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

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"The reasons are probably complex and may involve a 'messy blend of truth conflicts and conflicts of interest making it difficult to separate factual disputes from value disputes' or a manifestation of optimism bias (an unwarranted belief in the efficacy of interventions." In other words, the overuse of the flu vaccine is related to: (1) overzealous policy makers with good intentions but a lack of knowledge of the evidence; (2) the attitude that "it can't hurt"; and (3) the influence of the profit motive in selling millions of flu vaccines." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"In an investigation into whether or not the journals with the best "conflicts of interest" policies were adequately monitoring the admissions of private industry ties, the CSPI researchers found they were not. Even at JAMA the CSPI researchers discovered that 11% of the articles were written by authors who failed to disclose their financial conflicts of interest.5 regularly (44% attend two or more each month). This same study noted, "Students regard the pharmaceutical industry as one of their most important sources of pharmaceutical information." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.) "Despite the lack of openness concerning conflicts of interest, investigative reporters have been successful in gathering sufficient data to make it clear the system is extremely tainted today. USA Today reporters found that though, as already noted, federal law does not allow the experts who vote to approve a new drug to have a direct financial interest in the drug they are evaluating, more than half of the experts do have these conflicts of interest. But if the law does not allow this, how could this be possible? The answer is found in the fact that the experts are given waivers by the FDA." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"Brewer left the NIH in 2005 in the midst of adverse publicity about potential conflicts of interest. Nassir Ghaemi, M.D., a psychiatrist at Emory University, was quoted in the Emory Academic Exchange (February 2007) as having said, "Critics say we are being influenced and don't realize it—that drug companies are smarter than we are and know a lot more about human psychology than we think, and they're probably right about that to some extent." Expert consensus guidelines have a potent effect on doctors; they can be held liable if they do not adhere to accepted standards of care. Dr. Curt D." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"There will be multiple codicils attached to the contracts of employees of the indemnity scheme regarding conflicts of interest. Furthermore, no officer will be allowed remuneration greater than five times that of the average wage of those employed by the plan. That leaves some 10 percent of annual wages, tithed monthly, available for Plans A and B of the indemnity scheme. Plan A: The Health Plan As you are aware (since I emphasize it repeatedly in Worried Sick), there are important lessons that derive from the work of social epidemiologists." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"Ioannidis blamed the industrial quest for profit, the growing number of conflicts of interest among scientists, the small size of many clinical trials, as well as the manipulation of their design, for creating an era in medicine when most studies turn out to be fiction. "There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," he wrote in the journal PLoS Medicine. "However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false." - 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.) "The resulting news reports often quote physicians who are being paid by the manufacturer of the featured drug but fail to disclose the doctors' conflicts of interest. The news stories almost always exaggerate the possible benefits of a drug while ignoring its risks, just the outcome the company's public relations team was aiming for. Prevent automobile accidents caused by drivers impaired by the effects of their medications." - 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.) "At the same time, medical journals had their own conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. When journals published favorable articles on medicines, they could earn millions of dollars from reprints purchased by the drug companies. Sales representatives distributed the glossy reprints to local physicians to highlight the new "science" supporting the use of the company's product. By 2005 even editors of some of the world's top medical journals were admitting their controls were not strong enough to keep tainted corporate science out of their publications. " - 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.) "But for patients and providers it can mean misleading promotions, conflicts of interest, increased costs for health care, and ultimately, inappropriate prescribing." The regulators said they were particularly concerned about the companies' practice of paying pharmacists to get doctors to switch patients to their products, even when such a switch could harm the person. More troubling was some companies' practice of paying doctors to prescribe medications in what the companies called clinical trials but were really campaigns run by marketers." - 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.)

"Reclaiming Our Health: Exploding the Medical Myth and Embracing the Source of True Healing by John Robbins questions the efficacy of our high-tech approach to medicine and uncovers some of the conflicts of interest present in the mainstream medical community. In this solution-oriented book, Robbins also discusses many important issues related to fertility, childbirth, and women's health in general. Preconception and Pregnancy Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? (www.ourstolenfuture.org), by Theo Colborn, Dianne Du-manoski, and John Peterson Myers." - Deirdre Imus, Growing Up Green: Baby and Child Care: Volume 2 in the Bestselling Green This! Series (Green This!) (Get the book.)

