Mosier, you’d really be surprised at how often drugs are used off-label. It’s common, accepted practice, done typically with years of evidence that the drug helps the indication in question. If the drug companies were required to go off and go through the FDA testing cycle (on a drug that’s already been FDA approved, just not for that particular disease) for every new indication before a doctor could prescribe it for that, drugs would cost a hell of a lot more than they already do.
For instance, at one point I was on amitriptyline, FDA approved as an antidepressant, as a migraine preventative. It’s also used for pain from shingles and as a treatment for eating disorders. Check the link - that’s a NIH website, listing its other uses and suggesting that if you’re a patient, you can ask your doctor about it. The Wiki page’s approval section shows that the migraine indication is officially approved in some European countries but not in the US.
The reason the fraud did not get a thread, was that it is just business as usual. In some perverted and twisted logic, we accept that corporations will do anything they can to make money. Regulation and environmental concerns are anti business. A proper corp will fight and cheat to make money. It is our job to stop them. Of course some fools think if corporations are left without regulation ,they will just naturally do the right thing. These people like Greenspan. are part of a economic philosophy called "thieving idiots and their enablers’. The people interests are served by fighting them as hard as we can. and to regulate and police them thoroughly.
We are just so used to reading about corporations breaking the law that it feels like yesterdays news. It is yesterday, todays and tomorrows if we don’t clamp down on them.
Or because maybe people who get annoyed enough to post “omg why hasn’t anyone posted a thread on this?!” are the ones who should be posting that thread in the first place, and all the other latest outrages have threads because other people are shouldering the workload for them. I don’t remember seeing a list of assigned thread-posting jobs around here.
I’m grateful you want to make the thread to be about me but I ought to mention the reason I left it 5 days was to see if there was any reaction. Now, hopefully back to the issue.
Btw, with 2 million in prison the US prison population is 10 times that of the European average; are things right when people get sent to prison for possession of x quantity of grass and executives face no personal penalty at all for corporate fraud on an historic scale?
I mean, if you’re going to lock up so many people . . .
This reminds me of why I don’t like the way our drug approval process works. The classic example is Prozac (read all the details in this book). Long story short the only way it got approved was by repeatedly submitting the same data set but filtering out any group that had a lower success rate. They basically took multiple studies that showed it was less effective than a placebo and turned them into one study that showed it barely worked. I told this to a psychology professor in class once. He didn’t believe me. He thought the doctor who wrote the book just had an axe to grind. I went to check the actual studies submitted. Unfortunately, the FDA did not have that available online. They did have an administrative letter addressing a application to approve Prozac for pediatric usage. It stated that this was the second application using data showing that Prozac was not effective on children. I just checked again, and it is now approved, but the original descrpencies are referred to here. What scares me is the that drug companies pay for these studies, only publish successful ones (cite), and then can repackage the data and add to until they get the results they want. It is truly frightening.
The serotonin hypothesis is scientifically unproven and unsupported. All SSRIs are flawed. Big Pharma make $16.9 billion per annum from them whilst the facts are swept under the carpet. Meanwhile the media & public think a simple chemical solution exists.