Hormone Replacement Therapy: New Case Of Corruption In Academic Medicine

And, this case has nothing to do with academic psychiatry, but involves women's health doctors at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Unearthed by two reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is evidence that for several years researchers at the UW taught medical courses at the school touting the efficacy of hormone replacement therapy for women, even after other UW researchers participating in a major clinical study of HRT had cancelled the study due to grave safety risks that cropped up around the drugs, including breast cancer and heart disease. Of course, the first group of researchers downplayed those risks in their course and on an accompanying website, which was taken down earlier this month where reporters began asking the UW questions.

The course was funded by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to the tune of $12 million. Wyeth makes HRT drugs such a Prempro and Premarin. The UW got $1.5 million of that and individual doctors got money as well, all to advance views which several experts quoted in the article say are out of touch with consensus views in women's medicine.

"The Journal Sentinel asked several doctors, including Jacques Rossouw, chief of the Women's Health Initiative branch of the National Institutes of Health, to review course material. The initiative is the largest clinical trial of hormone therapy drugs.

"He said the views expressed in the course are not those of the general scientific community and are not suitable for a university medical education course.

"'There is a history of this kind of thing from Wyeth,' Rossouw said. 'The materials regurgitate lines that I have heard and read many times, and I have come to believe (though I do not know) that this is part of an overall marketing strategy to the profession. It is not good science because it fails to strive for any kind of balance.'"

Remember the days when doctors were supposed to be ethical actors and a firewall against their patients being given dangerous treatments? Those days are gone it seems. I wonder if they will ever come back.

As troubled as psychiatry is, there is now growing evidence that these wild conflicts and unscientific drug pushing pervade academic medicine. That's not just my view. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine makes that very point in this recent article.

It's time for medicine to have its head examined. Meanwhile, the article is further proof that America needs stout, healthy newspapers and reporters paid decent wages in order to have these sorts of stories continue to see public view.