Your honor

Ushering into the stands now, accomplice No. 2: Universities, medical schools, teaching hospitals, national academies…

10 accusations made & circumstantial evidence sequenced together [8]:
 
1. Institutionalized kickbacks:

Around 66% of academic institutions are receiving payments from the allopathic industry [7].

Premier universities such as: Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Emory, Pittsburgh, Stanford, Texas, UCLA, etc. have signed moneymaking financial agreements with drug manufacturers.

In return, they promote pharmaceuticals regardless of their unproven efficacy & despite a body of evidence – documented in manufacturers' own disclosures – confessing the hazards of allopathic medications.

“The road to hell was paved with the flood of corporate research dollars that eagerly filled gaps left by slashed government research funding.”
- Cynthia Crossen, a Wall Street Journal staffer, in her book
'Tainted Truth : The Manipulation of Fact in America'.
 
 
She also found that the drug industry's academic financing rose up from $292 million to $2.1 billion within 10 years.


2. Criminal nexus:

Extensive ties with the academicians, particularly the senior faculty of prestigious medical schools, affects the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease [3].

Faculty's financial relationships with the drug manufacturers are commonly in the form of:

• paid speaking engagements,
• consulting agreements,
• holding a position on a scientific advisory board or board of directors,
•  holding equity in start-ups floated by the drug companies that sponsor research performed at the same institution,

      … just to name a few [2, 13]. They do know how to bribe legally.


3. Temples of knowledge or brothels of disinformation?

Corporate-academic adultery starts with the medical text books written by cronies of the allopathic establishment [5].


4. Spurious trials:

Statistically significant association was found between funding by biomedical companies and conclusions favorable to the pharmaceutical industry; with a summarized odds ratio (OR) of 3.6 & 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.6 – 4.9 [7].

This proves that results of allopathic trials are fudged to make the sponsoring companies happy.

Dr. Marcia Angell, in her last editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, entitled “Is Academic Medicine for Sale?” said :

“When the boundaries between industry and academic medicine become as blurred as they are now, the business goals of industry influence the mission of medical schools in multiple ways.” [1]

Sr. Marcia Angell also commented on the systemic ethical violations at the nation's leading research centers – including,

• Duke,
• University of Pennsylvania,
• New York Cornell Medical Center,
• Johns Hopkins,
• Fred Hutchinson,
• The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH),
• University of Maryland &
• Harvard in China.

The federal Office of Protection from Research Risks (now, OHRP) was temporarily forced to halt clinical trials at some of the nation's most prestigious institutions [11, 12].


5. Lack of policies:

Academic institutions do not have clear policies covering the industrial relationships of their Institutional Review Board (IRB) members with commercial firms.

These committees are responsible for ensuring that clinical studies uphold patient rights and follow ethical guidelines [9]. But the stated procedures to purportedly achieve those goals vary wildly.

"It is shocking that, after more than 20 years of talking about industry relationships and conflicts of interest, there are still IRBs out there that haven't dealt with this issue.

It also is clear that many IRB chairs have no clue about the behavior of their members who have industry relationships.

The IRB is the primary mechanism medical schools and hospitals have to ensure the appropriate conduct of clinical research, and IRBs without clear, well-defined and enforced policies about conflicts of interest cannot accomplish their fundamental mission,"
- Eric G. Campbell, PhD, MGH Institute for Health Policy [9].
 
 
6. Low adoption rate of the few official policies that do exist:

Only 25% of accredited allopathic medical schools have adopted the Institutional Conflicts Of Interest (ICOI) policy regarding financial interests held by the institutions.

How many of these educational institutions actually enforce it, is an altogether different matter [9].


7. Self-regulation by the selfish?

“it is naive to trust institutions to monitor and discipline their own financial activities, particularly when the financial returns can be substantial.

Licensing agreements on patents generate close to $2 billion per year for academic research centers …

At a time when federal research funding is declining and competition for philanthropic gifts is intensifying, universities may not be eager to promulgate policies that would restrict their freedom to maneuver."
- David J. Rothman, Ph.D., of Columbia University, New York,
comments on the findings of Ehringhaus & colleagues [10]
 
 
 
8. Strong arm tactics against whistle blowers:

Researchers whose findings collide with corporate interests, face intimidation by both corporate sponsors and their own university's administrators [11].
 
