Cholesterol Targets Fraudulent - Association for Honesty in Medicine Charges
CategoriesA few days ago, the New York Times told us that "Federal health officials" had "sharply reduced the desired levels of harmful cholesterol for Americans who are at moderate to high risk for heart disease".
But just two days later, we hear from Newsday: Of the nine panelists, six (later data indicate eight) had received grants or consulting or speakers' fees from companies that produce some of the most popular statin medications on the market, according to published material from 2001. Those drugs include Pfizer's Lipitor; Bristol-Myers Squibb's Pravachol, Merck's Lovastatin and AstraZeneca's Crestor.
In a message titled "The Cholesterol Fraud", F. Batmanghelidj, M.D., President of the National Association for Honesty in Medicine (www.nafhim.org) minces no words:
The members of the media are being used for perpetuation of the cholesterol fraud against the American people. Recently, a widely publicized doctored report by an NIH panel, most of whose members are now known to have had a direct connection to manufacturers of cholesterol-lowering drugs, unveiled a much stricter guideline for cholesterol levels for people at risk of a stroke or heart attack. Unfortunately, this report, and the publicity given it, set up the people of this country for the use of more totally useless drugs. Science reporters should know that the blood for measuring cholesterol levels is taken from a vein in the arm. But at no time has there been a record of cholesterol ever having blocked a vein in the body! It is not the stickiness of cholesterol that causes the blockage of healthy blood vessel walls! The body uses cholesterol as a kind of bandage to cover abrasions and tears in its arterial walls. It is a life-saver. If you want to learn more about cholesterol read "Bad Cholesterol": A Myth and a Fraud!
Cholesterol is the building block for all the hormones - Pregnenolone, Dehydroepiandrosterone, Progesterone, Desoxycorticosterone, 11-Desoxycortisol, Testosterone, Corticosterone, Cortisol, 18-Hydroxycorticosterone, Aldosterone, Prostaglandins, Prostacylin and many other hormones, brain cell membranes and the insulating material for all the nerves of the body. It is a precursor to vitamin-D, essential for prevention of osteoporosis. Why would you want to lower its levels without knowing the reasons the body has resorted to making more cholesterol?
The pseudo-scientists who recommend more and more drugs for lowering cholesterol levels want to make money at the expense of the ill informed and trusting American public. Unfortunately the people in the media, knowingly or unknowingly, set the innocent public up for their sting. It is not as if the drugs pushed on people to lower their cholesterol are harmless, they do actually kill.
Bayer's statin drug Baycol was taken off the market some years ago - too many died - but many statin drugs continue to be sold and they have the same side effects. Reports about those effects just somehow never seem to make it into the FDA's database for evaluation. No wonder - the drugs rake in billions, and if we are to follow the new cholesterol recommendations we'll get into the zillion range ... but I forget, national health insurance plans and state medical services will be bankrupted long before that.Pharma manufacturers Merck and Schering-Plough are expected to obtain approval later this month of their new combination product Vytorin, which associates two statins, Zetia and Zocor, which apparently complement each other by attacking cholesterol synthesis in the liver (Zocor) and cholesterol absorption in the intestines (Zetia). According to an article in the Delaware News Journal, Vytorin's expected approval coincides with the release of last week's new guidelines that call for people who have had heart attacks or who are at high risk for heart disease to lower their LDL, or bad cholesterol, to 70 instead of 100, as previously recommended.
Analysts expect the guidelines to help increase the market for cholesterol drugs.
There is room for growth - while an estimated 37 million Americans could benefit from the drugs, only around 14 million take them, according to the cholesterol education program.
Yahoo News published an article, saying that the Consumer groups Center for Science in the Public Interest and Public Citizen blasted the new cholesterol guidelines as being tainted by the influence of major pharmaceuticals that make blockbusters such as Lipitor and Pravachol. Last year, drug makers earned $26 billion worldwide on cholesterol-lowering medicines, the top-selling class of drugs.
Vera Hassner Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection has some further comments on the ethics of this type of medical research driven by profits rather than human concerns...
ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION (AHRP)
Promoting openness and full disclosure
http://www.ahrp.org
Scientific journal editors are scrambling about how to react to bad publicity emanating from public disclosure that the scientific reports they have published are likely to be biased because the authors had financial ties to the companies whose drugs / devices they report on favorably - and that information was withheld from readers.
A newly released survey by the Center for Science for the Public Interest (CSPI) looked at articles that appeared during a 3 month period--between December 2003 and February 2004--in four premier scientific journals--the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Environmental Health Perspectives and Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology -- finding that even in these journals, 8% of authors failed to disclose conflicts of interest.
Among the reports cited by CSPI whose authors failed to disclose their financial conflicts: "Frank D. Kolodgie and Renu Virmani, two scientists at the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, failed to disclose their consulting relationships with 20 companies in the heart-disease treatment field in a December article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the formation of plaque in coronary arteries." [Ref. 1]
Inasmuch as biased science affects public health policies and misleads treating physicians who may be unwittingly doing harm to patients, is it not the responsibility of science journals to ensure that they provide accurate, full information to readers?
Here are two modest recommendations: Journal editors should make an effort to publish an update, listing articles whose authors failed to disclose their financial ties to drug companies.
Furthermore, it is essential for journals to retract clinical trial reports that were based on only partial--favorable-data. The results are false and misleading, and may be leading physicians to prescribe medications whose risks outweigh any benefits. [References 2]
The same day that CSPI's survey was reported in the press, the journal, Circulation, published a report announcing new federally endorsed recommendations for the treatment of heart disease--more accurately, recommendations for the increased use of cholesterol lowering drugs. The recommendations were made by a panel convened by the National Cholesterol Education Program on the supposition that they will prevent heart disease. The recommendations will dramatically increase the use of statins to control cholesterol levels.
Statins sales for the current 26 million Americans taking them reach $15 billion. The new recommendations will increase the number of users to 36 million and increase sales to $20.8 billion.
The Wall Street Journal reports today, that the FDA is about to approve Vytorin, a drug, "which packs two cholesterol fighters into one pill. It combines Zetia, a cholesterol-blocker from Schering-Plough Corp., with Merck & Co.'s Zocor, the second-most-prescribed brand in the class of powerful drugs known as statins: "Just as heart patients and their doctors are grappling with updated government guidelines for dramatically lowering cholesterol, a new drug is about to be approved that is sure to deepen the confusion over choosing proper treatment." [Ref 3]
Since the NIH recommendations clearly provide statin drug manufacturers with a mega-billion dollar profit enhancement-and the rationale is controversial -- isn't a bit of skepticism in order?
For starters, why has no one questioned the absence of financial disclosure by the panel members that recommend the new guidelines? Have editors of the journal Circulation not heard about disclosure requirements? [Ref. 4]
Why have reporters failed to ask about possible financial conflicts of interest that may have a bearing on these recommendations? [Ref. 5]
Why has no one in the mainstream media seen fit to inform the public that there are scientists around the world who are skeptical about the intensive statin-cholesterol push, calling it "massive hype" by "Rent-A-Quote" Doctors? [Ref. 6]
Doesn't good science depend upon open debate?
The new recommendations were immediately endorsed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI); the American Heart Association (AHA); and the American College of Cardiology (ACC). But these institutions have a checkered record of endorsing expensive treatments that were no better than cheaper ones, and potentially made matters worse.
For example, the ALLHAT study conducted by NHLBI ("antihypertensive and lipid lowering to prevent heart attack trial") tested the effectiveness of both antihypertensive and lipid treatments. It was published in JAMA (2002) and is cited in the journal, Circulation. The ALLHAT study was critically reviewed in the British Medical Journal (2003), noting that in BOTH arms of this government sponsored study neither expensive treatment endorsed by the AHA and ACC demonstrated better results than cheaper treatments which proved safer. [Ref 7]
Indeed, a cheap diuretic proved safer and more effective against heart attack than either expensive calcium channel blockers and ACE inhibitors or lipid lowering statins which "showed no statistically significant reductio