license to ill
- From: "outrider" <outrider@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 25 Jul 2005 16:08:18 -0700
License to Ill
"Everywhere one looks, drug money is sloshing about.
During the 1990s, the U.S. National Institute of
Health's cholesterol guidelines estimated that 13
million Americans could benefit from treatment with
statins-new cholesterol-lowering drugs. In 2001, a new
panel of experts revised that number upwards, to 36
million. In 2004, another panel updated the guidelines
again, to 40 million, a number that included many
Americans with relatively low risk of a future heart
attack. Why was this? Was it actually true that
statins could now benefit not only the sick, but the
healthy as well? It's possible. But it's hard to
ignore the fact that eight of the nine experts who
wrote the 2004 guidelines also serve as paid speakers,
consultants, or researchers to drug
companies-companies that stood to reap billions from
overnight changes that relabeled healthy people as
sick and created a new market for statins.
This doesn't mean the experts deliberately fudged the
results, although many researchers who aren't on the
take, such as Dr. John Abramson of Harvard, believe
that statins, while useful for those who have suffered
heart attacks, offer very little benefit to healthy
individuals, and may even cause harmful side-effects."
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2005/07/selling_sickness.html
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