“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”

Adlai Stevenson.





This week saw two very important publications in the medical scientific press. PLOSmedicine.com is the only medical journal on line which is totally free. There is a whole new issue this month on disease mongering-corporate sponsored disease creation. Interestingly, of the eleven articles specially commissioned for this issue, with two Australian researchers as guest editors, the editor has included one of our articles. Second land mark story is the tragedy of six young men that received TGN1412, a novel type of immune stimulant that had never been used in humans thus far, that has sent shock waves through the research world and has caused regulators to rethink procedures for testing certain new drugs in human beings. As I sat down to write this piece I received a mail from a dear friend of mine in the US, Bala Shenoy, whose philosophic lamentations gave credence to this piece that I was compelled to quote him verbatim (italics mine) hereunder.



“Henry Ford would not have in his wildest dreams, imagined what his push for assembly line mass production would do to public health. The same is the case with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations which promoted division of labor, Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity which led to the digitization of every possible phenomenon! If at all there is a Disaster of unimaginable magnitude, it is going to be the Disaster caused by unbridled mass production and unbridled mass media use in marketing “Fears” and then solutions to get over the “Fears”! This endless cycle of production and distribution keeps the Dow Jones, FT SE, Nikkei, SENSEX etc rising and the Credit Card Companies making hay while the sun shines! Moody's and S&P will be able to justify borrowings by big corporations promoting fear psychosis and purported remedies for different conditions and imbalances!”



There can never be a better description of the present goings on. It is the poor that are at the receiving end in this game. In February Rob O saw a SMS message from Parexel International, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, a CRO- Clinical Research Organization- that contracts with drug makers to test their new medicines. The message read “healthy males needed for a drug trial.” It seemed like a harmless opportunity to make much needed cash! Weeks later the previously healthy 31-year-old was in intensive care at London's Northwick Park Hospital - wires running into his heart and arteries; on dialysis; his immune system, liver, kidneys and lungs all failing - the victim of a drug trial gone disastrously bad.



“Although tests of TGN1412 in monkeys showed no major trouble, all six human subjects nearly died. One is still hospitalized, and the others - though discharged - have impaired immune systems, and their future health is uncertain. Within minutes of receiving the milky white drug in a Parexel research unit at the Northwick Park Hospital in London, on March 13, the volunteers were racked by chills, pain and nausea. In fact, TGN1412 is anything but standard. The first product of Te Genero, a tiny German company, TGN1412 belongs to a completely novel class of synthetic antibodies - the company trademarked the name super MABS - which researchers thought might revolutionize the treatment of leukemia and rheumatoid arthritis. Now, TGN1412 seems poised to go down in medical history as a pharmaceutical lemon, its near-tragic trial raising serious questions about whether patient safety is adequately protected in the lucrative race to get products to the market.” wrote Elizabeth Rosenthal in the Sunday April 9th issue of the International Herald Tribune.



The CROs have made a big foray into Indian medical scene with middle men hoping to make tons of money through this kind of research. The horror story of Northwick Park with millions of dollars of medical damage suits to follow might make even the NHS collapse! Most of the western drug makers now want their human trials done in India and Africa where informed consent is a farce among the illiterate masses and there are doctors bending over backwards to jump on the band wagon and greedy organizations ready to participate. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, in her classic The Truth about Drug Companies published in 2005 by Random House goes deep into the fraud that these CROs and drug companies commit to market their products. Powerful drug companies could lure researchers by various fraudulent means, money being the first attractor, of course.



Not a day passes without our media-print and electronic-going to town with the frightening stories of the new epidemics of killer diseases like heart attacks, diabetes and cancer in the near future in India. This reminds me of the epidemiologists causing epidemics through fear psychosis. The remedy to save mankind from this danger, they say, is to get everyone checked up to screen for the indicators of future trouble with these deadly maladies. With the assured promise of averting future tragedies large sections of healthy people’s lives are medicalised. Poor readers, doctors included, do not realize that time evolution in a dynamic human system does not depend on minor changes in the initial state of man. Correcting those minor variations might not (will not) hold good as time evolves. The only thing that could postpone death and keep man healthy is life style modification that affects the mind and body in a holistic fashion. However, the Screening Industry is the biggest till mover, according to an editorial in the British Medical Journal by the then editor, Richard Smith. Our paper in the PLOSmedicine.com, cited above, tells the whole story. A recent WHO report showed India to be the best country to live in the next fifty years if one wants to avoid the ravages of diabetes. Indian life style is supposed to be the best to prevent diabetes or postpone its onset!



We have been instilling fear into the minds of the gullible public to get them into the net of drug and instrument manufacturers. I have labeled this as the medical scare system. Time has come to make the medical profession to realize this trap. Doctors are trained to keep the health of the public. We have to follow the Hippocratic dictum of Primum Non Nocere-first do no harm. Fear is the key to bakrafy man-fear of death is the leading fear. Man could easily be tricked to believe that the present day hi-tech modern medicine’s efforts will postpone death and give him good health as long as he lives. We must tell the public the truth and let them live happily devoid of fear. “Do not try to live for ever; you will certainly not succeed” wrote George Bernard Shaw in his classic Doctors’ Dilemma. This book did put an end to the horrible crime of complete removal of patients’ colon-total colectomy-that was thought to generate all the poisons to initiate a simple malady- chronic fatigue syndrome- in those days in London. This practice originated from the (in) famous Sir Arthanolt Lane. No one in the medical fraternity dared to stop him as he was considered the greatest of his time.



“All things flow, nothing abides.”

Heraclitus.