..."But it was really the internet that allowed public health activists to do an
end run around GSK's and the medical authorities' denials of the drug's risks.
An explosion of websites dedicated to vivid accounts of antidepressant reactions
told these campaigners about hundreds of thousands affected by a problem that
officially did not exist.
The internet was 'groaning with evidence'; over time, the 'cover-up became more
obvious as the weight of scientific evidence got stronger and public protest
grew'. Those are quotations from a magisterial history and analysis of the
antidepressant crisis by two leading campaigners, Charles Medawar and Anita
Hardon, in
Medicines Out of Control?, a new book recommended by the Lancet as essential
reading for members of the parliamentary committee examining pharma influence on
health policy, whose hearings began last week.
As critical to the pharmas' outing as the raw data on the internet was this
medium's capacity for handling complexity - at the speed of firing neurons."...
Like the printed press, and now the net which the vested interests inadvertently
let slip has now become the primary chink in their armour. This is are our Ace.
We need to exploit it exponentially and move the yard sticks forward.
Robin's Internet Communication Agent
Initiative, of which I am a proud member, is exactly the type of Internet
tool that is designed to turn the tables on the vested interests - it is
gratifying to see validation on this effort - thus making this whole endeavor
worthwhile.
See also:
Re: If Content Wants To Be Free, How Can I Be Sustainable Robin?
Chris Gupta
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2004/09/28/big_pharma_snared_by_net.htm
PS: Thanks to Peter Helgason - a lead council member of
Friends of Freedom organization
(worthy of our support) for bringing attention to the following. CG
--------------------------------------------
Big Pharma snared by net
The web has helped consumers turn tables on the drug giants, says Cheryll
Barron
Cheryll Barron
Sunday September 26, 2004
The Observer
What if ants could turn the microscopes on the scientists studying them and,
after beady-eyed surveillance, demand a revolution in their scrutinisers'
accustomed ways?
This is more than a variation on Lilliputians for a new Jonathan Swift to
consider; it's a metaphor for a real-life reversal of multinational power that
has no precedent.
Management tomes of the late 1990s - like Bill Gates's droning Business, the
Speed of Thought - explained how the internet might be used to study customer
behaviour minutely, through, for instance, 'data mining'. Companies, they said,
could use the intimate understanding so acquired to address customers' needs and
preferences, on the companies' terms.
What no one foresaw was the shocking extent to which the internet would change
the terms of trade between corporations and society. Certainly not that one of
the world's largest drug companies, which is among the richest and most
influential industries of all time, would be the first victim of the shift.
The crisis that began the containment of pharma power is a runaway rate of drug
injury. In England alone, reactions to drugs that led to hospitalisation
followed by death are estimated at 5,700 a year and could actually be closer to
10,000, according to a study in The British Medical Journal in July. The
researchers reckon that adverse drug reactions are costing the NHS £466m a year.
Drug injury has been worrying experts for decades. But after the thalidomide
tragedies of the 1950s, the subject failed to catch fire for politicians and the
public until the recent antidepressant controversy. Last month, that debate made
headlines when Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, the world's second-largest pharma,
denied any wrongdoing, but agreed to pay $2.5m to settle a lawsuit filed by the
State of New York accusing it of fraud for concealing evidence of its
antidepressant Seroxat's potential for harming children, while doing them no
measurable good.
In a sequel last week, a group of about two dozen American parents sued GSK
seeking refunds for treatment of their children with the drug.
The GSK suit created the tipping point in the pharmas' change of fortune and has
revealed the force behind it. The formal complaint drew heavily on research by
public health campaigners and consumer advocates about the hazards of
antidepressant use. These activists had toiled in deepest obscurity - some of
them, for a decade - until their discoveries were featured on a Panorama
programme, 'Secrets of Seroxat', in autumn 2002. A follow-up broadcast the next
spring, 'Emails from the edge', analysed 1,370 messages from viewers about the
first programme, mostly from people reporting antidepressant withdrawal
reactions including shock-like sensations in their heads, and thoughts about
self-mutilation, violence and suicide.
