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Quotes about Conflict Of interest from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"At 92% of these meetings in the year 2000, one expert had a financial conflict of interest, and at 55% of the meetings, at least half the members had a conflict of interest.51 This does not mean that consultants are dishonest, but it does raise considerable suspicion. There are also inevitable organizational problems for the FDA. Indeed, the mission of the FDA contains inherent contradictions that lead to inevitable dissonance. " - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"About half of those studies were authored by at least one person with a reported financial conflict of interest. To no one's evident surprise, trials that reported such a conflict of interest were almost five times more likely to find positive results about the drug.75 For schizophrenia drugs, Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and other companies have run numerous direct trials, in which their drug is compared with a competing product." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"At 92% of these meetings in the year 2000, one expert had a financial conflict of interest, and at 55% of the meetings, at least half the members had a conflict of interest.51 This does not mean that consultants are dishonest, but it does raise considerable suspicion. There are also inevitable organizational problems for the FDA. Indeed, the mission of the FDA contains inherent contradictions that lead to inevitable dissonance. " - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"This could create the appearance of a potential conflict of interest and there was also risk for an impact on employee selection and compensation if these liaisons had indeed taken place. Accepting sexual favors might clearly violate Pfizer's policy on conflict of interest. Then I told them all the specifics about the various allegations. I ended telling them that I was prepared to give detailed information, including dates, locations and facts related to the allegations listed in my memo." - Peter Rost, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman (Get the book.)

"But why send the papers to people who may have a conflict of interest? Very simply, because they are the most able to judge the work on its technical merits. This is the single most important thing wrong with contemporary science: when a field is specialized enough, only people who have a conflict of interest can fully judge your work. The ideal referee would be an honest broker who (a) knows enough to figure out for herself what the story is about while (b) not caring passionately enough about the outcome to find her judgement affected." - Luca Turin, The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell (Get the book.)

"There is an inherent conflict of interest in this arrangement. Without imputing malfeasance, it behooves the media companies to look askance, or choose other topics of interest, or practice circumlocution when it comes to being critical of the products of their advertisers. I believe that this is a subliminal dialectic most of the time. However, it need not be so subliminal." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"To no one's evident surprise, trials that reported such a conflict of interest were almost five times more likely to find positive results about the drug.75 For schizophrenia drugs, Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and other companies have run numerous direct trials, in which their drug is compared with a competing product. All five of the studies paid for by Lilly showed the superiority of their drug Zyprexa to Risperdal, while three of the four Johnson & Johnson studies favored Risperdal over Zyprexa. "The comparative studies are a joke. They are comical." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"Kassirer (Kassirer and Angell 1993), declared that for review articles and editorials, the declaration of a potential conflict of interest was not sufficient. The "Journal expects that authors of such articles will not have any financial interest in a company (or its competitor) that makes the product discussed in the article." Recently, the current editor modified that restriction to "any significant financial interest" (Drazen and Curfman 2002). Drazen had been involved in industry-sponsored drug trials prior to accepting the editorship." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.) "However, conflict of interest should exclude "experts" from panels and editorial authorships simply because self-interest, subliminal or not, cannot be weighed by those who are to be influenced. This, too, is an argument to which I will return. It is not clear how efficiently evidence translates into the quality of care in practice. The randomized controlled trials that are the fodder for Cochrane reviews and most similar exercises are seldom designed to seek evidence for clinically relevant effects, only evidence for effects. The systematic reviews are similarly limited (Malmivaara et al." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.) "Steinbrook (2005) offers a critical appraisal of the fashion in which conflict of interest is allowed to sully the advisory function of the fda's advisory panels. Lurie et al. (2006) surveyed fda advisory panels for declared conflicts of interest. Realize that fda regulations do not take exception to such ties to industry as long as they're declared. Of some 3,000 advisory committee members and voting consultants, 28 percent disclosed a conflict. Most were consulting arrangements, contracts/grants, and investments, often for sizable sums." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"The close business relationship between these in-store clinics and pharmacies also created a conflict of interest. The more meds prescribed in the clinic, the more money made at the pharmacy counter. There was a danger that patients would get drugs they did not need or whatever medicine happened to make the most money for the pharmacy, whether it was the best one for them or not. It had come to a point where almost any bodily function or any feeling could be tweaked with the help of a pill." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"I also referred to Pfizer's guidelines on employment policies and the fact that the company advises its employees that they "should avoid situations that present either an actual or potential conflict of interest or even the appearance of a potential conflict of interest." Having duly given them the context of my letter, I explained that employees had alleged that Pfizer management had violated the above guidelines by pursuing extramarital and other sexual relationships with people in their reporting line." - Peter Rost, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman (Get the book.)

