Tuesday, September 29, 2009

The Real Reasons Behind Fed Secrecy

Congressman Ron Paul has:



The Real Reasons Behind Fed Secrecy

Last week I was very pleased that the Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207. The bill has 295 cosponsors and there is also strong support for the companion bill in the Senate. This hearing was a major step forward in getting the bill passed.

I was pleased that the hearing was well-attended, especially considering that it was held on a Friday at nine o’clock in the morning! I have been talking about the immense, unchecked power of the Federal Reserve for many years, while the attention of Congress was always on other things. It was gratifying to see my colleagues asking probing questions and demonstrating genuine concern about this important issue as well.

The witness testifying in favor of HR 1207 made some very strong points, which was no surprise considering the bill is simply common sense. It was also no surprise that the witness testifying against the bill had no good arguments as to why a full audit should not be conducted promptly. He attempted to make the case that the fed is already sufficiently accountable to Congress and that the current auditing policy is adequate. The fact is that the Fed comes to Congress and talks about only what it wants to talk about, and the GAO audits only what the current laws allow to be audited. The really important things however, are off limits. There are no convincing arguments that it is in the best interests of the American people for anything the Fed does to be off limits.

It has been argued that full disclosure of details of funding facilities like TALF and PDCF that enabled massive bailouts of Wall Street would damage the financial position of those firms and destabilize the economy. In other words, if the American people knew how rotten the books were at those banks and how terribly they messed up, they would never willingly invest in them, and they would fail. Failure is not an option for friends of the Fed. Therefore, the funds must be stolen from the people in the dark of night. This is not how a free country works. This is not how free markets work. That is crony corporatism and instead of being a force for economic stabilization, it totally undermines it.

If the Fed gave its actual arguments against a full audit, they would not have mentioned anything about political independence or economic stability. Instead they would admit they don’t want to be audited because they enjoy their current situation too much. Under the guise of currency control, they are able to help out powerful allies on Wall Street, in exchange for lucrative jobs or who-knows-what favors later on. An audit would expose the Fed as a massive fraud perpetrated on this country, enriching a privileged few bankers at the top of our economic food chain, and leaving the rest of us with massively devalued dollars which we are forced to use by law. An audit would make people realize that, while Bernie Madoff defrauded a lot of investors for a lot of money, the Fed has defrauded every one of us by destroying the value of our money. An honest and full accounting of how the money system really works in this country would mean there is not much of a chance the American people would stand for it anymore.


Thank You Congressman/Dr. Paul

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Allen Jones Addresses Mental Health Screening: Video



Allen Jones Full Whistleblower Report is available free at the top of our sidebar.

Please take the time to read it if you haven't yet done so.

Psych Drugs are peddled under the Ruse of Suicide Prevention. In Investigative Reporter Ms. Evelyn Pringle's report, the actual numbers of Suicides tell us that those Drugs aren't getting the job done.

Suicide Prevention Drug Pushing Racket Part I

However, as we've previously noted, the Drugs Are getting a few Other jobs done.

Mental Health: Comes With FREE Suicide

And for even More of the wonders getting Drugged into Mental Health can bestow upon you:

Side Effects

Friday, September 25, 2009

Healthcare Reform Is More Corporate Welfare

Congressman Ron Paul has:

Healthcare Reform is More Corporate Welfare

Last Wednesday the nation was riveted to the President’s speech on healthcare reform before Congress. While the President’s concern for the uninsured is no doubt sincere, his plan amounts to a magnanimous gift to the health insurance industry, despite any implications to the contrary.

For decades the insurance industry has been lobbying for mandated coverage for everyone. Imagine if the cell phone industry or the cable TV industry received such a gift from government? If government were to fine individuals simply for not buying a corporation’s product, it would be an incredible and completely unfair boon to that industry, at the expense of freedom and the free market. Yet this is what the current healthcare reform plans intend to do for the very powerful health insurance industry.

The stipulation that pre-existing conditions would have to be covered seems a small price to pay for increasing their client pool to 100% of the American people. A big red flag, however, is that they would also have immunity from lawsuits, should they fail to actually cover what they are supposedly required to cover, so these requirements on them are probably meaningless. Mandates on all citizens to be customers of theirs, however, are enforceable with fines and taxes.

Insurance providers seem to have successfully equated health insurance with health care but this is a relatively new concept. There were doctors and medicine long before there was health insurance. Health insurance is not a bad thing, but it is not the only conceivable way to get health care. Instead, we seem to still rely on the creativity and competence of politicians to solve problems, which always somehow seem to be tied in with which lobby is the strongest in Washington.