The outcry that followed forced GSK to make a stunning admission. In June 2003,
it corrected its prescribing instructions for Seroxat, revising its estimate of
the risk of withdrawal symptoms from one in 500 to one in four.
Infinitely more frightening than that reluctant confirmation of a drug's
potential for harm was that in the years GSK spent denying it, this pharma had
the backing of institutions that we, the public, rely on to protect us from
poisoning by prescription. The Royal College of Psychiatrists had insisted only
a year earlier that 'there is no evidence that antidepressant drugs can cause
dependence syndromes'; a patient information leaflet approved by a regulatory
body also said as much.
The events that led to Seroxat's exposure would seem to suggest that it was
television power that forced GSK to recant. But it was really the internet that
allowed public health activists to do an end run around GSK's and the medical
authorities' denials of the drug's risks. An explosion of websites dedicated to
vivid accounts of antidepressant reactions told these campaigners about hundreds
of thousands affected by a problem that officially did not exist.
The internet was 'groaning with evidence'; over time, the 'cover-up became more
obvious as the weight of scientific evidence got stronger and public protest
grew'. Those are quotations from a magisterial history and analysis of the
antidepressant crisis by two leading campaigners, Charles Medawar and Anita
Hardon, in Medicines Out of Control?, a new book recommended by the Lancet as
essential reading for members of the parliamentary committee examining pharma
influence on health policy, whose hearings began last week.
As critical to the pharmas' outing as the raw data on the internet was this
medium's capacity for handling complexity - at the speed of firing neurons. Mood
medicines are arguably even more complicated than computers. Software's
complexity is largely restricted to the science behind it, and to products and
their intermeshing with other products. Pills have extra intricacies that follow
from variations in formulations of the same types of drugs, in the range of
possible reactions, some of them subtle, in patients - even to different doses,
in the same person - and consequences not just from interactions with other
drugs but with non-pharmaceutical treatment and lifestyle aspects such as diet.
Health campaigners trying to decide what the pharmas could reasonably be blamed
for shared vast stores of data about such complexities by - among other means -
encyclopaedic technical postings on their websites. Some of these sites also
feature open access to years of correspondence between the activists and
regulatory officials and pharma executives. Postings like these have allowed
rapid international co-ordination between the campaigners.
Pharmas bent on redeeming their reputations have suddenly begun to use the
internet to publish what they once fought for the right to conceal. GSK's first
notable response to the filing of the recent lawsuit was to start posting both
negative and positive findings from drug tests on its web site. But it is far
from the only pharma with a history of secretiveness about trials, and at least
three of its rivals have copied its turnabout, with Eli Lilly and Merck making
the most radical moves towards transparency.
Even top-ranking pharma executives might not yet grasp that this is only the
start of a progressive stripping away of power. They could do worse than
adopt for a model Gulliver, who reacted to his entrapment by the Lilliputians
with a 'promise of honour', for fear that the showers of tiny arrows his captors
used to disable him might be far from the worst they could do.
Bitter pills
Bit by bit, health activists in Britain and America have uncovered the core of
pharma might: a sinister mesh of hidden influences in the regulation and
practice of medicine that is painstakingly dissected in Medicines Out of
Control? by Charles Medawar and Anita Hardon.
In both countries, clinical drug tests are paid for by the pharmas, who tweak
the trials' design for the best possible results. Until recently, only the most
favourable findings got published in the 20,000-odd biomedical journals, many of
them dependent on pharmas for funding. The drugs are approved for marketing by
regulators, whose salaries are mostly financed by the subjects of their
evaluations - since pharmas pay to have their products vetted. The medicines are
then prescribed by doctors routinely courted with pharma gifts - from free pens
to family skiing holidays - meant to persuade them to change their prescribing
habits.
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