Believe it or not, medicine causes illness. Avandia causes heart disease. Vioxx doubles the risk for heart attacks and strokes. Zyprexa causes diabetes. It makes you think - what will that blue pill do to you? (showing my geek colors on that one)

Some may call it negligence, but I hope you know better by now. The tobacco industry has an entire institute devoted to making cigarettes look practically harmless - what makes you think scientists at the FDA can't overlook side effects that would be detrimental to a drug going through screening?

After all, more than one third of the FDA staff is paid for by Big Pharma. Yes, their whole salaries, not partial, and not even through this or that resource - they are literally hired and paid directly by Big Pharma.

Guess what else Big Pharma pays for

Doctors are required to take specified amounts of accredited continued education every year. Unfortunately, this continued education is terribly biased because Big Pharma hires companies to develop and deliver coursework. In some cases, the drug company then pays said company additional funds to actually pay doctors to take their courses.

Now this wouldn't be such a bad thing if those courses weren't so completely biased.

For example, GlaxoSmithKline footed the bill for dozens of educational courses intended to emphasize the benefits of Avandia over other drugs. An influential Internet-based educational program paid for by the company focused on specific studies that highlighted Avandia's advantages without discussing one of the drug's most worrisome side effects, increased levels of the lipids implicated in heart disease.

Avandia's chief competitor, a drug from Takeda Pharmaceuticals called Actos, improves lipid levels but was hardly mentioned. When GlaxoSmithKline's program did cite Actos, it did so tepidly. The information in the course was presented by noted diabetes academics paid by GlaxoSmithKline and other drug companies. - Source: New York Times article.

The solution

The Senate Finance Committee has caught wind of this - actually they've been researching it for two years and recently published a report on it. So thankfully the loophole in current legislation is being reviewed, and all it will take to close it is revoking accreditation to courses paid for by drug companies.

Unfortunately, it's a bit late for the 140,000 former Vioxx prescribed patients with heart disease and countless others that have fallen victim to FDA and Big Pharma coverups.