So banks, MPs, politicians and the police are all corrupt...and now you can add drug manufacturers and some doctors...

[breadandbutterfly]

GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn after bribing doctors to increase drugs sales

Sales reps in the US encouraged to mis-sell antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin and asthma treatment Advair

www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/03/glaxosmithkline-fined-bribing-doctors-pharmaceuticals

Really shocking. A drug company that knowingly made totally unproven or false claims about their drugs, and doctors who knowingly took bribes of up to 1.5 mn to promote them.

And a $3 billion fine, compared to Barclays £290 million fine that has been garnering all the headlines.

Are all rich people just high class crooks? It seems so.

There's the now-established link between swine flu jab and narcolepsy.

Here.

Very sad news, sydenhamhighstreet.

Miss-selling by banks, LIBOR fixing, paying doctors to prescribe drugs; what's real and who is telling the truth, who can you trust?

I even wonder if what they say about "saving the planet" and the 'catastrophic', cataclysmic consequences of climate change are a con.

Pandemics, paid-for studies and funds paid to academics, bonuses for bankers and knighthoods for "services to banking", and the now scrapped fines for old-age pensioners who forgot to close their bin lids.

Something is rotten. Something stinks to high heaven, and OP is right that it is rotten from the top down. We have just been able to see a bit of it because the lid has been lifted.

Think you'll find climate change isn't a con. Sadly.

Sensible action to stop it isn't going to happen while everyone's obsessed with lining their own pocket, though.

Broken Britain?
Who broke it? Who broke the trust, conned the public, sold them a pup and made more money than Midas?

And right now on Newsnight, they tell us that old people need to give up their entitlements.

They have paid-for 'think tanks' with spinners who spin us lies and messages that are against the public benefit.

Willetts tells us on Newsnight that we must have "fairness" between generations. As if we don't have that already and is if the young are being screwed and the old are benefitting?

This is classic divide and rule.

Why doesn't he talk about "fairness" between the rich and poor, between the top and the bottom, between the bankers and the public, between the moat house expense claimers and pensioners who can't afford their heating bills?

Will we get a real inquiry to find out what the bankers have been doing?
What about a real inquiry on why people die in hospital of dehydration?

What about some "fairness" for the public for a change?

Viva, that is what my friend the former drugs rep said. He said that in order to get just 10 minutes with the doctor he had to bring in loads of snacks for the staff and loads of small stuff like mugs, pens, etc.

I think you are right about the 'good apples' being afraid to whistleblow, although I am surprised no one has blown the whistle anonymously.

I am not sure of the economics of all this. If a drug is out of patent then there wouldn't be much to gain by prescribing it. So would this mean that doctors who receive bribes would prescribe newer drugs, with less known about possible long-term side-effects?

I am a bit biased on this but some of the side-effects of psychiatric drugs are truly awful. Apparently mental health patients die 15 years early. There may be many factors in this; suicide, smoking, other factors. But someone told me last week that the drugs may shorten lives but give a better quality of life in the shorter lifespan. (hollow laugh)

In a psychiatric hospital patients are observed for about 3 days and then WITHOUT EXCEPTION they are given medication. No talking therapy at all. I am probably a bit naive but I would have thought that drugs should be the very, very last resort.

Yes, lazy, the bribes are to persuade doctors to prescribe newer drugs that are still under patent. And never mind if the evidence coming in shows that people are dying as a result - Glaxo can make those results disappear down the back of a filing cabinet!

Drugs should be the very, very last resort if you were thinking of patient welfare.

If you were thinking of doctors and drugs manufacturers and all who invest in them getting rich, then drugs should be the very first resort.

And the patients are effectively guinea pigs. I am NOT defending TC or Scientology (which I think is a dangerous and bonkers cult) but he did have a point about Ritalin. Is Ritalin out of patent? If not, will it stop being prescribed on such a scale when it goes out of patent?

It really bothers me that there is such political and economic ignorance among the general population about this.

Admittedly I've worked in related fields so I do have insider knowledge, but still.

Yes, patients are guinea pigs.

It's worse when those patients are children.

I think that Tomas Szasz speaks a lot of sense about 'the medicalisation of every day life'.

www.syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/fall-2007/medicalization-everyday.html
But then prescribing doctors would not get their golfing holidays, so he is very unpopular with doctors.

Share your insider knowledge, Syd.

The risks of the GSK anti-D's don't stop once people are no longer teenagers, I had several suicide attempt trips to A&E 15yrs ago after starting their Seroxat in my 20's, which IIRC was later banned in children and teenagers. Still ok for adults though .

Pisses me off that they get away with keeping this type of medication on the market. I am only here with the skin of my teeth and realising how ill it was making me .

I loathe GSK.

Please note that this glaxo judgement was for behaviour in the US where medicine is big business and doctors are a free Market. It is very different in the UK. Yes medical reps give docs in the UK free pens & post it's but if you think that's what makes them prescribe something then you are crazy. (this kind of bribary happens in most industries .... I currently have a mug from a door manufacturer, a pencil from a carpeting company and a ruler from a god knows what they do Company. I have only specified products from one of these companies and that was because it did what I needed it to and for the right price, I can't justify thousands of pounds worth of expenditure to a client because of a cheap freebie, I have demonstrate why) A far bigger influence than advertising in this country is hospital & GP budgets, which are on the squeeze. So those expensive drugs that come with a rep & a free pen need to be justified if they are used to more than just the patient (who will generally believe the doctor that this is what they need)

I just read the classics thread on mad things our parents used to do. These days most of those parents would be diagnosed with some sort of mental disorder. Especially Lequeen's family.

Ditto Meglet. In the loathing.

Can't share me insider knowledge, Lazy. Would take too long... (and I would have to kill you all.)

It's not GSK. It is the whole pharmacrazy. And I don't mean proper drugs like anti-biotics and (in the pipeline) drugs for lupus, MS, cancer obviously.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders

The DSM, when it was first published in 1952 was just a pamphet. Now it is the size of the New York telephone directory. Tens of thousands of HCPs signed a petition to register their alarm that the next edition is going to bigger still. This is an extreme example but I think one of the new 'disorders' (to be treated with drugs, of course) is that paedaphilia and rape are going to be given a medical diagnosis.

And I heard on Women's Hour today that there has been a longitudinal study of women with fertility problems. I think they said that 47% were later diagnosed as scizophrenia. I can't quite believe that. I hope I got that wrong.

Thing is, on most MN threads if you start talking about pharmaceutical companies' profits, you get called paranoid.

Maybe criticism of pharmaceutical companies is going to be in the new DSM? A certifiable disorder; main symptom: paranoia.

That is the catch 22. And if you are taking one of these powerful anti-pyschotic drugs then you are bound to be paranoid.

I used to work in a situation where I had to research new drugs and, as I said, the ones that deal with actual medical conditions such as cancer, are worthwhile, and I know the hoops they have to jump through. It is the psychiatric ones that I am talking about.

You are dead right about the paranoia accusations. It is enough to drive anyone round the bend.

And people with severe alcohol problems are told that alcohol is a symptom of yet another 'disorder'. 'Alcohol abuse is a co-morbidity'. No talking about why they might be drinking excessively in the first place.