From Evidence-Based Medicine to Marketing-Based Medicine

Dr Peter Parry is an Australian child & adolescent psychiatrist who has researched the "Pediatric Bipolar Disorder" diagnosis emanating from the USA, a diagnosis completely at odds with his training and clinical experience in Australian child and adolescent mental health. As part of his research into the PBD phenomenon, he noticed hundreds of internal pharmaceutical industry documents publicly released from court cases against pharmaceutical firms by State and Federal Attorney Generals in the USA. These documents concurred with findings of the US Senate "Grassley Commission" into conflicts of interest between the pharmaceutical industry and academic medicine.In collaboration with A/Prof Glen Spielmans, psychologist from Minnesota, they researched over 400 internal pharmaceutical documents regarding psychotropic medications. They published an article in 2010 in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry titled "From Evidence-Based Medicine to Marketing-Based Medicine: Evidence from Internal Industry Documents"[1]. These documents reveal efforts at "disease-mongering" to expand markets e.g. by increasing the number of people diagnosed with "bipolar disorder"; marketing strategies to influence "customers" i.e. physicians, other health professionals and government regulators; and manipulation of the published medical literature to maximise positive findings and minimise or hide negative findings re manufacturers' medications.The past few years have witnessed a global awakening in...
Source: PharmaGossip - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: blogs