Friday, August 17, 2018

The Corruption of Science and The Negative Impact on Health

Science and technology is so seductive, and therefor imminently subject to corruption...quotes between the red lines from an article published in Kaiser Health News - "Financial Ties That Bind: Studies Often Fall Short On Conflict-Of-Interest Disclosures"


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...Nearly two-thirds of the 100 physicians who rake in the most money from 10 device manufacturers failed to disclose a conflict of interest in their academic writing in 2016, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA Surgery.

...The omission can have real-life impact for patients when their doctors rely on such research to make medical decisions, potentially without knowing the authors’ potential conflicts of interest.

...The issue is anytime there’s a new technology, people get really excited about it.

...The researchers also pinpointed the 10 physicians who received the highest compensation from each company. They then searched for articles published by these physicians between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2016, and reviewed the full text of each article for COI disclosure. According to their findings, those 10 companies paid more than $12 million in 2015 to the 100 doctors included in the study. The median payment to these physicians was $95,993.

...The financial ties between medical device manufacturers and providers go well beyond academic research and ivory towers. As many as 94 percent of doctors, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, report getting some kind of benefit from the industry.
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The best marketing medium in the 21st century for the "big" food, pharma, and medical industries? "Big science" of course.

Many of these folks are well meaning - my favorite Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

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