The Many Faces of Big Pharma’s Disease Mongering

[babylonsister]

The Many Faces of Big Pharma’s Disease Mongering
by Martha Rosenberg


Most people blame Big Pharma and the docs in its pocket for elevating everyday anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disease and childhood behavior problems to major psychiatric diseases.

But there are others to thank for the national pathology of creating and treating diseases that aren’t even there.

There’s the 200 US medical education and communication companies (MECCs) who ghostwrite journal articles for Big Pharma–”just sign here, Doc; we’ve reviewed the data”–for $20,000 to $40,000 per article.

Like Complete Healthcare Communications (CHC) whose phalanx of 40 medical writers, editors and librarians has submitted over 500 manuscripts to journals for clients Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis, Wyeth, Schering-Plough and AstraZeneca according to its promotional materials, with an acceptance rate of 80 percent.

And the MECC which wrote up the Merck-designed and paid for Vioxx trials less the death data which ran in Annals of Internal Medicine first author of the Advantage study Jeffrey Lisse recounts to the New York Times.

And of course there are the medical journals themselves which can make $450,000 off one article reprint as Big Pharma disseminates its messages under their masthead (”look, Doc–it says RIGHT HERE”) and untold ad page revenues.


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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/05/5622/