A New Low in Drug Research

This kind of stuff gets me really ticked off...

As a sufferer of MS, I, like others struggling with chronic disease, am held in the sway of the big pharmaceutical companies, whether I like it or not. And believe me, despite the benefits many of their products provide, I do not like it.

As public corporate entities, Big Pharma are legally accountable to their shareholders, not to the patients who rely on their products. As our recent economic implosion has shown us, the quest for profit does not always lead corporations, and those who run them, to pursue courses of action that put the public interest before their own.

In the world of Big Pharma, this has led to major drug studies being ghostwritten by corporate hacks, the data included in drug studies to be unabashedly manipulated, and drug studies with negative outcomes to be suppressed and withheld from the FDA and the public during the approval process.

Here's an article from the "Wall Street Journal", a publication not generally known for its muckraking coverage of corporate shenanigans, that details 21 studies that were fabricated by a respected research physician. Of course, the physician involved should suffer unrelenting condemnation, but so too should a system that encourages and rewards researchers for producing positive results, and inherently and insidiously leads to repeated abuses by those who rely on corporate grant money to sustain themselves and their institutions.

With at least half a dozen MS drugs now in late stage development, many of which work by fundamentally changing the functionality of our immune systems, I only hope that the data behind these compounds is repeatedly verified and validated before they are unleashed on the MS patient population.

Let's face it folks, MS has become a multibillion dollar a year industry, and the bean counters look at us as consumers first, and patients second. We must be our own best advocates, and it is contingent upon each of us educate ourselves as best we can in order to make informed decisions in regard to our treatment options.

Click here for the article:

A New Low in Drug Research: 21 Fabricated Studies