Sunday, May 15, 2011

Wednesday Update - Rapture Edition

They some Mexican teenager is screwing up the weather, they say, and I for one am a bit irritated at that. How dare she? The call her El Nina, and unlike her brother El Nino, she makes Spring wet, gray, and cold. Oh I know I shouldn't complain about the weather in our beloved Northwest (as people never fail to remind me whenever I do), but as a budding curmudgeon I feel I have a duty to uphold. Which brings me to one more little pet peeve of mine. Could someone please explain to me why people, perfect strangers mind you, feel compelled to "bless you" every freaking time you sneeze? Seems to me the only people authorized to do that are Catholic priests. And you well know how I feel about Catholic priests. So you, you pervert, and you know who you are, stop blessing me every time my allergies act up, or your liable to be present at the time of my final nervous breakdown. And it won't be a pretty sight. But I digress ...


  • And of course you've heard that the world is ending this Saturday. Oh stop whining, we've had our fun, and now it's time to pay up. By the way, when the rapture comes, can I have your car? Mark Morford, again.

  • Rick (I Dare You to Google Me) Santorum actually spoke words out of his mouth the other day that resembled "John McCain doesn't understand how torture works." Holy Moly, this guy may very well be the stupidest politician in the world. Well, okay, at least he's in the top ten. Really high on the top ten list. Really high. Check it out.

  • Okay, since the suposed rapture is coming this Saturday, I think it's really necessary that those of us who plan on being here Sunday have a plan. And guess what, I found one.

  • And you know, when you really think about it, maybe this SHOULD be the end of all this. For example: The president and CEO of a Salinas, Calif.-area public hospital district will receive nearly $4 million in retirement pay on top of his $150,000 annual pension. and that's just obscene. So I say, bring it on!

  • See you Sunday ...











Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Audacity of Hope

I'm not really sure how I feel about the killing of Osama bin Laden last week. Probably a better comment about it all would have the phrase "mixed emotions" in it somewhere. Personally deep down I'm pleased the crazy bastard is dead, of course. Even liberal commies like myself are pleased with that fact, I'm sure. As a matter of fact I hope in the few moments before life passed out of his body he experienced several frightening visions. I hope, as he heard his killers coming up the stairs he felt a cold desperate fear of losing control of his destiny, like being captive on a low-flying airliner, headed toward downtown New York city. I hope, as his killers burst into his room and aimed the barrel of a gun at him, he saw the last few seconds of life he had, like the woman who was recorded saying "oh my God" seconds before that plane slammed into the first tower of the WTC. I hope, as the first bullet ripped through his chest and the gun barrel slowly rose and aimed at his right eye, bin Laden experienced the helpless dread of someone resigned to jump out a 90th floor window to escape the raging inferno behind him. I hope, as this bastard's final thought, as the last bullet began blasting out a portion of his skull and brain, that he realized the total despair and waste and loss and the humanity and insanity of the religious bullshit that makes mankind hate each other in the name of their own personal god, amen.

And I hope that killing this bastard is going to make a difference in this world. I hope it's going to make things better. I hope the killing will stop now. I hope we can bring all our troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq. And I hope that now we can get on an airplane and go visit relatives across the country without having to take the baby's shoes off at the airport, and have our bodies searched and probed and violated just to ride on one of those cursed missiles, and we can stop kissing the tarmac when we land.

I hope the fear can go away now.

Because if it doesn't, I hope we can somehow justify what we have done. How many innocent dead in Iraq? How many innocent dead in Afghanistan? How many American fathers mothers brothers sisters blown up shot blown away homes destroyed limbs mangled blinded disfigured killed killed killed ...

I have a terribly hard time believing in God. But if there is such a thing, if he really really exists somewhere up there in the cosmos, I seriously doubt he wants us killing each other in his name, for any reason. But what do I know?

Osama bin Laden is dead. Whoopee.

Our Friends In the Pharmaceutical Industry ...

This article confirms my suspicions about Big Pharma, suspicions that have been growing steadily over the last several decades.

It may be worth considering who the players are when thinking about the remarkably negative reaction to the CCSVI theory from parts of the medical fraternity. To many people (myself included) there appeared to be a widespread and coordinated effort to marginalize and discredit the idea that there could be any alternative to "take your MS drugs and don't ask questions" pattern of MS care in this country. During the discussion about universal healthcare in the United States last year there was much made about the statistic that healthcare in the US represented one-sixth of our current economy, twice that of medical costs in any other nation. The implication seemed to be that the industry, as it was currently operating, was "too big to fail" and too central to our economy to risk meddling with.

If you read this story carefully, this is a description of a predatory industry, willing to use scientific fraud and strong-arm tactics to seize and hold market share, regardless of the possible defects in the products being marketed. I have never heard of the idea of creating non-existent medical journals. That truly shows the genius of American ingenuity, doesn't it? Assuming that President Obama gets reelected he could do worse than take on the "medical-industrial complex" and work to reign in its worst excesses.

It is enough to give a fellow a negative bias against drugs.

