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I found the New York Times editorial, at the following link, to be extremely informative. The bottom line is, (IMO), seeding trials are the primary mechanism by which the pharmaceutical companies so effectively brainwash doctors into prescribing their products. I've always wondered how doctors could be so gullible, but with slick marketing ploys such as this, it's no wonder that they fall for the pitch. This is deceptive marketing at it's best, IMO, because it doesn't even appear on the surface to be a marketing tactic. The title of the editorial is “Useless Studies, Real Harm” and it was written by University of Minnesota bioethicist Carl Elliot. Here's a quote from the article:
In a typical seeding trial, a pharmaceutical company will identify several hundred doctors and invite them to take part in a research study. Often the doctors are paid for each subject they recruit. As the trial proceeds, the doctors gradually get to know the drug, making them more likely to prescribe it later.
In an age of for-profit clinical research, this is the new face of scandal. Pharmaceutical companies promote their drugs with pseudo-studies that have little if any scientific merit, and patients naïvely sign up, unaware of the ways in which they are being used. Nobody really knows how often companies conduct such trials, but they appear with alarming regularity in pharmaceutical marketing documents. In the marketing plan for the antidepressant Lexapro for the 2004 fiscal year, Forest Laboratories described 102 Phase IV trials — the classification under which seeding trials fall — in a section labeled “Marketing Tactics.”
Oversight bodies like the Food and Drug Administration generally don’t view seeding trials as research scandals: seeding trials are not illegal, and the drugs in question have already received F.D.A. approval. But even after particularly egregious seeding trials have been exposed, the F.D.A. has not issued sanctions. Take the notorious Advantage study, a seeding trial of the pain reliever Vioxx conducted by Merck. According to a 2008 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine, litigation documents show that the Advantage study was conceived and managed by Merck’s marketing department. Three subjects died in the Advantage trial; five more subjects experienced heart attacks. Oversight bodies should treat the Advantage study as a violation of research ethics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opini ... emc=tha212
Drug companies love to use such marketing tactics, because it provides them with a way to sidestep the old caveat emptor principle, by creating a false sense of authenticity, as they dupe doctors into doing their marketing for them.
It appears that drug companies will do virtually anything they can get away with, to sell more drugs, whether the drugs actually provide any health benefits, or not.
Tex