Corporate influence is so entrenched at university medical centers that overt threats need not be explicitly made; everybody knows what's expected & what will happen if they don't fall in line. [12]


9. No respect for standards:

University laboratories had the worst record of adhering to Good Laboratory Practices than all other laboratories as per an FDA survey of safety testing violations [6].


10. Stifling the correct advancement of medical science:

Under corporate influence, more research is done comparing trivial differences between one drug and another [11].

Less research is done to gain knowledge about the root causes of disease [12].

Short-term corporate goals take priority over society's long-term needs.

“Conflicts of interest have corrupted the soul of the American university, the ethics of medicine, the integrity of the scientific record, and the safety of patients who serve as human subjects in pre- and post-marketing clinical trials.

Conflicts of interest in clinical trials result in deadly medicine. Adverse drug reactions in FDA-approved drugs are the leading cause of death” – Vera Hassner Sharav, Alliance for Human Research Protection [11].


What do the graduates of allopathic universities deliver?

In a 2000 JAMA article, Dr. Barbara Starfield documented some hard facts about allopathy's degradation of health which caused [4]:

• 116 million extra physician visits
• 77 million extra prescriptions filled
• 17 million emergency department visits
• 8 million hospitalizations
• 3 million long-term admissions
• 199,000 additional deaths
• $77 billion in extra costs.
  

Still prescription drugs remain the major treatment modality of allopathic medicine. It's just too profitable a business.

A five-country survey published in the Journal of Health Affairs found that 18-28% of people, who were recently ill, had suffered from an allopathic error in the previous 2 years.

The study was conducted in UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada & USA [4].

In the U.K., out of all those admitted in a hospital due to injuries inflicted by allopathy, only 6.3% had that Adverse Drug Reaction reported by their doctors.

As per FDA's MedWatch system for prescription drugs, only about 1 in 100 serious adverse events are reported [1].


So how can you read between the lines of your symptoms?

You have bad microvita troubling you in certain ways which are loosely grouped under the nameplates of different diseases.

But the exact details of your suffering may be quite different from that of another person enduring the same disease.

This is the case because there is much more going on than what has been discovered so far by mainstream disoriented science.

Eventually it all boils down to a scuffle between the benefic & malefic microvita operating within you.
 
Are you coaching the right ones to win?

While desecration of the scientific foundation of medicine continues at the hands of allopathy, Your honor's permission is sought to interrogate 2 more of their accomplices in the next hearing.
 
 
Citations:

1. Death by Medicine By Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, PhD.

2. Medical-research ethics under the microscope: schools try to plot the fine line between commercial links and conflicts of interest.

3. Financial relationships of Institutional Review Board members.

4. “Error in Medicine", Dr. Lucian L. Leape; JAMA.

5. Dr. Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine : Drug Co & Doctors: A Story of Corruption.

6. Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry. by Dr John Braithwaite.

7. The Financing of Drug Trials by Pharmaceutical Companies and Its Consequences: Part 1. A Qualitative, Systematic Review of the Literature on Possible Influences on the Findings, Protocols, and Quality of Drug Trials.

8. Assessing faculty financial relationships with industry: A case study

9. Massachusetts General Hospital (2009, March 25). Policies Regarding IRB Members’ Industry Relationships Often Lacking. Retrieved June 6, 2011, from ScienceDaily.

10. JAMA and Archives Journals (2008, February 12). Gaps Exist For Adopting Conflicts Of Interest Policies Among Medical Schools. Retrieved June 6, 2011, from ScienceDaily. Journal reference: JAMA. 2008;299[6]:95-671.

11. Dirty pharmaceutical tactics against dissenting researchers.

12. Angell, M. Is Academic medicine for sale? NEJM, 2000, 342: 1516-1518.

13. Scope and impact of financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research: a systematic review.
 
 
Privy to the previous testimonies?

1st session : Drug companies – Drugging or healing you?
2nd Session : Esteemed Research Journals – reservoirs of life-saving info?