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Massive medical fraud exposed --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Massive medical fraud exposed: pharmaceutical company paid doctors to
prescribe drugs and run sham clinical trials

Here's a must-read article for anyone interested in learning how the
pharmaceutical industry really operates. It's a case of aggressive
marketing gone bad, with a mixture of corrupt physicians, underhanded
payola and a near-total disregard for patient health. And yet it's
business as usual in the pharmaceutical industry: drug maker
Schering-Plough, one of the largest drug companies in the world, has
been outright bribing physicians to prescribe drugs and operate sham
clinical trials.

Here's how it would work: doctors who prescribed the drug company's
products and avoided competing drugs were paid "consulting fees" of
tens of thousands of dollars. And what kind of consulting did these
doctors do? The kind of consulting that requires nothing more than
signing a blank sheet of paper and cashing the check, of course. And
thousands of doctors participated in this criminal scam, collecting
untold sums of money in exchange for hyping Schering-Plough's
pharmaceuticals to patients. (Medical ethics, anyone?)

Doctors were paid even more money to conduct fraudulent clinical
trials that would require patients to take the drugs for twelve
months
at a time, which of course rang up even more drug profits for the
manufacturer and resulted in more kickbacks to the doctors. That's
right: they're literally playing doctor with your life while
pocketing
the drug money.

If all this sounds outrageous, think again: this is precisely the
kind
of criminal activity that now typifies the pharmaceutical industry
and
organized medicine in general. These companies will do anything to
make a buck, including outright bribing doctors with lavish meals,
free gifts and even trips to Hawaii and other exotic destinations,
all
under the guise of "continuing medical education" (CME) courses. It's
all a scam, and the vast majority of physicians just go right along
with it, pocketing the benefits and dosing up their patients with
whatever drug they've been told to prescribe.

I've seen it myself: a room-full of doctors in Hawaii, ditching a
drug
company sponsored "education" event, where airfare and hotels were
provided for free. Why were the doctors ditching the class? Because
they wanted to have fun in Hawaii, and attendance wasn't required
after the first hour. It's basically just a paid vacation scam,
courtesy of the pharmaceutical company. And it's happening every day,
right now.

Prescription drugs are so profitable -- some drugs are now sold at
more than 500,000% markup over the actual cost of their raw
ingredients -- that drug companies will do practically anything to
sell more pills. They invent fictitious diseases and urge doctors and
parents to dose their children with powerful narcotics. They conduct
fraudulent clinical trials, making sure to bury any negative results
that would show how dangerous their drugs really are. They buy the
favor of the media by pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into
magazine, television, newspaper and online advertising. They pressure
the FDA into delaying the ban on extremely dangerous drugs in order
to
squeeze out another twelve months of profits even while patients are
dying from drug-induced liver failure.

And the scam works: drug profits are up. Way up. Meanwhile, the
American people are sicker than ever. Drugs aren't helping the
population at large, all they're doing is turning the United States
into a nation of chemical zombies who suffer from the extremely toxic
side effects of taking dozens of prescriptions in combination.

It's the greatest con in American history. It's the racket of the
millennium. The drug companies are running the show, cutting off
drugs
from Canada, monopolizing the U.S. market, running the FDA, bribing
doctors and killing patients all the while. Even based on statistics
from conventional medicine, prescription drugs are right now killing
100,000 Americans each year and injuring another two million. And
that
doesn't count the tens of thousands of additional deaths caused by
NSAIDs and over-the-counter painkillers.

It's not an exaggeration to call this a medical holocaust. These drug
companies seem determined to dose the entire population with as many
simultaneous prescriptions as possible, as long as it generates
profits for their shareholders. Business ethics are nowhere to be
found in the pharmaceutical industry these days: it's all about
money,
profits, power and control.

And the funny part about all this is that these drugs are almost
entirely unnecessary. There's not a single chronic disease that's
actually cured or reversed from any prescription drug in existence.
All these drugs do is treat symptoms and barely keep the patients
alive long enough to write another check to cover their growing
medical debt. Chemotherapy is a sham and has absolutely no scientific
merit whatsoever. (Yes, it shrinks tumors, but it adds nothing to a
patient's lifespan.) Statin drugs are a con, and yet they're being
over-prescribed for all sorts of chronic disorders that actually need
to be treated with nutrition and exercise, not drugs. And
over-the-counter drugs are both extremely dangerous and highly
ineffective. NSAIDs kill some 40,000 patients each year from
intestinal bleeding -- and yet offer no real benefit to patients that
couldn't be achieved from simple changes in diet and exercise.

