FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Mainstream medical advice tainted by Big Pharma money  

Mainstream medical advice tainted by Big Pharma money  

Re: “Doctors, meat-eaters and the great conspiracy to destroy human health”, Letters, May 1

Eric Bahrt’s hit piece on the “messenger” shows blind faith in mainstream medicine and its health guidance. One needs to be much more open-minded in navigating these muddy waters, as it’s literally a matter of life or … a shortened, sickly life. Here’s a meaty little piece for Eric to chew on and digest. Hopefully it won’t jam his colon! 
In January this year, the British Medical Journal published the results of a damning study that identified a systematic abuse of Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) for evaluating the efficacy of drugs in 2013. In a random sample of 195 studies, 68 per cent (132) were found to feature financial ties between the investigators and the pharmaceutical industry. Sadly for us, the high rate of positive outcomes from “tainted” RCTs found 76 per cent of the investigators with financial links pushing favourably for the drugs they were in charge of testing.
In an ongoing internal investigation, major academic publisher Springer has uncovered – and retracted – 107 papers from a single cancer journal alone (Tumor Biology) that had been accepted with fake peer reviews. The faked reviews had been falsely submitted under the names of real researchers, generally with fake e-mail addresses. Third-party editing services may have been used in some cases to produce the reviews.
Thomas Turk
Phuket

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