Buying Our Doctors: How Big Pharma controls your health and your doctor

“Drug companies have been allowed to market hundreds of prescription drugs to doctors and sell them to unsuspecting patients despite glaringly inadequate evidence that they offer any benefit and in many cases amid clear signs that they pose a risk of serious, often irreparable harm.”

-Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer

When we explore the most pernicious influences on our society, the top of the list is the food industry.  Big Food advertises more than any other conglomerate.  It impacts public policy, public opinion, and has done more than any other entity to assure we are the sickest nation on the planet.  We eat poorly because that’s what we’re sold, we consume plastics and pesticides in abundance, we have even been convinced that fad diets and potentially dangerous diet medicines are the solution because we won’t alter our habits.  In the end we flood our bodies with toxins and noxious compounds even as we tell ourselves that we are trying and even if we feel good about ourselves because our cholesterol is lower and our weight is managed.  Many medical studies, including ones that created the low-cholesterol craze and led to increased rates of diabetes and heart disease, are financed by Big Food, and Big Food pays medical schools and academic medical doctors in addition to controlling the message in the media and within the medical establishment.

But right behind Big Food, and profiting from Big Food’s assault on our bodies, is Big Pharma.  They are the second most prolific advertisers in the media.  If you wonder why CNN incessantly showcases doctors pushing you to take this medicine or that, doctors with white coats and impeccable credentials, it’s because CNN accepts close to a billion dollars a year from Big Pharma and hires doctors who depend on Big Pharma largesse.  Given Pfizer’s huge contribution to CNN’s bottom line during COVID, and the overall accentuation of pharmaceutical spending during the crisis which they used to increase sales, it’s no wonder that none of their “expert” physicians dared question the utility of forced vaccination and vaccine utility/safety, despite a large chorus of respectable doctors and scientists who found fault with the Pfizer vaccine but were not invited on major media outlets (and some of whom had their medical licenses threatened just for speaking the truth).  To CNN, any attack on Pfizer would be a threat to its bottom line, something also repeated on networks such as Fox which has pulled stories that threaten its pharma sponsors.  Overall, Big Pharma pays, according to some estimates, $30 billion for advertising annually just to media, with a quarter of that designated to TV.   Johnson and Johnson alone inserted over $20 billion into its advertising efforts a year, far more than research and development, most of which sought to prop up the blood thinner Xarelto.  How can the media be anything but biased with such a pernicious attachment to industry?  The short answer is that it can’t, and its fact checkers and reliability are dubious to say the least. 

We clearly can’t trust the media and their manicured list of academic doctor guests all of whom are paid handily by drug companies to spread a dangerous gospel of excessive care.  Doctors at large medical institutions rely on billions of dollars of drug company spending to maintain their research network.  Most clinical studies are financed and designed by drug companies, and research doctors at the nation’s most prestigious medical institutions must play nice with Big Pharma or the money will be deflected elsewhere.  Given the powerful glue that assures such doctors only speak with a Big Pharma script lest their careers suffer, stations like CNN and Fox have no difficulty finding “reputable doctors” to spread their advertiser’s’ message.  Most of these doctors truly believe that the tons of money they are receiving to advance their careers don’t influence their usually very dogmatic pro-drug positions that tell you to take more and more drugs. Many such academic doctors can plausibly deny they receive drug company money since Big Pharma pays Hopkins and then Hopkins pays the doctor.  Still, this horribly deceptive marriage between academia, the media, and Big Pharma has clearly made both academic medicine and the media dangerous.

If a drug company finances and designs most clinical medical studies, why do major journals print them?  That’s because the journals too rely on drug company funding.  As we show in our book A Return to Healing, the AMA started accepting and even relying on drug company funding as early as 1905, essentially endorsing only drugs that advertised in its journal.  Little has changed since then; JAMA receives $20 million a year in drug company revenue, which constitutes 10% of the AMA’s entire income.  In addition, although such journals claim to be peer reviewed—in other words, reputable academic doctors review all submitted articles to assure their validity—those doctors are also paid by drug companies, a figure we now know to be about $1billion over 3 years.  The largest and most prestigious medical journals pay their reviewers the most in drug company money, assuring that the articles they publish are friendly to their drug company sponsors.

And all this is the tip of the iceberg.  As we detail in our book, drug companies view two of their investments as being most productive.  First are consumer and medical societies.  These include the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association, and the Alzheimer’s Association, all of which take large amounts of money from Big Pharma and have many Big Pharma executives on their boards.  These groups push drug use above all else, even if they give lip service to lifestyle changes; internal documents show that they know that people with, for instance, the fabricated disease of prediabetes will ultimately take more drugs even if they are told to try diet first.  Then there are medical societies like the American College of Cardiology and the American Psychiatric Association that, in addition to directly lobbying Congress and the public to assure higher pay for their specialist-doctor members, take ample funds from Big Pharma.  Over a quarter of the entire budget of the American Psychiatric Association is financed by pharmaceutical companies, and the “scientific” and “peer-reviewed” bible of psychiatric diagnoses, the DSM, is written by doctors who receive tens of millions of dollars from Big Pharma as a reward for their drug-loving conclusions; 6 out of 10 “expert” contributors had significant financial ties to Big Pharma.