"The ties are so intimate that the FDA always issues a series of letters before each hearing in which the agency lists these conflicts of interest and then exonerates each committee member from any legal liability for these conflicts. The role of these committees is advisory, but they have considerable influence over FDA decisions. At the time Prozac was passing through the FDA, it typically took ten years or more to get a drug approved." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"Another reason is that significant conflicts of interest have become a normal part of American medicine today. Dr. Scott Grundy, the chair of the panel that created the latest cholesterol guidelines, told the Wall Street Journal, "You can have the experts involved, or you could have people who are purists and impartial judges, but you don't have the expertise." Unfortunately, in American medicine that expertise is now virtually inseparable from financial ties to industry. When asked why a more balanced approach to heart disease prevention gets pushed aside by these guidelines, Dr." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "Another part of the answer may have to do with some of the authors' potential conflicts of interest: Five of the 14 experts who participated in writing the guidelines, including the chair of the panel, disclosed financial relationships with manufacturers of statin drugs. Four of these five, including the chair of the panel, had relationships with all three manufacturers of the best-selling statins. And curiously, although the guidelines recommend reduced intake of saturated fat and cholesterol, the words "egg," "beef," and "dairy" do not appear anywhere in the executive summary." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"Evaluation of ingredient safety is made by an "independent" board of toxicologists, pharmacologists, and dermatologists, without disclosure of their qualifications and potential conflicts of interest. Their findings are presented to IFRA's Scientific Advisory Board, and then published in its trade journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology. The information reported in this journal forms the basis on which IFRA formulates safety guidelines. Of the over 5,000 ingredients used in the fragrance industry, approximately 1,300 have so far been evaluated by the Research Institute." - Samuel S. Epstein, Randall Fitzgerald, Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Endanger Your Health . . . And What You Can Do about It (Get the book.) "The clever promotion of these products by a growing number of dermatologists, many of whom earn hefty fees consulting for cosmeceutical companies or produce and market their own products, raises disturbing questions about professional conflicts of interest which may tempt dermatologists to inflate cosmeceutical product claims. With so many claims for the effectiveness of cosmeceuticals relying on anecdotes, these products have understandably been characterized as a "voodoo science" (2,3)." - Samuel S. Epstein, Randall Fitzgerald, Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Endanger Your Health . . . And What You Can Do about It (Get the book.)

"That is particularly true when those with known conflicts of interest, with economic ties to the very company whose drug is being evaluated, are selected and the conflicts routinely waived. In 2006, the National Research Center for Women & Families evaluated FDA advisory committee meetings from January 1998 through December 2005. Based on its assessment, the NRC concluded: [M]any of today's FDA drug and device advisory committees are rubber stamps for approval almost every time they meet." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"The study itself and its accompanying editorial disclose, as potential conflicts of interest, that a number of the authors are either former employees or serve on an advisory board of, or were receiving grant support, lecture fees, or consulting fees from, the very manufacturers who put mercury in vaccines in the first place.That's like putting tobacco companies in charge of studies on the risks of smoking. 4." - Mark Hyman MD, The UltraMind Solution: Fix Your Broken Brain by Healing Your Body First (Get the book.)

"Relman, speaking from retirement (Relman 2002), decried the policy change: "Editors are on safer ground when they prohibit such conflicts of interest altogether rather than attempt to manage them by establishing flexible guidelines and negotiating with authors." Bravo. However, maybe Drazen's bending the ethic is a reflection of these times. Drazen (Drazen and Curfman 2002b) argues that a zero-tolerance policy "would exclude from the Journal the views of some of our top researchers and would instead favor authors who are not actively working in the field." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.) "The response of the leading medical journals was to promulgate and publish as a consensus document a detailed guideline for the declaring of potential conflicts of interest and the specifying of the role of each author in the conduct of the trial (for example, Ann Intern Med 135 (2001): 453 - 56). As a frequent author, I can tell you that this is a confusing exercise. For example, if in a future publication I reference Worried Sick, am I to declare a conflict of interest since this monograph is a source of royalty income?" - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"In 2006, after the San Jose Mercury News published an embarrassing expose of conflicts of interest among Stanford University medical school faculty, the school banned drug reps, free food, and gifts from its hospital. Several medical centers, including Kaiser hospitals, Yale, and the University of Virginia, had already barred drug reps from their facilities and forbidden their physicians to accept gifts. In response, the drug industry is already shifting some of its marketing effort away from drug reps." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Rather, they represent a single example of the kind of thing that routinely afflicts the medical journals: complex findings, which are reported by academics with conflicts of interest, who portray the results in a way that obscures risks and plays up benefits. The authors of the drug therapy article tell readers right on page 436 that naproxen is just about as effective at reducing pain as the expensive new drug. That much is plain. The paper doesn't hide the fact that there were double the cardiovascular events in the group taking Vioxx." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Eleven of the seventeen experts FDA management selected for the panel had conflicts of interest in the form of direct and indirect financial ties to the NSAID industry. The heavily conflicted panel, steered carefully by FDA counsel and CDER representatives, predictably voted against claim allowance. After the decision, in a letter to me dated October 12, 2004, FDA Director of Regulatory Affairs Michael M." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"Another is that despite welcome new pledges of transparency, full disclosure of trial results and no more conflicts of interest, the public is still largely peripheral to the process and still rightly concerned about any other regulatory failures in the pipeline. Even when they are invited to sit on regulatory committees, as is increasingly the case, they can be little more than a token presence. This is not to negate the value of the increasingly fashionable 'patient representative', rather to point out how it is rather more convincing in theory than reality." - Jacky Law, Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda (Get the book.)

