Conflicts of interest

The pharmaceutical industry spent USD $22 billion on marketing to physicians in 2003, up from USD $12.1 billion in 1999, according to data from Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), this month's Time magazine reports. The industry will have spent almost $3 billion in 2005 solely on meetings and events for physicians, according to Verispan, a health-care market-research firm in Pennsylvania (Time magazine, 6 November, 2005). That sounds like a lot of money! Would drug companies spend that sort of money unless they had reason to believe that the money would influence doctors to prescribe their medicines? It's a silly question, not intended to be taken seriously. In spending this money is it reasonable to suppose that what is uppermost in the minds of drug company executives is concern for our health and wellbeing? Another silly question. Do we think about these things when we go to the doctor and trust the advice they give us or the medication they prescribe? This, too, ought to be a silly question. Unfortunately it isn't. Most of us still trust the medical profession the way young children trust their parents, with devestating consequences for our health.

Let's look at another area where conflicts of interest are rife. Unless you have taken the healthy step of getting rid of your TV and refuse to read newspapers, you couldn't very well have avoided the fear campaign being whipped up by irresponsible public health officials worldwide regarding the imminent danger of an influenza pandemic that could kill millions of people. Perhaps these fears will one day prove to be based on real information. But is that what is really going on here? The Asia Times reported on 4 November, that Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of the board of the biotech company Gilead Sciences between 1997 and 2001 and currently holds a stake in the company valued between USD$5 million and USD$25 million. Gilead developed and patented Tamiflu in 1996 and then gave the marketing rights to Roche. The Asia Times reports that the global rush to buy Tamiflu (as a result of the fear campaign) has sent Gilead's share price from USD$35 to USD$47 "amounting to a windfall of at least $1 million for Rumsfeld". Gilead will continue to collect 10% royalties from Roche's sales of Tamiflu. We thus have the situation that the very officals who are whipping up a flu panic stand to make very substantial profits from it. And this story can be multiplied a thousandfold (see several of my journal articles for 2004 and 2005 on http://www.consciouslivingseminars.com ; for a very different point of view on the avian flu, see http://thedoctorwithin.com/index_fr.php?page=articles/avian.php ).

What is one to do in the face of the utter unreliability of what passes for information in the mass media, in schools and other "educational" institutions, in the scientific journals, in the booklets provided by government agencies and in doctors' offices? First, we need to educate ourselves. Amongst other things this means reading books written by people without ties to the pharmaceutical industry (eg Dr Robert S Mendelsohn, "Confessions of a medical heretic" and "How to raise a healthy child...in spite of your doctor"). Second - and more importantly - we need to develop within ourselves and then practise the principles of conscious living. In my next post I'll attempt to explain what I mean by "conscious living"