Billiam James

The heart of medicine… Is it the caring concern of one person for another? It is detached statistical analysis? Is it motivated by love? Or driven by greed?

Read Dr. David Healy’s parable about about a sister and a brother, and the winter and summer of medicine… The Snow Queen

Illustration: The Heart of Medicine, © 2013 created by Billiam James. Based on original painting on Sacred Heart of Jesus with Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Louis Gonzaga, circa 1770, José de Páez, Mexico, 1727-1790

Drug companies maximize the sales of new drugs by hyping their benefits while downplaying significant risks. In 2010 the European Medicines Agency began releasing patient-level data from the clinical trials used to approve new medicines in Europe – a development hailed by American, and European researchers and researchers around the world as a major step towards drug safety.

This process has been shut down by a lawsuit taken by two American corporations – AbbVie, makers of Humira, the number one selling medication in the world with projected sales of $10 billion in 2013; and InterMune, whose pulmonary-fibrosis drug Esbriet has recently been approved in Europe at a cost of over $40,000 per year.

Sign the petition here: Let us see Drug Data! Drug hazards are not “trade secrets”!

Read Dr. David Healy’s post here: Letter to Stacy London

Translations:
The posters are being translated into many languages including French, Dutch, Hindi, Kannada, Spanish, Mandarin, Italian, and German as part of RxISK‘s world-wide campaign for open data on pharmaceutical research and drug safety trials.

Humira is a monoclonal antibody – one of the new biological agents that acts on the immune system. Its side effects can be so nasty it has a black box warning on it.

Despite this, it’s on its way to becoming the best-selling drug of all time. You don’t get to be a best-seller on this scale without pushing the marketing envelope way beyond those who are seriously enough ill to warrant taking risks with a dangerous drug. Without running a marketing campaign that is to old-style drug marketing as a HumVie is to one of the smaller European cars.

The company have already been warned by the FDA for promoting Humira for milder conditions and misleading about its safety. The marketing includes many emotive messages – with images suggesting children are repelled by a single patch of psoriasis.

See more at: Stacy London: What not to Take by Dr David Healy

“There are many of us with bad Rheumatoid Arthritis or Crohn’s Disease who would gladly take these risks, especially if the drug produced a real benefit. We might be much less inclined to do for milder conditions. But in all cases the trade-off should be ours.

Ideally we should be helped by our doctors and pharmacists, but doctors and pharmacists who truly know what the problems can be. When AbbVie hide their clinical trial data, they make anyone who was involved in a clinical trial of their drug or a doctor prescribing it or pharmacist dispensing it into a potential accomplice to injury and perhaps homicide because the missing data is used to argue that ‘we’ve done trials and look there is no risk’.”

See full post: Lets do the AbbVie again by Dr. David Healy