NYT: Menopause, as Brought to You by Drug Companies

Mare's urine, you say?

From the article:

PREMPRO is a combination of Premarin, an estrogen drug derived from the urine of pregnant mares and first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1942, with an additional hormone, progestin.

Part of the Premarin saga shows how a drug maker successfully and cannily expanded a franchise whose central ingredient is horse estrogens into a billion-dollar panacea for aging women. Yet several hundred pages of court documents also raise questions about another aspect of Premarin’s trajectory: how Wyeth worked over decades to maintain the image and credibility of its hormone drugs even as the products were repeatedly under siege.

Pfizer representatives say court documents paint an unfair picture of Wyeth’s practices and that plaintiffs’ lawyers have cherry-picked documents for out-of-context comments to sway juries.

Still, the documents offer a snapshot of Wyeth’s efforts. Taken together, they depict a company that over several decades spent tens of millions of dollars on influential physicians, professional medical societies, scientific publications, courses and celebrity ads, inundating doctors and patients with a sea of positive preventive health messages that plaintiffs’ lawyers say deflected users’ attention from cancer concerns.

Link

Update: a video on hormones and cancer that Big Pharma does not want us to see:

Smoked Out

The New York Times offers us a slideshow of the history of tobacco advertising in America, with babies, dentists, athletes and doctors - even Santa - urging us to smoke. Link

Video - Money Talks: Profit Before Patient Safety

This 50-minute documentary was created to give an in-depth, academic perspective on the questionable marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry, and features the commentary of investigative journalists and medical professionals including Dr. John Abramson, author of Overdosed America, and Prescription Access Litigation Project Director, Alex Sugerman-Brozan. Other notable interviewees include Dr. Bob Goodman of Columbia University, founder of the 'No Free Lunch' program, and Dr. Jerome Hoffman of UCLA Medical School.

But these day may be numbered. Pharma may soon have to disclose its contacts. Read more here.

Big Tobacco, Big Pharma: $ame tune, different word$

The history of smoking: scary documents held at UCSF.

"New" "Improved" Antipsychotics Hype

New Schizophrenia drugs no better than the old ones: Reuters
Here you can read about correct diagnosis
and, here, about mental health and vitamins.

Shown: Steven Carter and Abram Hoffer of the International Society of Orthomolecular Medicine

Canada's Anti-Drug Strategy for Parents

This is all well and good, but the biggest drug dealers are listed on the Stock Exchange.

Why lecture kids about dope when we hand them Ritalin every day?

Have a look at this 2000 BBC report, Kids on Pills

Video: We'll Take Care of You - 1 and 2

That's the way the money goes...

Drug makers spend more on advertising than on research

Marketing Overdose Campaign

The pharmaceutical industry spends US$60 billion on drugs marketing each year, twice as much as it spends on research and development. Yet consumers know next to nothing about where this money is going. To expose where pharma companies spend this money, how it increases drugs sales, and why this irresponsible behaviour is putting consumer health at risk, Consumers International has produced a series of short, fun films for the Marketing Overdose campaign. Watch them - and get involved.
http://www.marketingoverdose.org/

Don't miss this expose of Pharma manipulation of physicians in Third World countries.
Drugs, Doctors and Dinners

Canada's Dr. Joel Lexchin weighs in on this
in the BMJ

Soft Targets: Nurses and the Pharmaceutical Industry

The pharmaceutical industry recognizes nursing influence on medical prescribing and identifies nurses as a marketing target. The industry has had its eye on nurses and nurse practitioners for over a decade, and is heavily invested in wooing them. The nursing literature has yet to pay much attention to the expansive reach of the pharmaceutical industry into the nursing profession. In this article, some of the key literature on the influence of drug companies upon nurses is examined.
Article here

Obay. Because I said so.

At The Torontoist.