The FDA, meanwhile, watches all this and focuses its own efforts on
discrediting herbal supplements like ephedra. The agency seems
determined to outlaw or regulate all nutritional supplements, thereby
making vitamins illegal and practically guaranteeing another decade
of
outrageous profits for drug companies. It's no surprise: most FDA
employees used to work for drug companies (or plan to in the near
future). Many FDA employees maintain strong financial ties to the
pharmaceutical industry. They're simply out to crush the natural
health industry and thereby boost their own personal profits from
pharmaceuticals.

Modern medicine is in shambles, folks. It's a train wreck. We're
sicker, fatter and more depressed than ever. And the really good
advice that people need isn't reaching them. Good health is really
simple, it turns out. Get lots of natural sunlight on your skin
daily.
Eat superfoods like chlorella and spirulina. Avoid all refined
carbohydrates and processed foods. Ban soft drinks from your life.
Never touch cigarettes. Pick up strength training, yoga, pilates,
cycling, jogging or some other physical exercise activity. And
breathe, people. Breathe consciously. Your body needs oxygen. Learn
how to put yourself in control of your own health: read Take Back
Your
Health Power!

In a way, the massive fraud now being exposed in western medicine is
a
blessing in disguise. Big Medicine has gone so far over the top with
aggressive marketing and downright evil (if not criminal) tactics
that
the whole profiteering orgy is going to come crashing down on them.
Big Medicine will soon be history -- remembered as just a moment of
insanity in the history of modern civilization. Some day, people will
say, "Do you remember when the whole country was dosed up on
chemicals?" They'll shudder with the thought of it -- how we were all
duped by the drug companies, by our family doctors, and by the Bush
Administration's complicity in the whole scheme. They'll ask, "How
could an entire country go mad like this?"

And the answer, of course, is that the whole country was doped up on
prescription drugs that alter brain chemistry, cloud the mind, and
turn ordinary consumers into pill-popping zombies.

It was a brilliant scam. It generated billions of dollars in profits.
And now the truth is starting to come out: Big Medicine is about to
become another sad chapter in the history of human deception. Good
riddance.

Highly recommended reading: Death By Medicine by Gary Null, Ph.D.

Now, here's the full article on prescription drug bribery originally
published by the New York Times, included here for educational and
discussion purposes only, under fair use consideration.

Printable version of this article

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Overview:

* As Doctors Write Prescriptions, Drug Company Writes a Check

The check for $10,000 arrived in the mail unsolicited. The
doctor who received it from the drug maker Schering-Plough said it
was
made out to him personally in exchange for an attached "consulting"
agreement that required nothing other than his commitment to
prescribe
the company's medicines. Two other physicians said in separate
interviews that they, too, received checks unbidden from
Schering-Plough, one of the world's biggest drug companies.

"I threw mine away," said the first doctor, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because of concern about being drawn into a
federal inquiry into the matter.

Those checks and others, some of them said to be for six-figure
sums, are under investigation by federal prosecutors in Boston as
part
of a broad government crackdown on the drug industry's marketing
tactics. Just about every big global drug company — including Johnson
& Johnson, Wyeth and Bristol-Myers Squibb — has disclosed in
securities filings that it has received a federal subpoena, and most
are juggling subpoenas stemming from several investigations.

The details of the Schering-Plough tactics, gleaned from
interviews with 20 doctors, as well as industry executives and people
close to the investigation, shed light on the shadowy system of
financial lures that pharmaceutical companies have used to persuade
physicians to favor their drugs.

Schering-Plough's tactics, these people said, included paying
doctors large sums to prescribe its drug for hepatitis C and to take
part in company-sponsored clinical trials that were little more than
thinly disguised marketing efforts that required little effort on the
doctors' part. Doctors who demonstrated disloyalty by testing other
company's drugs, or even talking favorably about them, risked being
barred from the Schering-Plough money stream.

Schering-Plough says that the activities under investigation
occurred before its new chief executive, Fred Hassan, arrived in
April
2003, and that it has overhauled its marketing to eliminate
inducements.

