HARLOT Plc: An Amalgamation Of The World's Two Oldest Professions

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This perversion is such an open secret that in 2003 the British Medical Journal published a tongue-in-cheek essay instructing researchers in the fine art of “HARLOT—How to Achieve positive Results without actually Lying to Overcome the Truth.” David L. Sackett, director of Ontario’s Trout Research and Education Center, and Andrew D. Oxman, director of the Department of Health Services Research at Norway’s Directorate for Health and Social Welfare, wittily summarized strategies by which drugmakers use clinical trials to tart up drugs that are poorly performing, dangerous, or both.

HARLOT plc: an amalgamation of the world's two oldest professions

Citation from DarkPharma http://www.darkpharma.nl/uploads/7/3/2/8/7328594/flacking_for_big_pharma.pdf

Opinions please!
 

haidut

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This perversion is such an open secret that in 2003 the British Medical Journal published a tongue-in-cheek essay instructing researchers in the fine art of “HARLOT—How to Achieve positive Results without actually Lying to Overcome the Truth.” David L. Sackett, director of Ontario’s Trout Research and Education Center, and Andrew D. Oxman, director of the Department of Health Services Research at Norway’s Directorate for Health and Social Welfare, wittily summarized strategies by which drugmakers use clinical trials to tart up drugs that are poorly performing, dangerous, or both.

HARLOT plc: an amalgamation of the world's two oldest professions

Citation from DarkPharma http://www.darkpharma.nl/uploads/7/3/2/8/7328594/flacking_for_big_pharma.pdf

Opinions please!

Great find, thanks for sharing!
Couple of things that stood out when I was reading it.

1) One of the techniques Big Pharma uses to conceal ineffectiveness of a chemical is this:
"...Pairing their drug with one that is known to work well. This can hide the fact that a tested medication is weak or ineffective."
Another way to look at this is also combining a new therapy that is suspected of working remarkably well with an older, approved drug and claiming that the benefits of the combination therapy are mostly due to the older drug, or at the very least cannot be ascribed to the new drug only. This approach is useful in cases where the new drug is suspected of being remarkably effective but would unmask fraud/idiocy when used on its own or debunk an old theory on which Pharma profits depend. A very recent case of using this technique was in the small human trials with testosterone treatment for prostate cancer. The studies always combined the T injections with "established" drugs like leuprolide or claimed the benefits of T were due to its conversion into estrogen when it is widely established that the prostate gland does NOT express aromatase much and produces mostly DHT, especially when provided directly (by intra-prostate injection) with a precursor such as T.
DHT Prevents Prostate Cancer And May Even Treat It
DHT Prevents Prostate Cancer And May Even Treat It


Another worrying and largely nefarious technique is the analysis of artificially created study subgroups in order to either find (non-existent) benefit for a drug the company is testing or proving the competing chemical is ineffective. Most forum users have probably seen the increasingly negative press aspirin is getting, especially when it comes to things like CVD and cancer. Well, here is one technique Big Pharma uses to "prove" aspirin is "ineffective" - by breaking down subgroups based on zodiac sign just so a group emerges for which there is either no benefit or dramatic increase in risk of side effects.
"...In 1988, he and his team analyzed the data of the International Study of Infarct Survival (ISIS-2), a real, 17,000-person clinical trial in the United Kingdom that asked whether aspirin helped people who had suffered a recent heart attack. This study found that the beneficial effect of aspirin for patients having a heart attack was quite as powerful as that of streptokinase, another effective clot-dissolving medication. But when Sleight sorted the patients’ responses by astrological subgroup, taking aspirin was associated with a good outcome for all birth signs except for Libra and Gemini, who were more likely to die when given aspirin. In 1985, another large study, ISIS-1, had found a 71 percent reduction in the death rate of people born between July 24 and August 23 (Leos), who took the beta-blocker atenolol, as compared to people of all other birth signs, who enjoyed a mortality reduction of only 24 percent. Sleight concluded with this warning: “When in a trial with a clearly positive overall result, many subgroup analyses are considered, false negative results in some particular subgroups must be expected.”"
 
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methylenewhite
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Must read there are more interesting things from the same darkpharma website
 
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