Love (Sex) and Other Drugs The Movie and Medicaid Fraud

The new movie Love & Other Drugs depics the unethical and illegal marketing activities of BigPharma. It shows mainly how Pfizer and Lilly pharmacuetical agents bribe doctors and medical practices with trips, money, alcohol and orgies all for thier products that don't work. It should be more of an eye opener to the general populace about fraud and pharma drug pushing for increased quotas and pharma agent perks. It is sick to see that Zoloft and Prozac have been marketed just like soup, or telecom services. It is all marketing for shelf space and personal income. This goes along with massive prescriptions by doctors across the US in an ongoing medicaid fraud investigation.

The following is a recent article from Lincoln Journal Star regarding massive prescriptions from doctors in Nebraska
The Cost of Mental Health? Pricey
November 24, 2010
By Mark Andersen
Lincoln Journal Star

Excerpt:
One Lincoln psychiatrist. Six mental health medications prescribed to Medicaid patients over two years. Cost to taxpayers: $2,927,872.
Newspapers around the country have picked up on the lists of Medicaid providers requested last April by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who suggested large numbers should spark official inquiries… In May, state Medicaid Director Vivianne Chaumont reported which Nebraska Medicaid providers wrote the most prescriptions for 11 types of medications during 2008 and 2009. Six of the drugs -- Abilify, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, Risperdal and Risperidone -- accounted for the bulk of the costs on Nebraska's lists.

Four Lincoln mental health providers were among the top 10 for those six drugs:

* Dr. Walter Duffy, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $2,927,872 (9,010 prescriptions), including more than $1.5 million for Abilify alone.

* Dr. Rafael Tatay, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $1,503,998 (3,998 prescriptions), including $473,700 for Abilify.

* Dr. Stephen Paden, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $587,917 (1,695 prescriptions), including $426,257 for Abilify.

* Dr. Pratap Pothuloori, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $545,487 (1,751 prescriptions), including $192,277 for Abilify.

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Grassley cited the example of a Florida doctor who wrote 96,685 prescriptions for mental health drugs in 21 months.

"This trend is found again and again across the states," Grassley wrote, "suggesting that top prescribers stand out not only against other providers in their state, but against the very top prescribers in those states."

Pharmaceutical Companies and the FDA Fraudulently Conducting Clinical Trials

The FDA attacks homeopathic treatments as they push for scientific evidence of these natural ingredient remedies. Yet BigPharma and the FDA are fraught with fraud in their own “scientific studies” which are far from using science. It is more payoffs to academic researchers and choreographed drugs trials versus placebo results.

Firstly, Bigpharma endows Universities to perform their “independent studies”, yet they pay enormous amounts of grants to complete these so called “independent” studies. Most would call that unethical. Pay a University to do a study, and if they came up with bad results would BigPharma use that University again? We think not.
That is outright fraud and coercion, and totally allowed by the FDA. Drugging a population keeps the population dumped down. It is a classic government conspiracy.

Clearly, these clinical trials are rife with fraud. Most of the clinical trials used by Pharmaceutical Companies to win FDA approval are funded by pharmaceutical Companies. It has been verified that most clinical trials tend to find results that favor the financial interests of whatever organization paid for them.

Secondly, these trials are typically preformed with pharma’s drugs versus a placebo. Yet, placebos are provided by the same company that funded the clinical trial. This provides the perfect scheme to supply the weakest placebo versus pharma’s drug. Can you see the clear room for unethical behavior and outright fraud? In our opinion when large amounts of money is involved then fraud is not far behind.

Thirdly, there are no standards for placebos as recently reported by Mike Adams of Natural News. A placebo is the “sugar pill” but could the trial use real sugar versus a diabetic drug in a trial. Yes they can, since there are no regulations on which type of sugar pill to use. The diabetes drug would clearly win against a real sugar pill. But, these trials don’t always use sugar in other cases they use olive oil which may actually improve heart health in a trial versus a cholesterol drug. Other placebo pills could use partially-hydrogenated oils which harm a hearts health. Yet less than 10 percent of the clinical trials list the placebo ingredients at all, Natural News reports. That doesn’t sound like scientific detail to us. Wouldn’t a pharmaceutical company want to boast if their trial drug beat olive oil in a head to head test? Or are they hiding something?

Natural News article also indicated that placebo performance strongly influences whether drugs are approved by the FDA. As the key piece of information on its regulatory approval decisions, the FDA wants to know whether a drug works better than placebo. That's the primary requirement. If they work even 5% better than a placebo, they are said to be "efficacious" (meaning they "work"). This is true even if the placebo was selected and used specifically to make the drug look good by comparison. As Natural News states, if there are no regulations or rules regarding the placebo, then none of the placebo controlled clinical trials are scientifically valid.

Yet homeopathic remedies have more stringent requirements for scientific evidence. Can you believe the irony here? The FDA in essence pushes away natural remedies, and embraces pharmaceutical drugs. Is the FDA really protecting you?

Contact your Congressional representative today and demand that these pharmaceutical companies at the least disclose which placebo they used in a test. Would you race a Porsche against a Pinto? Clearly that is not a true comparison, so the consumer should know how a drug preformed against a natural alternative. Go to stoprx.org site to contact Congress to address this blatantly obvious issue that the FDA should have a remedied already. Please feel free to also donate, so we can continue to keep you informed.