Tuesday 2 November 2010

Not Nice

I’m almost dismayed, now the Tories are back in, and she’s back in oppositional form, to find I'm agreeing with Polly. Here’s this one, pointing out that Andrew Lansley “seems to have been bowled over by a toxic combination of Daily Mail anecdotes of dying patients desperate for a few more months of life and intense lobbying by a pharmaceutical industry that has campaigned long and hard against the one body that kept NHS drug costs under a modicum of control."

Just wait for the avalanche of astroturf that follows in the comments - and if these commenters aren’t getting paid for it then really, they are missing out.

On big Pharma, two former medical journal editors, Richard Smith of the BMJ, and Marcia Angell of the New England Journal of Medicine explain the bottom line now that health has been made into Big Business and An Industry rather than diinterested scientific enquiry:

"Publishing a drug company sponsored trial rather than, say, a study of changing the built environment to increase physical activity will bring both profit and an increased impact factor. How tempting."

“it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published"

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