"This will be the only place in the world where every bit of health information relating to a disease will be available, because it is the only place in the world where there are no conflicts of interest, no financial ties to the sale of drugs or the use of specific machines. With no advertisers to skew the information or make the information biased, you can be assured that you have the answers that you need regarding your health. 2. Healthcare directory. I believe it is vital that you get professional treatment from licensed healthcare practitioners." - Kevin Trudeau, More Natural Cures Revealed: Previously Censored Brand Name Products That Cure Disease (Get the book.) "There are no conflicts of interest. Nobody at NaturalCures.com has anything to sell. We are only interested in your health. We only want to tell you all the information that is available anywhere in the world so that you can make the best informed decision without any bias. You go to the website under "diseases" and it says "prostate cancer." You click on it and it lists every single method of curing prostate cancer anywhere in the world. It lists drugs; it lists surgery; it lists natural remedies; it lists everything. It tells you the exact true success rates of each treatment." - Kevin Trudeau, More Natural Cures Revealed: Previously Censored Brand Name Products That Cure Disease (Get the book.) "This way you can be assured and guaranteed that the information I am giving is unbiased and there are no conflicts of interest. As far as I know, mine is the only health newsletter and website that does not sell supplements or take advertising. I am going one step beyond. In addition to all of the above, I am not going to receive any compensation in any form, directly or indirectly, from any of the products that I endorse or recommend." - Kevin Trudeau, More Natural Cures Revealed: Previously Censored Brand Name Products That Cure Disease (Get the book.) "Everyone believes that this "expert," whether it is a doctor, professor, researcher, or an author, is giving an unbiased opinion with no conflicts of interest. Well, guess what? It was reported in the Wall Street Journal, and I have been saying this for years, that these people are actually paid huge sums of money by the respective companies to talk glowingly about the particular products. This happens in every venue. I personally know publishers who write glowing reports on cars or products in exchange for huge advertising contracts by those same respective manufacturers." - Kevin Trudeau, More Natural Cures Revealed: Previously Censored Brand Name Products That Cure Disease (Get the book.)

"DeAngelis, Catherine D. "Conflicts of Interest and the Public Trust." Journal of the American Medical Association 284 (2000): 2237-38. DesMaisons, Kathleen. The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program. New York: Ballantine, 2000. The Diabetes Monitor. "Is Stevia Safe? Depends Who You Ask." http://www.diabetesmonitor.com/ stevia.htm. Donn, Jeff. "Respected Journal Says Conflicts Compromising Science." Associated Press, May 18, 2000. Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, s.v. "cyclamate." MerckSource website, http:// www.mercksource.com/pp/us/cns/cns_hl_dorlands." - Connie Bennett, C.H.H.C. with Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D., Sugar Shock!: How Sweets and Simple Carbs Can Derail Your Life-- and How YouCan Get Back on Track (Get the book.)

"Not in CPI 2005 their leaders conduct public business in public—they demand to see the books, to inspect the records, and to be kept abreast of potential conflicts of interest. They demand that those in power be accountable to independent legal authorities when they break the rules—that leaders be public servants in more than name alone. Transparency is the battle cry of twenty-first-century politics. as Estonia's Tiger Leap ¦¦¦¦¦ After the fall of the Soviet Union, an international aid assessment summed up Estonia as being "bankrupt, polluted and decaying." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.)

"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. An analysis of the influence of these arrangements on voting patterns suggests that advisors with conflicts are predisposed to voting against the interests of competitor products, although the influence is weak and not discernibly determinative." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

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