“Self-Serving” Research and Scientific Ethics…
By Ralph Fucetola JD – President, Institute for Health Freedom
The US Health Care system is in shambles. Revising or repealing ObamaCare, by making the US system less costly, is only one of the issues, and not the main one.
Our US health care system is paying for expensive nonsense (chemotherapy, Statin Drugs, vaccines, mammograms, etc) , that has little, or no validity, and does NOT improve health. Worse, is that what DOES work, and is far less costly, is suppressed.
One of the problems is that the “science” system we rely on to make decisions on what works, and what doesn’t work, is a bad joke, controlled by Big Pharma.
The “Science” bad joke…
Let’s start in 2015 with the then editor of The Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton[1]
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” Dr. Richard Horton[1]
There’s More…
But that’s not the only editor of a prestigious medical journal who has pointed to the obvious problems with the way “science is done” in the globalized economy.
Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ) opined:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”[1]
These science scholars, seeing the problem from the perspective of the responsible parties in science journal world, decry the lack of real science being reported.
How did the science become so distorted? What structural conditions have contributed to this sorry state of affairs?
There is a lawyers’ secret that may explain what happened to the science, especially with regard to health care. Let’s call it the “Crony Corp Square Dance.” It’s a way of dancing around legal restrictions.
The dance goes like this:
Step One… do-si-do to the market researchers and find a potentially profitable medical condition.
Step Two… identify a patentable chemical that suppresses symptoms of the condition.
Step Three… run a pilot study on the so-called “afflicted” as Dr. Horton notes by the panoply of crony conflicts. Repeat as clinical trials. Remember to remove anyone who dies during treatment, since they didn’t complete the experiment.
Step Four… apply for a Patent based on the “sanitized” crony clinical trials.
Step Five… apply to FDA for drug approval based on the approved Patent claims.