And then there’s the CDC and FDA.  Robert Kennedy was severely chastised by the Big Pharma sponsored national media when he removed former drug company executives from the CDC, and most Democrats also berated him for harming the integrity of the organization.  But again, as we show in our book and which medical journalists have demonstrated, the CDC is largely financed by Big Pharma through its CDC-foundation, and it has in its leadership primarily former executives of Big Pharma.  Many of its campaigns, whether in favor of anti-viral drugs like Tamiflu and Paxlovid, or its advocacy of useless vaccines like Prevnar (the second pneumonia shot), or its Hepatitis C campaign, have all been shown to be instigated by its Big Pharma leadership and all of them directly contradicted current medical knowledge.  In fact, when Cochrane (a non-drug company financed think tank that examines medical interventions through a truly objective lens) insisted that the makers of Tamiflu release their unpublished data, and that data clearly showed that the drug not only was ineffective against flu but also caused significant side effects, the CDC refused to acknowledge that data and continued to not only advocate Tamiflu use but also often mandate it.  The same is true of Paxlovid.  And the FDA is even more corrupt, receiving all of its funding for drug approval from the drug companies themselves, and having drug company executives with hefty stock options make the final decision.  The new book No More Tears about Johnson and Johnson, written by New York Times journalist Gardiner Harris, lambasts the FDA as being no more than an instrument of Big Pharma.  Recent articles by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer not only demonstrate the FDA’s perfidy in approving dangerous and ineffective drugs based on both the money and personnel given to them by Big Pharma (reviewers typically have strong financial ties to drug companies), but their analysis of new dementia drugs that cost $50,000 a year, don’t improve clinical outcomes, and cause brain bleeds in over 20% of people each year shows just how deep the influence of Big Pharma is not only on the FDA but also on those who rely on the FDA for objective information.

But of all the tricks and methods that drug companies use to sell useless and dangerous drugs—drugs that have caused more death and disability than providing any benefit—their one go-to remains their reliance on doctors.  And not just doctors who accept their money, give talks for them, or work on their boards, but all doctors.  Yes, many of our “experts” from academia buttress their salaries not only by taking drug company money for their research, but also by being on their speaker’s panel.  I remember being at the annual meeting of the American Medical Directors Association and the group’s secretary—who is the leading expert on bone density at Hopkins and gives ample lectures for the companies that make bone density medicines—implored all of us to visit the hundreds of drug company booths that gave everyone lunch and gifts and a lot of “education.”  This conference can’t occur without their kindness, she said.  Yes, almost every conference doctors attend, every journal article they read (especially the internet journals like Medpage Today), every protocol and calculator they use to determine treatment, every quality indictor they follow are all scripted by drug companies.  And doctors are fully unaware of this conflict of interest; they are taught from day one to follow expert advice and ask no questions.  Only about 10% of doctors (including most “experts,” specialists, and academics) know the risks and benefits of the drugs they prescribe, and most severely overestimate the benefit and ignore the risk.  Doctors, most internal memos from drug companies acknowledge, are their biggest asset.  And that’s because they simply swallow the fallacious dogma spit out by the companies and their paid allies (media, journals, protocols, expert doctors, ect) and write the prescriptions.

So, what can we do when every single tentacle of the healthcare system is driven by drug companies, and when the vast majority of doctors do the bidding of drug companies?  What is our recourse when our trusted cardiologist pulls out her calculator and tells us that unless we take these 5 drugs we’ll get a heart attack, a stroke, go into fluid overload, and maybe die before we even get home!  The vast majority of drugs don’t help anything or anyone, and certainly almost no drugs are studied in people with other medical conditions, the elderly, or people at risk for injury.  The accumulation of drugs is incredibly dangerous, with studies showing that even taking more than 5 drugs at once increases risk.  While doctors may be the best salesmen for the drug companies, you as a patient don’t have to take the bait.  As Osler said, if you have a problem and take a drug for it, now you have two problems.  During our era of drugging, we are living shorter and suffering from more chronic disease, with the drugs themselves causing more harm that actual illnesses.  It’s ironic that as cardiologists have convinced tens of millions of trusting souls to take statins and blood thinners so that they don’t get strokes, the number of strokes (mostly from brain bleeds) has increased, and the percentage of deaths from bleeding has become almost epidemic.  Doctors do just what Big Pharma wants: they tell people to take more blood thinners and statins to fix the problems caused by blood thinners and statins.  When I spoke to a local cardiology “expert” and showed him studies demonstrating the danger of blood thinners in the elderly, he hung up the phone on me.  He just didn’t want to know.  He had his drug company data and drug company calculator and gives talks for drug companies.  And that’s where the problem really is.  You can’t trust doctors.  Unlike the drug companies, they wrote the prescriptions that caused the opioid epidemic, and they freely write all the prescriptions that make the drug companies smile, and patients suffer.

The best advice is to be critical of everything you hear in the media, everything your doctor tells you when he or she insists that you must take these drugs or else, everything that you take that makes you feel worse even if some vague numerical measurement gets better.  We have a drug epidemic in our nation, and it is eating away at us even as the doctors tell us that these drugs are necessary and lifesaving.  Be careful.  Be suspicious.  And just say no.