Doctors Paid Off By Drug Companies At Harvard
Written by admin on June 10, 2008 – 10:25 pm -Shocking evidence that those doctors that protect us are actually on-the-take has broken across the country, with the center of the investigation at the prestigious Harvard school where the Harvard Medical Journal is published.
Often, ivy-league schools such as Harvard run testing and medical trials on prescription drugs before they are released to the public or FDA for testing. This has always been a sacred cow and thought to be above refute, until three psychiatrists went under investigation at Harvard for allegedly receiving much more money from drug firms and not reporting their income accurately.
The psychiatrists in question were working on testing anti-psychotic medications on children, and the honor system that researchers work off was brought into question. If the Harvard Medical Journal is not a report that can be trusted, long seen as a standard of integrity, the question of what can be trusted is brought to light; no one is above being paid off by big pharmaceutical agencies.
Between the years 2000 and 2007, over 1.6 million dollars was received by two separate researchers at Harvard. The third psychiatrist at Harvard received over a million.
The senate has written a bill that would force doctors to receive no more than $500 per year without reporting, accurately and with the threat of law, for handling drug testing from drug companies. The shockwave created by this incident will be felt for years to come, and brings us to wonder what drugs have been given an OK by independent researchers only because they were receiving unusually large payments from the drug manufacturers.
Is nothing sacred anymore? Certainly not the image of Harvard research.
“What makes this case particularly troublesome is that the Harvard group’s research has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic drugs to treat children, as was described in The Times on Sunday by Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey. Although supporters praise the most prominent of the trio, Dr. Joseph Biederman, as a visionary who has saved many lives, critics complain that the Harvard studies have been too small and loosely designed to provide conclusive results. Critics say they also were subject to biased interpretation through use of a subjective rating scale.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10tue2.html?ref=opinion
Source: New York Times
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