"Katz told the Los Angeles Times that he had been "unaware of any relationship between Berlex and Schering AG," and therefore unaware of a potential conflict of interest. But, according to the Los Angeles Times, "Katz declined to identify when he learned that Berlex was the U.S. affiliate of Schering AG." Drs. Eastman and Katz were certainly not the only high-ranking officials at the NIH to receive consulting fees from the drug industry. Another official had accepted $1." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "In a 2002 article published in the British Medical Journal, investigative journalist Jeanne Lenzer reported that the American Heart Association "will not release the conflict of interest statements for public inspection and verification." However, a subsequent independent investigation reported that six out of the eight experts who supported the upgrade in the recommendations had financial ties to Genentech. In addition, contributions from Genentech to the AHA totaled $11 million between 1991 and 2001, including $2.5 million to help build the AHA's new headquarters in Dallas." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "The production and implementation of medical knowledge in the United States is by now so riddled with conflict of interest at virtually every level and every stage that nothing less than a new independent national public body is needed to protect the public's interest in medical science. Such a body must have the independence and expertise of the Institute of Medicine (part of the National Academies of Science), which would be well suited to accept responsibility for evaluating the scientific evidence." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"In 2006, the head of the FDA, Lester Crawford, pleaded guilty to false reporting and conflict of interest charges for owning shares in the food, beverage and medical device companies he was responsible for regulating. "Everywhere you look," says Bill Moyers, "the foxes own the chicken coop." Moyers's PBS documentaries on food pesticides revealed that chemical companies have knowingly withheld damaging information about harmful toxins in their products." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

"Unfortunately, there just happens to be a conflict of interest in that respect. 1. Where the conflict of interest comes into play, is in regard to the very common hypothyroid condition that results in reduced metabolism, increasing the risk for a drug overdose. The pharmaceutical industry makes sure, by its influence on your doctor's training, that the condition will seldom be identified, due to the standard protocol that most doctors are trained to follow. The standard blood test for TSH (and sometimes T4 thyroid) will seldom detect the true problem." - Dr. David W. Tanton; Ph.D., A Drug-Free Approach To Healthcare, Revised Edition (Get the book.)

"This fundamental conflict of interest provided very shallow and self-serving study results for anyone interested in truly finding out what real world nutrition was all about. Further research and observations of wild animal life, which was virtually devoid of disease, brought me to the shocking and devastating conclusion that cooking food was absolutely insane ?no less than a slow, "civilized" road to mass suicide." - Susan E. Schenck, The Live Food Factor: The Comprehensive Guide to the Ultimate Diet for Body, Mind, Spirit & Planet (Get the book.)

