This is a must read article from the New York Review of Books. Maybe someone should forward it to Mayor Bloomberg, himself the head of a large corporation with its accompanying influence.
This almost deserves its own thread but it speaks to the 'certainty' with which Mayor Bloomberg asserts his understanding of the health decisions of millions of people he knows nothing about. Those 'medical experts' he's been listening to apparently don't always know best.
The author:
Marcia Angell is a Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. Her latest book is The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.
(April 2012)
Some choice quotes from this long read:
Quote:
|
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.
|
Quote:
|
No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top 9 U.S.-based drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year in North America alone.By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.
|
Now I realize that a drug company would likely be in favor of selling formula to mothers instead of encouraging breast feeding in this case, but the overall point is that political leaders cannot trust even top university medical researchers to produce objective studies in the current climate of corporate influence on medicine.
When the former head of the New England Journal of Medicine tells you to trust your gut over the latest fashionable study, it makes you wonder how politicians can legislate choices away from patients with any kind of conscience.
Read the rest:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...of-corruption/