At the heart of the various investigations into drug industry
marketing is the question of whether drug companies are persuading
doctors — often through payoffs — to prescribe drugs that patients do
not need or should not use or for which there may be cheaper
alternatives. Investigators are also seeking to determine whether the
companies are manipulating prices to cheat the federal Medicaid and
Medicare health programs. Most of the big drug companies, meanwhile,
are also grappling with a welter of suits filed by state attorneys
general, industry whistle-blowers and patient-rights groups over
similar accusations.

In many ways, the investigations are a response to the evolution
of the pharmaceutical business, which has grown in the last
quarter-century from a small group of companies peddling a few
antibiotics and antianxiety remedies to a $400 billion bemoth that is
among the most profitable industries on earth.

Offering treatments for almost any affliction and facing
competition in which each percentage point of market share can
represent tens of millions of dollars, most drug makers now spend
twice as much marketing medicines as they do researching them. Their
sales teams have changed from a scattering of semiretired pharmacists
to armies of young women and men who shower physicians with
attention,
food and - until the drug industry recently agreed to end the
practice
- expensive gifts, just to get two to three minutes to pitch their
wares. A code of conduct adopted in 1990 by the American Medical
Association suggests that doctors should not accept any gift worth
more than $100, but the guidelines are widely ignored.

A quarter-century ago, the Food and Drug Administration was the
lone cop on the drug industry beat. But the F.D.A.'s enforcement
powers over drug marketing have been severely curbed since 1976 by a
series of court rulings based mainly on the companies' free-speech
rights. That left a vacuum that many companies decided to exploit,
said William Vodra, a former F.D.A. lawyer.

"A lot of people decided there was no check on what they were
allowed to do," Mr. Vodra said. Using fraud, kickback and antitrust
statutes, federal prosecutors, state attorneys general and plaintiffs
lawyers stepped into the void, asserting that the companies' sales
pitches have cost the government billions of dollars in payments for
drug benefits.

This legal scrutiny can be expected to intensify. Once the new
Medicare drug benefit takes full effect in 2006, the government will
pay for almost half of all medicines sold in the nation. So the
marketing programs will cost the government even more money and, if
they are uncovered and determined to be illegal, will probably result
in even larger fines.

Last month, Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million and pleaded guilty
to criminal charges involving the marketing of the pain drug
Nuerontin
by the company's Warner-Lambert unit. AstraZeneca paid $355 million
last year and TAP Pharmaceuticals paid $875 million in 2001; each
pleaded guilty to criminal charges of fraud for inducing physicians
to
bill the government for some drugs that the company gave the doctors
free.

Over the last two years, Schering-Plough, which had sales of
$8.33 billion last year, has set aside a total of $500 million to
cover its legal problems - mainly for expected fines from the Boston
investigation and from a separate inquiry by federal prosecutors in
Philadelphia who are investigating whether Schering-Plough
overcharged
Medicaid.

Besides looking into whether Schering-Plough paid doctors large
sums to prescribe the company's drug for hepatitis C, prosecutors are
investigating whether many company-sponsored clinical trials for the
drug were simply another way to funnel money to doctors.

Dr. Chris Pappas, director of clinical research for St. Luke's
Texas Liver Institute in Houston, said that Schering-Plough "flooded
the market with pseudo-trials."

Dr. Pappas and eight other liver specialists who were
interviewed say the system worked like this: Schering-Plough paid
physicians $1,000 to $1,500 per patient for prescribing Intron A, the
company's hepatitis C treatment. In conventional clinical trials,
participants are given drugs free, but the doctors said that in these
cases the patients or insurers paid for their medication. Because
patients usually undergo Intron A treatment for nearly a year and the
therapy costs thousands of dollars, Schering-Plough's payments to
physicians left plenty of room for the company to profit handsomely,
the doctors said.

In return for the fees, physicians were supposed to collect data
on their patients' progress and pass it along to Schering-Plough, the
doctors said. But many physicians were not diligent about their
recordkeeping, and the company did little to insist on accurate data,
according to Dr. Pappas and the others.

One of the nation's most prominent liver disease specialists,
who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of angering big drug
makers, called the trials "purely marketing gimmicks."

"Science and marketing should not be mixed like that," the
doctor said.

Schering-Plough did more than encourage physicians to place
patients on Intron A, many of the physicians said. They said the
company would remove any doctor from its clinical program - and shut
off the money spigot - if he or she wrote prescriptions for competing
drugs, participated in clinical trials of alternatives to Intron A or
even spoke favorably about treatments besides Intron A.