It is sad to think of the many creative, free market solutions that government prohibits with all its interference. What if instead of joining a health insurance plan, you could buy a membership directly from a hospital or doctor? What if a doctor wanted to have a cash-only practice, or make house calls, or determine his or her own patient load, or otherwise practice medicine outside the constraints of the current bureaucratic system? Alternative healthcare delivery models will be at an even stronger competitive disadvantage if families are forced to buy into the insurance model. And yet, the reforms are sold to us as increasing competition.

What if just once Washington got out of the way and allowed the ingenuity of the American people to come up with a whole spectrum of alternatives to our broken system? Then the free market, not lobbyists and politicians, would decide which models work and which did not.

Unfortunately, the most broken aspect of our system is that Washington sees the need to act on every problem in society, rather than staying out of the way, or getting out of the way. The only tools the government has are force and favors. These are tools that many unscrupulous and lazy corporations would like to wield to their own advantage, rather than simply providing a better product that people will willingly buy. It seems the health insurance industry will get more of those advantages very soon.


Thank You Dr. Paul

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Ghostbusters: Crackdown On Medical Ghostwriting

AHRP has:

Medical Journal Editors To Crackdown On Ghostwriting_NYT

Monday, 21 September 2009

The New York Times reports (below) that:

This month PLoS editors called for a zero tolerance policy: calling upon journals to identify and retract ghostwritten articles and banish their authors from publishing in their journal. The New York Times reports (below) that:

"In medical journal circles, the exorcism of industry-financed editorial assistance even has its own name: ghostbusting."

Medical journal editors are FINALLY determined to do something meaningful to prevent company-crafted, ghostwritten articles from infiltrating their journals under the "authorship" of prominent academics who are engaging in research misconduct for cash. Those ghosted articles have corrupted the practice of medicine, leading to the use of ineffective, harmful therapies, and have largely undermined the integrity of the scientific literature.

Despite a continuing stream of revelations in U.S. courtrooms where company documents confirm the planting of promotional articles that masquerade as science, "leading medical journals have continued to rely largely on an honor system of disclosure to detect such potential bias, asking authors to voluntarily report any industry ties or contributors to their manuscripts." Journal editors, afraid of losing corporate ads and reprint income, have been duplicitous in turning a blind eye to the corruption.

The editors of PLoS Medicine--Virginia Barbour, Jocalyn Clark, Susan Jones, Larry Peiperl, Emma Veitch, and Gavin Yamey--have taken up the clarion call that Dr. Richard Smith, longtime editor of the British Medical Journal, had been championing without success. This month PLoS editors called for a zero tolerance policy : calling upon journals to identify and retract ghostwritten articles and banish their authors from publishing in their journal.

“Any papers where this breach is substantiated should be immediately retracted,” the editors wrote. “Authors found to have not declared such interest should be banned from any subsequent publication in the journal and their misconduct reported to their institutions.”


The power of persuasion, however, does not lie with the editors of PLoS--it lies with Congress.

The Times reports, "As Washington tries to revamp the health care system, concerns about ghostwriting are taking on new urgency. One of the underlying assumptions of the health care overhaul effort is that money can be saved and medical care improved by relying more heavily on research showing which drugs and procedures are the most effective. But experts fear that the process could be corrupted if research articles are skewed by the hidden influence of drug or medical device makers."

Senator Charles E. Grassley, the former chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which has taken a leading role in the health overhaul effort, is hot on the trail of ghostwriting. In July, Mr. Grassley sent letters to eight leading medical journals asking about their ghostwriting policies. He also asked whether in the last five years, the journals had taken action against any author who had failed to report the involvement of a third party in the development of a manuscript.

None of the editors reported taking action against an author for ghostwriting. Their replies to the senator, obtained by The New York Times, varied from assurances of editorial diligence to the equivalent of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” One editor in chief, for example, wrote that because his journal prohibited ghostwriting, the publication did not have a specific policy on the practice. Journals without explicit ghostwriting rules can expect to hear more from the senator...

Shame on medical journals and academia for demonstrating their inability / unwillingness to take action against the polluters of Medicine: not until the threat of Congressional tightening of the purse strings did journal editors consider cleansing the scientific literature of fraudulent articles.

