregnant or breast feeding or post-menopausal - so they didn't have periods. Also, the idea that the period you have when you are on the pill is natural is also wrong. The pill turns the ovaries off and the period you have is a fake. The thing to worry about is the increased risk of deep vein thrombosis on the pill - but there is no evidence that a seven-day break each month makes any difference."

No, says Paula Derry, health psychologist, Maryland, US

"If it is more common today to have monthly periods than in the past that doesn't mean it is unnatural. We know that menstruation is what naturally occurs when women don't become pregnant. A menstruating woman is a healthy, probably fertile woman - whereas unhealthy, malnourished or massively stressed women are more likely to skip periods. Menstrual suppression is unnatural. A drug chronically over-rides the physiological changes associated with the menstrual cycle creating a hormonal environment that is not found in nature." "

PMT problems can easily be lessened or cured by eating less salt/sodium. - See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/pmt.html

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)