I've been waiting to post in this thread. Hi. I'm a biomedical student with a lot of research into how private and publicly funded studies assist/hurt the medical industry.Verigan said:
I'm sorry but simply no. Privately run medical experiments are more likely to lie, cheat, deceive and produce results which don't help anyone at all. Private practices when running medical experiments have cost thousands of lives because companies have no reason to care as long as it doesn't hurt the bottom line. Lets give you some wonderful cited examples and statistics:
85% of all privately funded studies are positive. 50% of all government funded research is positive like you would imagine. (http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=745938) And this is for a simple reason. When a company produces a study they don't like? They probably bin it. And the knowledge that this drug doesn't work or might hurt people? Hidden from doctors forever. And why wouldn't they? You have some paper that says "My product is crap". What company in their RIGHT mind would not burn it immediately? I, and almost ALL (I've never met one who disagreed) doctors and medical students agree that that piece of paper should be taken immediately and shown to all doctors under ALL circumstances. You perform a trial? The results are available to all NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS. But apparently if they don't consent its stealing. And so people die. Lets give an example of human suffering caused by this.
In 1980 doctors agreed that survivors of heart attacks should be given, in all cases, a drug that prevents and lessens the effects of an irregular heart beat. This is because MANY heart attack survivors later develop an irregular heartbeat. On paper it made perfect sense. Initial findings were good. However later down the line it turns out the drugs put too much stress on an already weakened heart and over 100'000 patients died due to this misunderstanding. The worst part? A company that was trying to invent a new drug for this purpose FOUND this relationship before this initial discussion even took place. They found that it caused deaths later down the line and people died in THEIR trial to discover it also, their deaths indicating the relationship. But since it was discovered with THEIR drug they said "We wont put our drug on the market, and since OURS isn't on the market this paper relating to it can go in the bin". That paper cost 100'000 lives. But apparently taking it from that company would be stealing if they didn't consent. The people in the first trial died in vain. The worst part is companies use volunteers (Sometimes paid) for drug testing. Sometimes they use people who desperately want an alternative to the drugs they have currently. These people are not informed that their sacrifice might be for nothing if the trial isnt good enough to ever see the light of day again.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8349379
Heres a smaller one. In 2006 6 people trialled a new drug for the first time after it passed animal testing with flying colours across the board. All seemed to be safe in every way. In an hour the men had flu symptoms. Then one had his lungs fail and fill with fluid. Another stopped breathing at all and was thankfully nearby a mechanical ventilator to keep him alive. Then their kidneys failed. All of them. Their blood began to clot in their veins. Their white blood cell count dropped sharply. The blood stopped reaching their fingers. They began to rot. Thankfully, with a team of doctors furiously attending each one to stop this torrent of terrible effects, all survived. I'm sure you can guess why this makes companies look bad though? It had happened before. Another company developed a VERY VERY similar drug and saw it did these horrible things. But they said nothing and hid the results. If a competitor creates a similar drug its not OUR problem and THEY should pay to test it again, not use our results that WE paid for. So they had no reason to publish the results to save these people so much suffering.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130107105354/http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_063117
When i have to make a call about what drugs to use? I'm not trusting drug companies as far as I could throw their damned office buildings. They lie. They cheat. They KILL. They will perform a 100 trials and keep the good while hiding the bad. They will slant their trials to make them look good, use faulty systems and techniques and weird things to test against (I VERY VERY rarely want to know if your drug is better than NOTHING, I want to know if its better than OTHER drugs we already use!) knowing that doctors simply don't have time to analyse in depth EVERY drug they ever use. If they did they could never use anything. A fun fact is that the drugs market produces 26 hours of reading material in studies every day. A doctor simply cannot read 26 hours of material in 24 hours no matter how much catch up he uses.
Here's another fun practice they use:
Me again drugs! The rule now in the medical industry is that when you invent something you have the sole right to make it for 3 years. After that ANYONE can produce it for as cheap as possible and the price will go WAY down. However some companies came up with a great solution. Invent the same drug again with a different name and push it on doctors to keep them buying from their company despite it doing NOTHING else and being WAY more expensive for the patient. A doctor, for 3 years, will become used to buying a drug from a company from a sales rep for his practice under a certain name and then using it. After 3 years he/she SHOULD stop this and move to the cheapest producer of the same drug as soon as it pops up. However drug companies do not want this. They send "reps" to give gifts to a doctor, to talk to them, to befriend them and to let them know about the new drug they are producing. See its perfectly valid to take your drug and change it very slightly in an area that isn't medically important. You can even just use a mirror image of it so its in fact the EXACT same drug in reverse. You run a few tests to see if its the same as the old one but you don't need as many. And then you give it a new brand a new name and tell doctors this ones just as good as the one they are used to but NEWER! And so you keep them away from cheaper alternatives that could save everyone money.
Companies will waste millions of dollars producing drugs that are NOTHING new at all! Its not medical research its business masturbation for crying out loud. Nothing new is being produced. No one is being helped. Its milking an old product as hard as possible rather than developing new techniques. If a company is REALLY lucky, due to random chance, this "new" drug might even test a TINY bit better than the one before it despite it being EXACTLY the same. This does NOT encourage progress.
Chopping subgroups is another wonderful practice companies use to lie to doctors. Does your drug suck? Too bad, but what you can do is see if it sucks in:
Men over 30?
Chinese vegetarians?
Women between the age of 33 and 54?
Women with blond hair and brown eyes who enjoy long walks on the beach?
Eventually you will find a group where your drug will do well. Because there are infinite groups to choose from and chance dictates at least one will show a good result. Then you market a useless drug to these people using findings you butchered to find a good result. But there's no need to tell anyone that.
Another fun one is ignoring drop outs. You see this one on TV all the time. Ever see the shampoo with "88 out of 93" women agree? Why 93? It was probably 100 at some point but 7 decided they just couldn't finish the trial. Why? We don't know, it might be because they were lazy, it might be because it was the worst thing ever and ruined their hair. But because they didn't complete the trial they don't count and so their possibly extremely negative opinions don't make the trial.
Companies waste millions of dollars constructing an elaborate web of lies upon lies upon lies to make doctors buy, not the best drug, but their drug. They have every reason to make sure doctors make a bad decision about purchasing drugs. To want them to have no access to information that might make them look bad in future. Drug companies produce the WORST research with the least value. They actively hinder the medical industry and in the worst cases actively cause lives to be lost. Without laws demanding ALL trials be published and reviewed before they can be used in advertising and the drugs sold doctors are trapped in a situation where they are surrounded by people who want to deceive them and they have no idea who to trust while reps attempt to weasel into their good books to sell drugs. Its a nightmare. Some third party impartial judges produce good results (The Cochrane collaboration is a brilliant brilliant thing) because they have no reason to lie. Government funded studies also, and I wont try and guess a reason for this, tend to be more impartial. But seriously there needs to be major reform in the drug industry now. Way more regulation. Not less. Its bad enough as it is.
A free market does not encourage progress in the medical industry. Its undeniable. It encourages companies to do everything in their power not to innovate because innovation is expensive and risky especially since information from one drug company cant tell another if they are about to kill people in a study that's already been performed. Producing the same drugs over and over with new names works because they can pick trials to make them look superior to other drugs.
