Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare

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137 people found this helpful

Big pharma and the Mafia

ByMauricio J. Solorzanoon October 23, 2013

One of the biggest canaries at the moment is Peter Gøtzsche, none other than the head of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, the Scandanavian arm of the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent research and information centre committed to preparing, maintaining, and disseminating reviews of the various treatments of mainstream medicine and examining whether they have adequate evidence of safety and effectiveness. Cochrane was the first group of individuals to champion the notion of`evidence-based' medicine - that is, medicine shouldn't be used unless there's evidence that the stuff works.

Gøtzsche is a guy after my own heart. When asked to speak at a Danish Society for Rheumatology event, called `Collaboration with the drug industry. Is it THAT harmful?' Peter's opening gambit was to highlight the fact that Pfizer, one of the meeting's sponsors, had been fined $2.3 billion in the US for promoting off-label use of four drugs, while Merck, the sponsor the year before, had been responsible for the deaths of thousands due to deceptive information about its arthritis drug.

Gøtzsche's latest book, entitled Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare' (Radcliffe Publishing Ltd) pulls even fewer punches. The book essentially makes the point that the drugs industry uses virtually every tactic used by the mob to sell its products.

He even quotes a former vice-president of Pfizer as saying, `It is scary how many similarities there are between his industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the sides effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry.'

Perhaps even more extraordinary than the careful case made by this blunt soothsayer is the fact that Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, agreed to write the book's foreword. In the book, Smith points out, the characteristics of organized crime include extortion, fraud, federal drug offences, bribery, embezzlement, obstruction of justice obstruction of law enforcement, tampering with witnesses and political corruption.

"Peter produces evidence, most of it detailed, to support his case that pharmaceutical companies are guilty of most of these offenses," says Smith. Indeed, most of the billions paid out as fines by the drugs industry for flouting the law as thought of as `the cost of doing business.'

"As an epidemiologist with very high numerical literacy and a passion for details, so that he is a world leader in critiquing clinical studies, Peter is here on very solid ground," says Smith. "He shows too how the industry has bought doctors, academics, journals, professional and patient organizations, university departments, journalists, regulators and politicians. These are the methods of the mob."

This is only the latest canary from among Establishment medicine to blow the whistle on Big Pharma. Marcia Ancell, the editor for two decades at the new England Journal of Medicine, recently published her own book: The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.

All of the major medical journals, from the BMJ and the Lancet, to the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New Eng Journal, have revealed the scale of the problem - that correctly prescribed drugs are the fourth leading cause of death, that drug companies massage and make up data.

Medicine should be a gift to us all rather than a money-making scheme for the pharmaceutical industry, as it now largely is.

With that in mind, we suggest that the following be implemented.

An independent funding body should be created to finance all medical trials, whether of drugs, other forms of therapy or alternatives
Doctors should be required to spend one year of their five-year training learning about nutrition, alternative modalities and new possibilities
Drug-company influence should be entirely excluded from medicine, from training colleges and from trips abroad
Doctors should be rewarded for adopting non-drug therapies, thus saving the nation at least one small part of the £160 billion spent every year on drugs by the NHS.
But most of all, we need to open up the entire field of cancer--our understanding of what it is, what causes it and how it could be treated--while taking on board new understandings of the body and the impact upon it of the environment, stress and emotions. As a researcher once commented when asked whether research into alternative healing should continue, "We can't find the answers if we don't keep asking the questions."

We will shortly announce our campaign for freeing medicine from the pharmaceutical industry, so that doctors and patients alike are free to use an entire toolkit of modalities to get and stay well.

Top critical review

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5 people found this helpful

very well documented and data based. Although I found ...

Byfflafraon February 23, 2015

very well documented and data based . Although I found it too cynical, in very few cases the author does the effort to outline the risk/benefit of the drugs he mentions.

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Showing 21-30 of 57 reviews(Verified Purchases). See all 68 reviews

One cause of higher medical costs.

ByJ. Segerson October 20, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

If you are at all concerned about the high cost of medical care in the United States and elsewhere, you need to read this book.

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Most of the previous books in this genre have endeavored ...

ByM. Saunderson July 25, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Most of the previous books in this genre have endeavored to be gentle about this message. Peter Gotzsche was just done with that, and I give him credit for it. Now we need a choir, all calling it out.

0Comment 4 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Everybody should know...

ByAmazon Customeron January 5, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Very well explained and accurate, at least somebody has the courage to talk about, and he is a very good source of knowledge.

0Comment 8 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

The exposure of an unprecedented crime against humanity. I applaud you Peter.

ByKiwion January 14, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book by Gotzsche will shake you to wake you out of a false sense of trust in those people society holds up as academic giants people we entrust our health our lives and minds to, people who have proclaimed to first do no harm! It will stir the emotions within that cries out for justice and fairness and transparency when it comes to something as precious as our health. It exposes the shameful disgraceful behavior that has led to the prescribing of poisons under a wrapper of lies, fraud and deceit. Behavior that the trusting, humble man in the street is completely unable to conceive of. Its well referenced documentation silences all critics. No doubt about it Gotzsche is a true hero and very informed. One area he appears to be uninformed in is the need to taper for years in order to get off psych drugs he seems surprised in one sentence that some 'may have to taper for a full year', unable to conceive of tapers that last for 4-5 years yet that kind of tapering requirement is becoming more and more common as thousands come to the realization that pharma have taken addiction to a whole new level... and lied about it. One quote will stick with me Gotzsche when asked to comment on the ethical standards in drug companies replied......'I am unable to comment on something that does not exist.' A must read for all people who wish to be informed of this unprecedented crime against humanity.

0Comment 7 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Learning to be a responsible health care consumer

ByShellyon December 1, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Shocking and angering. I sure hope he is exaggerating. But as a former Cochrane guy, I suspect he is not. Anyway I think it is critical for a health care consumer to be as educated about the health system as possible in order to be able to make intelligent decisions relating to health care. Cost/benefit as well as quality of life related issues.