Monthly Archives: November 2009

Doctor’s kiss and tell tale: “My 1-Year Career as a Wyeth Drug Rep”

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
10

drug reps. fourbags

Psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Carlat is a compelling storyteller. One especially compelling story, Dr. Drug Rep, was told in the pages of the New York Times Magazine about his own very brief career moonlighting as a Big Pharma drug rep.

Once upon a time, he explained, on a blustery fall New England day in 2001, a friendly sales manager from Wyeth Pharmaceuticals came into his medical office and made him an offer he found hard to refuse.

“He asked me if I’d like to give talks to other doctors about using Effexor XR for treating depression. It would be pretty easy. Wyeth would provide a set of slides and even pay for me to attend a speaker’s training session.

“I would be paid $500 for one-hour Lunch and Learn talks at local doctors’ offices, or $750 if I had to drive out of town. I would be flown to New York City for a ‘faculty-development program,’ where I would be pampered in a midtown hotel for two nights, and would be paid an additional honorarium.”   Continue reading →

New ‘desire drug’ claims that sex really IS all in her head

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
22
porn for women

a woman's aphrodisiac

Apparently, there have been a lot of satisfied yet exhausted male rats lying about in Montreal research labs lately, smoking that post-coital cigarette and wondering what on earth has gotten into their little nympho rat partners all of a sudden. This is largely thanks to an experimental drug designed to reawaken female sexual desire by blunting inhibition. (We used to call this ‘getting wasted’ back in art  college, a pastime which had a similar inhibition-blunting effect on us). Although yet to publish any clinical test results showing the drug is actually effective, the German drugmaker Boehringer* is putting the finishing touches on a pill that, unlike Viagra which targets the mechanics of sex by boosting blood flow to the penis, works on the female brain.  Continue reading →

Warning: clinical trials funded by drug companies may appear more truthful than they actually are

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
4

gabapentinWell, here’s a shocker: apparently, there appears to be a difference between internal drug company documents about the research trials that they fund, and the articles reporting that research that end up in medical journals. The New England Journal of Medicine calls this ‘selective outcome reporting’, but for the sake of clarity, let’s just call it ‘lying’.

At first blush, the process of getting drug research results published seems straightforward enough. Since 2005, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has even required all research investigators to register their clinical trials prior to participant enrollment as a pre-condition for publishing the trial’s findings in member journals.

So in a nutshell, researchers set out to run clinical trials, as they are legally required to do, on a particular drug. They have some specific purpose in mind before undertaking this research.  Will this drug ease pain? Reduce inflammation? Lower blood pressure? Treat cancer? That’s the primary outcome of the clinical trial they have in mind, which must be registered before they even begin recruiting people to participate in this study if they want to later submit their findings to a medical journal. Which of course they do.

In a study published today in the NEJM, researchers examined practices for clinical trials of a drug called gabapentin, better known by its brand name Neurontin, an epilepsy drug which was approved in late 1993 for use as an adjunctive medication to control partial seizures (meaning that it’s considered effective when added to other anti-seizure drugs). The research trials for this drug were all funded by Pfizer and Warner-Lambert’s sudsidiary drug company, Parke-Davis.

Researchers looked at 20 clinical trials of gabapentin for which there were internal Pfizer or Parke-Davis documents, 12 of which were ultimately published in medical journals. For eight of these 12 reported trials, the primary outcome defined in the ultimately published journal article differed from that described in the internal documentation protocol. Quelle surprise…  Continue reading →

Nice work if you can get it: same talk, same slides, week in, week out – at $1,500 a pop

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
7

speech purpleSince returning from Mayo Clinic and the annual WomenHeart Science & Leadership Symposium for Women with Heart Disease last fall, I’ve done a number of public presentations on the subject of heart disease - the #1 killer of women in North America. My talks are pretty well all the same. When I tell the story of my own heart attack, it never changes.  When I talk about risk factors for developing heart disease, it’s always the same list.  When I discuss surprising symptoms and signs that you might be having a heart attack – well, you get my drift.

This is a normal public speaking reality for those who have a specific message to deliver or a unique area of expertise to share.  Same talk, same slides, different audiences.  Just ask psychiatrist Dr. Manoj Waikar, adjunct professor at Stanford University, who moonlights as a public speaker for the largest American psychiatric drug maker, Eli Lilly.

The company has been in the news since the FDA issued a warning to the 7 million diabetics who take its drug Byetta, after its use was found to threaten kidney function. And in January 2009,  Lilly pleaded guilty in court and paid $1.42 billion (yes, that’s ‘billion’ with a B) in fines and penalties to settle charges that it had for at least four years illegally marketed Zyprexa, a drug approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, as a remedy for dementia in elderly patients. (In fact, in the past five year, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and four other drug companies have paid a total of $7 billion in fines and penalties. Six of the seven companies admitted in court that they marketed medicines for unapproved uses).

But I digress. Last year, Eli Lilly paid Dr. Waikar to give 51 talks to his fellow physicians – week in, week out, all year long at $1,500 a pop. That’s $75,000 a year.  Just show up for an hour, and the drug company cheque is in the mail.

Oh, wait. That’s the difference between my presentations about women’s heart disease and Dr. Waikar’s presentations shilling Eli Lilly drugs like Zyprexa and Cimbalta: I volunteer to do my talks for free, and he doesn’t. Continue reading →