"The law recognizes this tension and resolves it by providing for waivers; if a conflict of interest were sufficient to make a possible candidate for advisory committee membership ineligible for service without the possibility of a waiver, FDA would be unable to obtain the outside expertise it needs. Not surprisingly, then, FDA issued waivers to 11 of the other 17 members of the FAC.177 After Whitaker v. Thompson III the drug industry has become emboldened. Whitaker v." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.) "Those appointed to run agencies and commissions have an inherent conflict of interest. They are aware that the decisions they make will either please or displease favored regulatees. They are aware that their decisions will either enhance or diminish their prospects for employment and business opportunity when they leave government." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"In a subsequent editorial, New England Journal editors Marcia Angell and Jerome Kassirer bemoaned the authors' failure to disclose their financial relationships, noting that Manson and Faich's conclusion, that fen-phen's benefits outweighed the risks, was just the sort of practical summary the journal wanted—if only the experts offering it had not had a conflict of interest. The fact that the authors were paid consultants, they wrote, "raises troubling questions." Later, Manson and Faich chalked up the omission to a "series of unfortunate misunderstandings" with their editors." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "There's growing awareness among medical professional societies that conflict of interest is a real problem that isn't going to go away if they ignore it. The press is (finally) investigating the myriad ways in which medicine's financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry are harming patients and distorting medical science. Many doctors don't want to have to change their ways—a doctor at a recent medical meeting stood up in the back of the room where a speaker was discussing the issue of gifts to doctors and said, "I like getting pens and sticky notepads and free lunches. Don't ruin it for me!" - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Can you spell conflict of interest? A man I once talked to told me that he quit working for a drug company because he noticed that doctors were encouraged to drop from studies patients who were not responding to the drug being tested to increase the percentage of good results! According to the report "Death by Medicine," the number one cause of death today in the USA is iatrogenic, meaning caused by errors made by medical caregivers." - Susan E. Schenck, The Live Food Factor: The Comprehensive Guide to the Ultimate Diet for Body, Mind, Spirit & Planet (Get the book.)

"There is, instead, a fundamental conflict of interest inherent in present standard modes of generation and interpretation of product safety and related data by scientists employed directly or indirectly by the same industry which manufactures the particular product." - Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., What's In Your Milk?: An Exposé of Industry and Government Cover-Up on the Dangers of the Genetically Engineered (rBGH) Milk You're Drinking (Get the book.)

"First Arnold Relman (Relman, "Information for Authors," 1990) and then his successor as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Jerome Kassirer, declared that, for review articles and editorials, the declaration of a potential conflict of interest was not sufficient. Rather, the "journal expects that authors of such articles will not have any financial interest in a company (or its competitor) that makes the product discussed in the article." - Nortin M. Hadler, The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System (Get the book.) "Stelfax and colleagues, "Conflict of Interest in the Debate over Calcium Channel Antagonists" (1998), discuss the calcium channel blocker stain on medical ethics. The trial by Tuomilehto and colleagues, "Effects of Calcium-Channel Blockade" (lggg), is an example using calcium channel blockers to the advantage of older patients with diabetes and systolic hypertension." - Nortin M. Hadler, The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System (Get the book.)

"While past clients have included the likes of McDonald's and the Snack Food Association, the company promised there would be no conflict of interest. So what did U.S. taxpayers get for their $2.5 million? Reactions from nutrition experts to the curious graphic—featuring little more than a few variously colored triangular segments alongside a stick figure climbing stairs—have been swift and unequivocal: the new "MyPyramid" is certainly no better and may even be worse than the old version." - Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back (Get the book.) "That's why CCF uses nonexistent violent threats to avoid disclosing the group's conflict of interest. Of course CCF knows this threat is a sham since director Rick Berman doesn't appear on television in disguise or use a pseudonym when talking to the media.19 Another curious thing about front groups like CCF is that food corporations can derive benefits from their slithery PR work without even paying for it. As Northeastern law professor Richard Daynard notes, the "smart folks" in the food business are happy to take advantage of the so-called free rider effect." - Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back (Get the book.) "Usually the amount of money a school district receives is dependent on soda sales, thus creating a conflict of interest between health and profit. In addition to soda, schools sell chips, candy, cakes, cookies, you name it. One angry parent sent me a photo of her child's school store that looked like the inside of a candy shop. Not willing to take it anymore, from Philadelphia to Seattle, from California to Connecticut, parents, teachers, policy makers, and advocates are organizing to take back their schools from the clutches of Coke and Pepsi." - Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back (Get the book.)

"One day he took off his lawyer's hat and moved to FDA, and became Deputy Commissioner of FDA, and then, in blatant conflict of interest, wrote regulations banning the labeling of rBGH milk. A: Let's try to sum up here. What would you like to see done? What do you think government should be doing, what do you think citizens should be doing in order to bring this issue to the forefront and start taking this seriously?" - Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., What's In Your Milk?: An Exposé of Industry and Government Cover-Up on the Dangers of the Genetically Engineered (rBGH) Milk You're Drinking (Get the book.)

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