This article has been published on the website of American legal firm Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman. It begins:
“‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave. When first we practise to deceive!” From Walter Scott’s epic poem, Marmion.
This is the story of a drug and an idea, and how, in 2004, the rise of one helped bring about the downfall of the other.
The drug is Celexa (generic citalopram), an SSRI antidepressant whose manufacturer, Forest Laboratories, Inc., is currently the target of a class action Celexa and Lexapro lawsuit. The idea is evidence-based medicine (EBM), which gained prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
EBM grew from the belief that the practice of medicine should be based not just on the experience of individual doctors, common practices, or the advice of “experts,” but on evidence from high-quality medical research. A 1992 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) called EBM a ‘new paradigm’ that required research literature to be evaluated by ‘formal rules of evidence.’
The authors of that article were most likely not referring to the rules of evidence used in legal proceedings, but they might just as well have been. For it has largely been through lawsuits that physicians, consumers, and researchers discovered a fatal flaw in this new paradigm. That flaw is the research EBM depends upon is largely created by pharmaceutical companies. And, many of those companies have viewed medical research as something to be manipulated, altered, falsified, or kept hidden in order to sell drugs and expand markets …”
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