Big Pharma CEO Fakes Cancer while Pill-Pushing Doctor Fakes Clinical Trial Results for Bextra, Effexor and Celebrex
By: Mike Adams
The culture of deceit and fraud that permeates conventional medicine became even more apparent today with the announcement that Howard Richman, the former vice president of a pharmaceutical company named Biopure, faked his own cancer and even impersonated a doctor in order to convince a federal judge that he was dying from colon cancer.
This bizarre deceit was an effort by Richman to squirm out of an SEC lawsuit that accused Richman of misleading investors. According to the Associated Press, Richman misled investors about the potential for FDA approval of a blood replacement product called Hemopure, which is made from cow’s blood. By faking his own cancer and forging a doctor’s note, Richman was able to get a postponement of judgment in the SEC lawsuit, which effectively ended the legal action he would have otherwise faced.
It all makes you wonder just how low the integrity standards really are at drug companies these days. If a highly-paid executive can fake his own cancer in order to avoid a lawsuit brought against him because he lied to investors, what other sorts of fabrications and deceits might be going on at these companies?
Faking clinical trial data for Vioxx and Celebrex
Meanwhile, a researcher at Baystate Medical Center in Massachusetts, Dr. Scott Reuben, was found to have faked the data used in 21 “scientific” papers published in peer-reviewed medical journals from 1996 – 2008.
The Associated Press is reporting today that journals have begun retracting papers authored by Dr. Reuben. The journal Anesthesia & Analgesia has retracted 10 studies authored by Dr. Reuben, and the journal Anesthesiology has also started retracting studies.
But the damage has already been done: Dr. Reuben’s work was reportedly relied on very heavily by pull-pushing doctors and medication advocates, who cited his studies to “prove” these drugs are safe and effective. In reality, though, it was all just made up!
The fictions of Big Pharma and clinical trials
This is actually the story on just about everything Big Pharma pushes these days: It’s all just fiction shrouded in scientific-sounding language, led by dishonest, corrupt drug company CEOs and deceitful doctors who lie to the world in order to make more money pushing dangerous prescription medications.
Even when drug company executives aren’t lying to their investors or lying to judges, they’re still lying to the FDA and their own customers about the safety of their drugs. Through the cherry-picking of drug trials (and the burying of negative results), they lie to the entire scientific community about the real dangers of their chemical products.
Modern medicine is largely one big lie. It doesn’t work. People aren’t getting any healthier from drugs and surgery, but they sure are becoming increasingly bankrupt.
The “grand clinical trial” of medicating an entire nation and observing the results has proven quite conclusively that drugs and surgery do not produce a healthy nation. That’s the one drug trial they will never report, of course: While people suffer from sky-high rates of degenerative disease, depression, obesity and chemical intoxication, the drug companies hilariously try to convince people they’re somehow getting healthier by popping patented pills.
But the results speak for themselves: Big Pharma is a big lie, and the people pushing the Big Pharma agenda are, themselves, some of the most dishonest and despicable human beings to ever walk the planet.
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that if the entire drug industry shut down tomorrow, and all the doctors went on strike, and all the oncologists overdosed on chemotherapy and died, the health of the population would immediately improve.
Modern medicine has become the enemy of good health, and those who advocate drugs and surgery have become well-paid destroyers of lives. We would all be better off simply abandoning nearly all of modern medicine and advocating nutrition, exercise, sunlight and the avoidance of man-made synthetic chemicals.
More on the Madoof or Mad_Dog of Big Pharma
Over the past 12 years, anesthesiologist Scott Reuben revolutionized the way physicians provide pain relief to patients undergoing orthopedic surgery for everything from torn ligaments to worn-out hips. Now, the profession is in shambles after an investigation revealed that at least 21 of Reuben’s papers were pure fiction, and that the pain drugs he touted in them may have slowed postoperative healing.
“We are talking about millions of patients worldwide, where postoperative pain management has been affected by the research findings of Dr. Reuben,” says Steven Shafer, editor in chief of the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia, which published 10 of Reuben’s fraudulent papers.
Paul White, another editor at the journal, estimates that Reuben’s studies led to the sale of billions of dollars worth of the potentially dangerous drugs known as COX2 inhibitors, Pfizer’s Celebrex (celecoxib) and Merck’s Vioxx (rofecoxib), for applications whose therapeutic benefits are now in question. Reuben was a member of Pfizer’s speaker’s bureau and received five independent research grants from the company. The editors do not believe patients were significantly harmed by the short-term use of these COX2 inhibitors for pain management but they say it’s possible the therapy may have prolonged recovery periods.
Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., began investigating Reuben’s findings last May after its chief academic officer, Hal Jenson, discovered during a routine audit that Reuben had not received approval from the hospital’s review board to conduct two of his studies. Reuben “violated the trust of Baystate, the community and science,” Jenson says. The story of the investigation was first reported by Anesthesiology News late last month.
Beginning in 2000, Reuben, in his now-discredited research, attempted to convince orthopedic surgeons to shift from the first generation of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) to the newer, proprietary COX2 inhibitors, such as Vioxx, Celebrex, and Pfizer’s Bextra (valdecoxib). He claimed that using such drugs in combination with the Pfizer anticonvulsant Neurontin (gabapentin), and later Lyrica (pregabalin), prior to and during surgery could be effective in decreasing postoperative pain and reduce the use of addictive painkillers, such as morphine, during recovery. A 2007 editorial in Anesthesia & Analgesia stated that Reuben had been at the “forefront of redesigning pain management protocols” through his “carefully planned” and “meticulously documented” studies.
In 2004, Vioxx and Bextra were pulled from the market because of their link to an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes, leaving Pfizer’s Celebrex as the only COX2 inhibitor available. Celebrex sales plunged 40 percent after a study that same year suggesting that it, too, posed a heart attack risk. Despite this, Reuben continued to present “findings” in research funded by Pfizer that trumpeted Celebrex’s alleged benefits and downplayed its potential negative side effects.
The question is: Why did it take 12 years before a “routine audit” revealed Reuben’s widespread data fabrication? “Baystate publishes about 200 [studies] every year, and of those [articles], the audit rate might only be 5 percent,”
Read my post on Vioxx
Vioxx: How an insider exposed the flaws of the FDA and how these flaws can cost 100,000 Americans their lives
A Lone Voice Against Vioxx:
Let me begin by describing what we found in our study, what others have found, and what this means for the American people. Prior to the approval of Vioxx, a study was performed by Merck named 090. This study found nearly a 7-fold increase in heart attack risk with low dose Vioxx. The labeling at approval said nothing about heart attack risks…. More ..
Similar Posts:
- None Found
|
|
|
|
|
 |