Contact: Vera Sharav

THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 18, 2009
Medical Editors Push for Ghostwriting Crackdown
By NATASHA SINGER and DUFF WILSON

The scientific integrity of medical research has been clouded in recent years by articles that were drafted by drug company-sponsored ghostwriters and then passed off as the work of independent academic authors.

Yet the leading medical journals have continued to rely largely on an honor system of disclosure to detect such potential bias, asking authors to voluntarily report any industry ties or contributors to their manuscripts.

But now, in light of recently released evidence that some drug makers have gone to great lengths to turn scientific articles into marketing vehicles for their products, some influential medical editors are cracking down on industry-financed ghostwriting. And they are getting help from some members of Congress.

These editors are demanding that journals impose tougher disclosure policies for academic authors and that the journals enforce their own rules by actively investigating the provenance of manuscripts and by punishing authors who play down extensive contributions by ghostwriters.

In medical journal circles, the exorcism of industry-financed editorial assistance even has its own name: ghostbusting.

In an editorial last week calling for a zero tolerance policy, the editors of the medical journal PLoS Medicine, from the Public Library of Science, called for journals to identify and retract ghostwritten articles and banish their authors.

“Any papers where this breach is substantiated should be immediately retracted,” the editors wrote. “Authors found to have not declared such interest should be banned from any subsequent publication in the journal and their misconduct reported to their institutions.”

In the past, researchers have raised allegations of ghostwriting in articles about quality-of-life drugs like antidepressants, painkillers and diet pills. But the situation has become more serious this year after a few editors said they had discovered ghostwriting in manuscripts about life-and-death products like cancer and hematology drugs.

As Washington tries to revamp the health care system, concerns about ghostwriting are taking on new urgency. One of the underlying assumptions of the health care overhaul effort is that money can be saved and medical care improved by relying more heavily on research showing which drugs and procedures are the most effective. But experts fear that the process could be corrupted if research articles are skewed by the hidden influence of drug or medical device makers.

One senator on the trail of ghostwriting is Charles E. Grassley, a Republican of Iowa and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, which has taken a leading role in the health overhaul effort.

In July, Mr. Grassley wrote letters asking eight leading medical journals about their ghostwriting policies. He also asked whether, since 2004, the journals had taken action against any author who had failed to report the involvement of a third party in the development of a manuscript.

None of the editors reported taking action against an author for ghostwriting. Their replies to the senator, obtained by The New York Times, varied from assurances of editorial diligence to the equivalent of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” One editor in chief, for example, wrote that because his journal prohibited ghostwriting, the publication did not have a specific policy on the practice.

Journals without explicit ghostwriting rules can expect to hear more from the senator.

“Objective research is really at the heart of public trust in medicine,” Mr. Grassley wrote in an e-mail message to a reporter last Friday.

Allegations of ghostwriting first surfaced several years ago in the promotion of the diet drug combination fen-phen, which was taken off the market because of safety concerns in 1997, and the painkiller Vioxx, withdrawn in 2004. And last month, documents made public in litigation against the pharmaceutical giant Wyeth showed that the company had paid a medical writing firm to draft articles, published through 2005, favorable to its Premarin family of hormone drugs even as evidence mounted that certain hormone drugs could increase the risk of breast cancer.

Some researchers say industry ghostwriting is widespread and continuing. Even with disclosure policies already in effect at many publications, unnamed authors played a role in more than 40 articles published last year at six major medical journals, according to a study made public last week. That study, conducted by an editorial team at The Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, defined ghostwriting broadly as any uncredited significant contribution to research or writing, regardless of whether it was financed by industry.

Over the last few years, international associations of medical journal editors have developed stricter disclosure criteria for authors of and contributors to scientific manuscripts. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, for example, defines an author as a person who makes a substantial contribution to developing a study or analyzing its results and in drafting a manuscript, and who approves the final version of an article. Authors should identify other contributors to an article and their financing sources, according to the group.

Drug companies say they are about to put these publication principles into effect for clinical trials.

“The pharmaceutical industry is moving in lock step with the editors of medical journals,” Jeffrey K. Francer, assistant general counsel of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group for drug makers, said in an interview last week. The new standards are to take effect in October, he said.

But even though disclosure policies are already in place at many journals, the new JAMA study found a ghostwriting rate of more than 7 percent at JAMA and PLoS Medicine, and nearly 11 percent at the New England Journal of Medicine. Joseph S. Wislar, who led the study, said in an interview last week that The New England Journal of Medicine may have had a higher rate because the journal did not require lead authors to list all other contributors.

