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Old 09-22-2009, 07:27 PM
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fmichael fmichael is offline
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fmichael fmichael is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: California
Posts: 1,239
15 yr Member
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Quote:
Originally Posted by allentgamer View Post
I think the insurance companies cause a lot of corruption in our government, and are in bed with the drug companies and our government. I would say that the insurance companies just love that this is happening between the FDA and IRB's.
Allen -

Your point about insurance comapnies is not at all off topic. One of the fundamental principles of modern "democracy" is that only when big money is evenly balanced on both sides of the equation - in our case, it's the insurance cos. vs. Big Pharma - is there any chance of a just result. As such, where you've got a generic drug with no money to speak of behind it, administered through expensive ICU stays, guess who wins?

And in terms of tricks of the trade, there's one area that has received no attention that I can find, and that is the possibility of medical ghostwriting on behalf of the insurance industry. This, while the practice of medical ghostwriting by drug companies is being increasingly well documented. See, Medical Ghostwriting, Wikipedia. ("A [September 11,] 2009 NYTs article estimated that 11% of New England Journal of Medicine articles, 8% of JAMA, Lancet and PLoS Medicine articles, 5% of Annals of Internal Medicine articles and 2% of Nature Medicine were ghost written.") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ghostwriter

Where I see the specific possibility for mischief by the insurance industry is in the context of "review articles" concluding that not enough work has been done to accept an apparently expensive therapy as a proven treatment, even though there have been serveral promising smaller studies, and everyone knows there's no money behind the drug to support large scale multi-center double blind testing, simply because there are not "enough" people for whom the treatment might be useful so as to secure an NIH grant. Moreover, in this specific regard, I have been reliably advised that even if a patent is still in place with years to run, many drug cos. are reluctant to provide even free samples let alone fund a study looking for a new "application" of an already approved drug for what is basically a small target audiance, lest the researchers turn up a pattern of side effect that didn't emerge when the drug was initially tested on carefully selected groups without those pesky "co-morbidities."

For one such suspect review article, this one on Pamidromate iv infusions (or in my case Zometa) as a treatment for CRPS - as opposed to the much larger market of multiple myeloma patients - check out the last paragraph of my August 30th post (#12) at http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...d.php?p=561135

Time will tell.

Mike

Last edited by fmichael; 09-23-2009 at 02:32 AM. Reason: adding coherence to 2nd paragraph
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