DRUG company-sponsored trials published in medical journals should be regarded as marketing

DRUG company-sponsored trials published in medical journals should be regarded as marketing, unless proved otherwise, a researcher with the independent Cochrane Collaboration says.

In an article published in the British Medical Journal this week, researcher Tom Jefferson said that robust, independent assessments of drugs could not be carried out while companies were allowed to keep trial data secret on the basis that it is privately owned.

Mr Jefferson said it was vital that data be made freely available because trials and meta analyses of drugs in respected publications were ''heavily influenced by drug companies' marketing decisions on what is and isn't published''.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/sponsored-drug-trials-under-fire-20110121-1a02a.html

medical sects and cults that propagate the Absurd

“...when irrational beliefs are shared with a surrounding community of sympathetic thinkers, errors become institutionalized. Thus are generated medical sects and cults that propagate the Absurd....
The guardians that usually keep the institution of medicine from reeling off into irrationality are social contracts built into medical science and ethical behavior. The academic community guards the contractual borders of science, while laws and regulations encode our ethical system. For the Absurd to have advanced, there must have been some breakdown of these social guardians.”
Propagation of the Absurd: demarcation of the Absurd revisited
Wallace Sampson, MD Editor and Clinical Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Kimball Atwood IV, MD, Anaesthesiologist; and Assistant Clinical Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine Medical Journal of Australia Dec. 2005

France pledges reform after diabetes drug scandal

French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand has promised a complete revamp of the country's medical regulatory system.

He was speaking after an official report said a diabetes drug which caused up to 2,000 deaths should have been banned 10 years earlier.

The drug - known as Mediator - should have been banned as early as 1999, when it began to emerge that it could cause heart disease, the report said.

Several other European countries and the US then withdrew it.

'Political connections'

But Mediator remained on sale in France for another 10 years.

Between 500 and 2,000 people in France are believed to have died because of its side effects.

It was developed to treat diabetics but millions of people took it simply to lose weight.

The report by a government agency, the Social Affairs Inspectorate, said it was incomprehensible that the authorities had failed to act sooner.

Mr Bertrand said it was now his duty to rebuild the regulatory system to protect the public.

His statement is being seen as an admission that one of the biggest medical scandals in France in recent years may not be an isolated case.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12200506