Editors of The New England Journal of Medicine said that they were puzzled by and skeptical of the JAMA data, but confirmed that the publication left such disclosures to the discretion of authors.

Experts who study disclosure said authorship policies might be inadequate in part because they asked for incomplete information, but also because they typically had no teeth.

“Requiring someone to write a retraction or barring them from publishing in academic journals for some period of time — that would be an effective deterrent,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who has conducted research on the effect of conflict-of-interest disclosures in medicine.

A few editors said they were already taking tougher stances after discovering their disclosure policies had allowed authors to acknowledge writers financed by drug companies without explaining that the paid writers played primary roles in creating the manuscripts.

The problem of incomplete disclosure is particularly worrisome for opinion pieces like review articles, in which an author brings a personal perspective to a wide body of research, according to an editorial in The Oncologist.

“These articles are likely to influence the direction of new investigation as well as the practice of oncology,” wrote Dr. Bruce A. Chabner, the clinical director of the cancer center at Massachusetts General Hospital and the editor in chief of The Oncologist. “It is critical that such articles represent the unbiased views of the authors, and not those of a ghostwriter or a drug’s sponsor.”

The Oncologist plans to continue publishing clinical trials sponsored by drug companies, Dr. Chabner wrote. But the journal no longer accepts opinion pieces that involve writers with ties to companies that have a commercial interest in an article’s content — nor will its editors correspond with hired writers who are not named as the authors of manuscripts.

Mr. Francer, of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said such measures could be detrimental because they could “chill research and chill support for research.”

But the trend may be too far along to deter.

In January, editors at Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematology, discovered that an unsolicited manuscript submitted by a prominent researcher involved significant contributions from a pharmaceutical company employee named in the acknowledgments — a major role in the manuscript that should have qualified the employee to be listed as an author of the paper. Further detective work quickly turned up two other ghostwritten manuscripts.

Editors decided to make their discoveries public in an editorial titled “ ‘Ghostbusting’ at Blood” in which they wrote that the journal would henceforth reject opinion pieces that had industry ties.

In an interview last month, Dr. Cynthia E. Dunbar, the editor in chief of Blood, said that, in the future, the journal would consider a ban of several years for authors caught lying about ghostwriting, in addition to retracting their ghosted articles.

But, said Dr. Dunbar, who is a hematologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, “I hope we don’t have to do that.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted (© ) material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.


Thank You AHRP

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Britain's Government-Run Health-Care System Under Fire.

CNSnews.com has:

Britain's Government-Run Health-Care System Under Fire

Go Read It, and hope that British Citizens can Get Rid of this Obnoxious, Inhumane, Cost Cutting, Socialist Dysfunction before it finishes off any More of their family members.

And ask yourself; Why, would we want the Same Disaster here in the States?


There's One, Huge, and very Visible, 100% Incompetent, Disease Mongering Drain on America's Health Care Resources which we could get Rid of Right Now.

Cut the GD Funding Off. All of it.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Python Interlude: She's A Witch!



Behavioral Scientists

Wooden Duck/Chemical Imbalance

DSM-IV-TR Billing Code 300.9: Unspecified Mental Disorder (non psychotic)

Scales/Pharma funded CME.

Key Opinion Leaders

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Mental Health: Comes With FREE Psychotic Disorder

All 23 of the Psychiatric Poisons in our FDA Adverse Reaction section feature Psychotic Disorder as an FDA reported Adverse Reaction with each Drug Individually identified as 'The Primary Suspect Drug' responsible for that Adverse Reaction

Abilify: Psychotic Disorder
Adderall: Psychotic Disorder
Celexa: Psychotic Disorder
Clozapine: Psychotic Disorder
Cymbalta: Psychotic Disorder
Depakote: Psychotic Disorder
Effexor: Psychotic Disorder
Geodon: Psychotic Disorder
Klonopin: Psychotic Disorder
Lamactil: Psychotic Disorder
Lexapro: Psychotic Disorder
Neurontin: Psychotic Disorder
Paxil: Psychotic Disorder
Prozac: Psychotic Disorder
Risperdal: Psychotic Disorder
Ritalin/Concerta: Psychotic Disorder
Seroquel: Psychotic Disorder
Strattera: Psychotic Disorder
Tegretol: Psychotic Disorder
Wellbutrin: Psychotic Disorder
Xanax: Psychotic Disorder
Zoloft: Psychotic Disorder
Zyprexa: Psychotic Disorder