Friday, November 09, 2007

Ari-Pimp-Razole: Science and Marketing Collide

Wow. I've recently seen a study on aripiprazole (Abilify) that boggled my mind. It was in the category of godawful. I'll be writing more about it, likely within the next few days. Stay tuned. It goes to show that Bristol Myers Squibb will stop at nothing to market their product, but I suppose their recent large settlement for naughty marketing of Abilify already indicated they had no qualms in how they pimped their product.

The atypical antipsychotics keep taking a beating on this site (1, 2) -- lots of hype for these medications treating, um, everything, yet little supporting data.
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2 comments:

  1. Alex ChernavskySaturday, November 10, 2007 7:30:00 AM

    And speaking of Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), check out this excellent article about how BMS fudged the clinical trials for their antidepressant Serzone:

    Hard to Swallow, by Thomas J. Moore

    The real interesting stuff starts about half-way down the second page of the article.

    Note:  The article originally appeared in a magazine called the Washingtonian back in 1997. It's apparently not available on their website anymore. The link posted above will take you to the appropriate page on The Wayback Machine (Internet archive). Sometimes the archive site is very slow, so give it a chance to load.

    This whole investigative piece is well worth reading. Thomas J. Moore does an excellent job in revealing some of the underhanded tactics used by Big Pharma.

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  2. AnonymousSaturday, November 10, 2007 3:47:00 PM

    Have you seen this site? This is its Abilify page. Quite interesting:

    http://patientsville.com/medication/abilify_side_effects.htm

    It has summaries of each adverse drug reaction submitted to the FDA.

    Abilify it doesn't make pleasant reading.

    I thinks its also necessary to search in the alphabetical section to get reports listed by 'other' names of drugs, generic, other countries names for a drug etc, to get a more complete picture.

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