For my generation there is a certain irony to that...


Arthur

Big Pharma has developed new forms of 'research' to serve its own interests.

The medical research world has been concerned about the problem of ghost writing for more than a decade. Over the past few years, the issue has been repeatedly raised in the mainstream media. Most of the commentary has focused on the ethics of academics signing their name on papers they did not write and on some of the most egregious actions by pharmaceutical companies.

But these efforts miss the ways in which Big Pharma has developed new forms of medical research to serve its own interests.

How Ghost Writing Feeds Big Pharma Profits

According to a study by Marc-AndrĂ© Gagnon and Joel Lexchin in PLoS Medicine, Big Pharma firms spend twice as much on promotion as on research and development. But it is worse than that: More and more medical R&D is organized as promotional campaigns to make physicians aware of products. The bulk of the industry’s external funding for research now goes to contract with research organizations to produce studies that feed large numbers of articles to medical journals.

Internal documents from Pfizer, made public in litigation, showed that 85 scientific articles on its antidepressant Zoloft were produced and co-ordinated by a public relations company. Pfizer itself thus produced a critical mass of the favourable articles placed among the 211 scientific papers on Zoloft in the same period. Internal documents tell similar stories for Merck’s Vioxx, GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, Astra-Zeneca’s Seroquel, and Wyeth’s hormone-replacement drugs.

To promote the now-notorious Vioxx, Merck organized a ghost-writing campaign that involved 96 scientific articles. Key ones did not mention the death of some patients during clinical trials. Through a class-action lawsuit against Vioxx in Australia, it was discovered that Elsevier had created a fake medical journal for Merck – the Australasian Journal of Joint and Bone Medicine – and perhaps 10 other fake journals for Merck and other Big Pharma companies.

In another example, GlaxoSmithKline organized a ghost-writing program to promote its antidepressant Paxil. According to internal documents made public in 2009, the program was called “Case Study Publication for Peer-Review,” or CASPPER, a playful reference to the “friendly ghost.” Such strategies are not exceptions; they are now the norm in the industry.


Most new drugs with blockbuster potential are introduced accompanied by 50, 60, or even 100 medical journal articles. Any firm that refused to play this game in the name of ethics would likely lose market share. Profits in the pharmaceutical industry depend on companies’ capacity to influence medical knowledge, and create market share and market niches for their products.

A Call for Evidence-Based Medicine


In 2008, research showed that pharmaceutical companies systematically failed to publish negative studies on their SSRIs – formally called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the Prozac generation of antidepressants. Of 74 clinical trials, 38 produced positive results and 36 did not; 94 per cent of the positive studies were published, compared to only 23 per cent of those that were negative, and two-thirds of those were spun to make them look more positive.

Physicians reading the scientific literature got a biased view of the benefits of SSRIs. This helps to explain the huge number of antidepressant prescriptions, in spite of the fact that, according to a meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 2010, the drugs did not bring more benefits than a placebo for 70 per cent of people taking SSRIs. Compared to a placebo, however, SSRI antidepressants can result in serious adverse drug reactions.


With this we see one of the problems with the ghost management of medical research and its publication. Pharmaceutical companies want upbeat reports on their drugs. They design, write, and publish studies that are likely to show their drugs in a positive light – and there are myriad ways to do so. Ghosts sometimes bend the truth, and sometimes even commit fraud, with grave results.


Why do academics sign their name on scientific articles they did not write, using research they did not perform? Because they are rewarded, both by their universities and by their colleagues, for how much they publish and for the prominence of the publications. Pharmaceutical companies and their agents are very good at placing articles in prestigious journals, and they then make them even more prominent by having their armies of sales reps circulate them and talk them up.

Researchers who sign their name on studies and analyses (perhaps scientifically correct) that are favourable to the industry can expect to see these articles increase their prestige and influence, and possibly even funding.


What happens, however, when a researcher produces studies and analyses (also scientifically correct) showing that some products are dangerous or inefficient, as some did about Vioxx before the scandal broke? Reading Merck’s internal emails, revealed during the class-action lawsuit, it was exposed that the company drew up a hit list of “rogue” researchers who needed to be “discredited” or “neutralized”“seek them out and destroy them where they live,” one email read. Eight Stanford University researchers say they received threats from Merck after publishing unfavourable results.


Corporate Science


In the ghost management of research and publication by drug companies, we have a new model of science. This is corporate science, done by many unseen workers, performed for marketing purposes and drawing its authority from traditional academic science. The high commercial stakes mean that all of the parties connected with this new corporate science can find reasons or be induced to participate, support, and steadily normalize it. It also biases the available science by pushing favourable results and downplaying negative ones – and sometimes through outright fraud.

As long as pharmaceutical companies hold the purse strings of medical research, medical knowledge will serve to market drugs, not to promote health. And as long as universities grovel for more partnerships with these companies, the door will remain wide open to proceed with the corruption of scientific research.


Source: THE MARK COPYRIGHT 2010 (12/05/11)