Article archive / November 1, 2013
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 3. Source pages: 2.
Mark Twain wrote, “Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.”
That’s exactly what Irving Kirsch provided to the audience last month at the LPA-Tulane conference, gratification and astonishment.
Kirsch presented more proof that Big Pharma and the FDA skew data in favor of drug approvals when the drugs don’t really work. Not surprising, since the FDA receives 40% of their funding from these companies. Kirsch had to pull out all the stops to get at the truth, including filing a Freedom of Information Act request for raw data.
This is more damning evidence about the medical-industrial complex, just like the multibillion dollar fines that have become commonplace for drug companies’ illegal actions in research and marketing, usually only exposed by some whistleblower.
Recently I read an account of how Penn State officials participated in the cover up of Jerry Sandusky’s decade-long criminal child molesting. The authors point to toxic leadership as one element for such a horrendous occurrence. But they also note that the environment has to be conducive, and there have to be followers, both the colluders and the conformers.
Kirsch showed us that the FDA is a colluder, and its fails in the role of staying neutral, to act as a check and balance on behalf of the citizen. We see this more and more lately, and it is and should be disturbing to all social scientists.
What should be alarming is our society’s combined level of critical- thinking. If anti-depressants are a sham, or the model for them is a sham, what other models in health care might be fabricated by the medical-industrial complex and its groupthink colluders and conformers, including the FDA in this case?
When we come up with a new theory or discovery or new technology, do we need to ask, “Who profits?”
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.