The pharmaceutical industry has always been inextricably tied to the medical industry; the two seem to be a perfect pairing, after all. Why wouldn't modern medicine prescribe pills to make people better? The only problem is that many of these pills do not really make people better; doctors have merely been led to believe that they do.
Arnold Seymour Relman, the former editor-in-chief of the New England Medical Journal, and professor of medicine at Harvard University, once stated: "The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful."
Fortunately, there are others like him. The co-founder of Cochrane Collaboration, Dr. Peter Gotzsche, is currently working to bring the truth about the insidious nature of many common pharmaceuticals, including antidepressants, into the light. Dr. Gotzsche's research has revealed that 100,000 people die from the side effects of properly used medications each year, just in the United States. He has authored a number of different papers regarding the ways in which antidepressants contribute to the suffering of their consumers.
Researchers from the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen have also recently authored a paper which was published in the British Medical Journal on the sordid nature of antidepressants. The scientists concluded that pharmaceutical companies were not being totally honest and forthcoming about the side effects of their products, by not disclosing all the details regarding the results of their trials.
The study's lead author, Tamang Sharma, a PhD student at Cochrane, said: "We found that a lot of appendices were often only available upon request to the authorities, and the authorities had never requested them. I’m actually kind of scared about how bad the actual situation would be if we had the complete data."
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