The main competitor to Intron A, which Schering-Plough now sells
as Peg-Intron, is Roche's comparably priced drug Pegasys.

Dr. Donald Jensen, the hepatology director at Rush University
Medical Center in Chicago, said he wanted to perform clinical trials
using drugs from both Schering-Plough and Roche. "I was told by
Schering-Plough that I couldn't do both - that I had to sign an
exclusive agreement with them," Dr. Jensen said. "That was the
juncture when Schering and I parted ways."

Six specialists in liver disease said Schering-Plough also paid
what it called consulting fees to doctors to keep them loyal to the
company's products. The letter accompanying a check for $10,000
explained that the money was for consulting services that were
detailed on an accompanying "Schedule A," said a doctor who insisted
on anonymity. But when the doctor turned to the attached sheet, he
said, "Schedule A" were the only words printed on an otherwise blank
sheet of paper.

Dr. Pappas, who in the past has consulted for Schering-Plough
and worked for Roche, said that stories about the enormous sums that
Schering-Plough paid its consultants were common among liver
specialists. "These were very high-value consulting agreements with
selected opinion leaders that looked like payments of money with no
clear agreements on what was supposed to be executed," Dr. Pappas
said.

In an interview, Mr. Hassan and other top executives declined to
discuss past marketing practices. Richard Kogan, the company's
previous chairman and chief executive, declined to be interviewed.

Schering-Plough's current management says that much has changed
at the company since Mr. Hassan took over. The company no longer
allows sales representatives or marketing executives to have any say
over its clinical trials, physician education or medical consulting,
they said. And in all clinical trials begun in the last year, they
said, drugs have been provided free to the enrolled patients, rather
than being billed to them or their insurers.

"The temptation to give clinical grants to high prescribers and
consulting agreements to high prescribers is why we pulled those
decisions out of the hands of the sales representatives," said Brent
Saunders, who was named senior vice president for compliance and
business practices last year. "Sales representatives had an input
into
that process before, which I think is still fairly normal in the
industry."

In the separate Philadelphia investigation, Schering-Plough is
expected to plead guilty soon to charges that it failed to provide
Medicaid with its lowest drug prices, as is required by law, and to
pay a fine. Investigators are examining whether Schering-Plough, to
gain sales with some private insurers, offered premiums, such as free
patient consulting arrangements, with its drugs. Prosecutors are
arguing that such incentives had a market value and meant that
Schering-Plough was offering drugs to private payers at prices well
below those offered to Medicaid. Many other drug companies are the
targets of similar inquiries.

The Boston inquiry into suspected kickbacks and improper
marketing by Schering-Plough could take months more to resolve,
people
close to the investigation say. Schering-Plough may also be charged
with obstruction of justice and document destruction as part of the
Boston inquiry, according to the company's filings with securities
regulators.

Industry experts say the federal inquiries into Schering-Plough
and the other drug giants have led some companies to adopt
significant
changes in the way they peddle drugs to doctors. Other companies have
been slower to react. "These investigations came out of left field,
and no one saw them coming," said Peter Barton Hutt, a former F.D.A.
general counsel who now advises drug companies. "The industry has
since had to reshape entirely what they are doing, but it was too
late
to redo what they'd been doing for years."

Tony Farino, leader of the pharmaceutical consulting service at
PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that as a result of the investigations
many companies in the drug industry were hiring executives to police
marketing and sales practices.

"Reputational risk is something they're all trying to manage,"
Mr. Farino said, "because the damages from failure can be
significant."

Source: http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/...gi?ArtNum=55366

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About the author:
Author Mike Adams is a holistic nutritionist with over 4,000 hours of
study on nutrition, wellness, food toxicology and the true causes of
disease and health. He is well versed on nutritional and lifestyle
therapies for weight loss and disease prevention / reversal. View
Adams' health statistics showing LDL cholesterol of 67 and
outstanding blood chemistry.

Adams uses no prescription drugs whatsoever and
relies exclusively on natural health, nutrition and exercise to
achieve optimum health.

Adams' books include the Seven Laws of
Nutrition, The Five Soft Drink Monsters and Superfoods For Optimum
Health. In his spare time, Adams engages in pilates, cycling,
strength
training, gymnastics and comedy improve training. In the technology
industry, Adams is president and CEO of a well known email marketing
software company.
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