Wood Goblin wrote: Plenty of trails happen without Big Pharma funding. The CDC, NIH, NIAID, WHO, US Army, etc. fund trials, not to mention academic societies and universities.

Okay, put all them on the blame list ahead of the patients also. Also,please don't suggest that 'plenty' of trials happen without Big Pharm funding, either. Saying 'plenty' verges on suggesting that a majority of them are not big pharm funded.

According to a June 2006 Agence France-Presse (AFP) article, private drug companies finance 75 percent of the studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet in Britain.

Do the math. That's a lot of potential bias.

According to this PDF from the U.S. Senate, 43% of biomedical research in the U.S. is funded by nonprofit organizations:

The federal government, mainly through the NIH, funds about 36 percent of all biomedical research in the United States. Nonprofit organizations fund about 7 percent, and private industry funds about 57 percent.

clocker bob wrote:

Wood Goblin wrote: Plenty of trails happen without Big Pharma funding. The CDC, NIH, NIAID, WHO, US Army, etc. fund trials, not to mention academic societies and universities.

Okay, put all them on the blame list ahead of the patients also. Also,please don't suggest that 'plenty' of trials happen without Big Pharm funding, either. Saying 'plenty' verges on suggesting that a majority of them are not big pharm funded.

According to a June 2006 Agence France-Presse (AFP) article, private drug companies finance 75 percent of the studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet in Britain.

Do the math. That's a lot of potential bias.

That's also just three journals--three journals out of (literally) thousands. (Granted, they are the three biggest journals.) Look, I'm not going to argue that Big Pharma doesn't fund a lot of research--clearly, they do. There have also been huge scandals in medical publishing re: the role that the industry has taken in writing articles or presenting data (as well as subsequent safeguards that have been put in place to limit the industry's interference, but those don't appear to interest you).

For the hell of it, I thumbed through the most recent issue of the journal I work on. Of the 17 studies published, 15 either received no funding or funding from non-industry sources (e.g., academic societies, government agencies, etc.), 1 study received funding from a drug company, and 1 study received a study drug for free from a pharma company.

My "research" is hardly academic, of course; it's anecdotal. I cite it only to make the point that a great deal of incredibly valuable research is being conducted without interference from the pharaceutical industry. Believe it or not, there are doctors out there who are interested in curing and treating diseases. I know! Who wouldda thunk it?

Mark Hansen wrote: but wouldn't a low cost, reasonably safe treatment like the use of Vitamin C be encouraged by health insurance companies (which, by the way, I have no love for either) as a way to keep their costs down?

Whoa. Hold on. 'their costs'??? The cost of health insurance is the cost borne by the health insurance customer. They're our costs, and their profits. Their job is to sell us insurance, which is a loan: it allows us to be able to pay a big medical bill all at once, and in return for the coverage ( loan ), we pay them premiums which include interest. They let us pay slowly and they pay the hospitals quickly, and the difference between what they collect from us and what they pay the hospitals is their profit.

Where do you see the insurance company motive for cheap alternative medicine replacing corporate medicine? That breaks the circuit. The insurance companies have no interest in healthy people who get healthy cheaply without using corporate med, because that reduces rates. Insurance companies make the most money off people who suffer from long, protracted illnesses or catastrophic illnesses, like cancer, because an abundance of such people in society escalates the insurance rates for all of us. People that eat right and exercise and live without constant health care problems into old age are poison to health insurers and corporate med.

Come on, Mark. The insurance companies and the health care industry have two enemies:

Healthy people.

People who get healthy without buying their products.

What you are suggesting is sort of like suggesting that the banks would be happy if fellow citizens banded together into groups to share their savings and promote business using internally-generated money the way many Koreans do, reducing the demand for credit from the interest-charging banks.

Are you going to tell me next that the funeral home industry would back a secret potion that let people live forever?

No question about it; drug companies can unduly influence studies. What do alternative health practitioners do to avoid biases and ulterior motives based on profit, etc?

Wood Goblin wrote:(Granted, they are the three biggest journals.)

Dr. John Abramson, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and author of the critical 2004 book, "Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine," said in an op-ed piece he wrote in January 2006 for the Los Angeles Times: "Before 1980, most medical studies were publicly funded, and most academic researchers scorned industry support. Now, however, the vast majority of clinical trials are commercially funded, and with the financial stakes so high, there is mounting evidence of individual scientists and corporations manipulating their findings."

Please accept that the majority of published trials are pharm funded.

newberry wrote:No question about it; drug companies can unduly influence studies. What do alternative health practitioners do to avoid biases and ulterior motives based on profit, etc?

Simple. They have a millionth of the Big Pharm profits, so they have a millionth of the influence over doctors, journals, media, newscasters, and politicans.

Your argument is psycho. It's like you're suggesting that solar energy companies and the petroleum companies have equal sway over politicians.

I didn't make an argument; I asked a question. I never said that the supplement/alternative health industry had the same influence as "big pharma."

clocker bob wrote:Please accept that the majority of published trials are pharm funded.

Clearly they are. Clearly that has affected the quality in the past. When did I state otherwise?

Please accept that industry funding does not equal bad research. Please accept that publishers continue to fight industry's influence in the process. Let me know if you want to know how they do that.

newberry wrote:I didn't make an argument; I asked a question. I never said that the supplement/alternative health industry had the same influence as "big pharma."

You are suggesting that alternative medicine is just as much of a threat to the health care consumer as corporate medicine. You do that by answering every post critical of big pharm with a post by you critical of alternative medicine. Do you not understand that people have examined the scale of influence, found that big pharm is the bigger threat, and decided to focus on big pharm? What are you not seeing? People who criticize big pharm more have decided to criticize big pharm more. They have made the call for themselves. All you do is tug at their ankle and say, "Look, look! Alternative medicine bad, too!". Get over yourself. It's not that we're not listening to you, it's that we think your insistence that alternative medicine be examined as intently as big pharm is an annoying waste of time, and totally biased.

Corporate medicine can buy more good public relations and many more rigged trials and many more journal articles and many more advertisements.

Alternative medicine cannot be an equal threat to the health care consumer.

OKAY?

Your tired crusade is just that: tired. You have one response to criticism of Big Pharm: you say that there are reasons not to trust alternative medicine either. When it is pointed out to you that big pharm holds the lion's share of influence, you claim that you never said it didn't. If you know that big pharm is worse, why do you ploddingly try and redirect scrutiny of big pharm onto a different industry? Why are you trying to swat hornets when a shark is devouring your legs?