Dr. Timothy Scott looks at how physicians are being led to believe that drugs are safe based on studies, but what they fail to realize is that the studies are paid for by the drug companies. He explains why drug company studies are not a good source of material to refer to in regards to drugs.
How Are Physicians Fooled by the Drug Companies?
Interview with Dr. Timothy Scott
Interviewed by Raena Morgan
October 5, 2009
Raena Morgan: Doctor Scott, how are psychiatrists and physicians fooled? You talk about in your book America Fooled that these professionals are deceived, fooled.
Dr. Timothy Scott: Yeah, I think it’s a fair term. Because these are good people, these are good men and women who want to help people, but they’re fully convinced,-
RM: Okay.
TS: -not everyone, there are a lot of physicians who understand the issue,-
RM: Okay.
TS: -but the majority are fully convinced that these drugs are the answer to depression or other mental problems, they believe it.
RM: All right.
TS: How did that happen? Well it happens in lots of ways.
RM: You said there are five different ways.
TS: Yeah, and really more, I outline five in my book, but there are really a number of ways. For example, before the drug ever is launched pharmaceutical industry hires the thought leaders, they cultivate the thought leaders. Who are the thought leaders? They are the people in the field of psychiatry writing articles.
RM: Okay.
TS: And so they’ve got to get those folks on board. Those people are often on various kinds of committees for the pharmaceutical industry. They receive various kinds of stipends, honorarium, grants of stock,-
RM: Okay.
TS: -so these people are often very highly paid. I document one case in the book where a person I think is on seventeen different pharmaceutical companies who are paying that one thought leader. So they receive large amounts of money, some of these people literally making millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry, far more than they’re making from their academic physician at Harvard or at Emory or somewhere; they’re making these large amounts of money from the pharmaceutical industry. They want them on board to promote their drug, now they’re going to write articles. So anyone can put some of this to the test. For example, simply go to Google and put in the word “PubMed,” “Intra’s PubMed,” and what’s that’s going to bring up is a databank, government databank, it’s all the medical research you’re going to find out there. It’s something approaching twenty million studies, medical studies.
RM: Okay.
TS: Then put in the name of a pharmaceutical company, put in Wyatt, put in Lilly, put in Pfizer, you are going to be shocked at how many studies are published by the company. So when a physician in his office picks up a journal, he assumes that that information is all objective. He does not realize how many of those studies are paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, the vast majority, not some, the vast majority of antidepressant and antipsychotic drug studies today have been published by the pharmaceutical industry, paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. It may be a researcher at Harvard or somewhere else that has a physician there, but he’s still receiving funding for the study from the pharmaceutical industry, that’s the relationship. So there’s a bias built into the system to start with.
RM: All right, okay, that’s part of being fooled.
TS: Yeah. Part of being fooled is also what we call the mirror exposure effect. This is a psychological principle. If you were a psychology professor you’d be very familiar with the mirror exposure effect. It simply says this, and we’ve proven it with experimental studies. We know that we can expose you to even a new word, let you hear that word over and over, and then we ask you what words do you like, and a word that you’ve heard more frequently you learn to like better than another word that you haven’t heard as frequently. That’s true of a face, and that’s true of a message. If we let you hear a message, you repeat a lie often enough, pretty soon it’s the truth; it’s that basic concept. When you pick up JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, or The New England Journal of Medicine, or any other host of journals that are popular in our nation, they’re going to see what? They’re going to see drug ads, one after the other. You pick up JAMA and you see here’s an ad for Effexor, here’s an ad for Zoloft, here’s an ad for Prozac, here’s an ad for Wellbutrin, here’s an- and on and on it goes.
RM: Okay.
TS: The thought is these must be drugs that really work, and so you become convinced in part just because you’re exposed to those ads over and over. You’re exposed also to all kinds of articles. Again, who pays for most of those articles? The vast majority is the drug companies, and consequently you get a one-sided view, you get a distorted view, you get a dishonest view, because the studies, as I’ve pointed out-
RM: Well certainly biased.
TS: Yeah. As I’ve pointed out previously, these studies were not done in a fair way, again the tricks of the trade. And so physicians are convinced for these reasons.
RM: All right, the mirror exposure factor.
TS: Yeah. Another very important factor is what’s called cognitive dissonance.
RM: All right.
TS: Cognitive dissonance is considered by some of the most important psychological research of the twentieth century, and I tend to agree, because it explains human behavior so well. It explains why we do what we do and how we do things which you would think would violate our conscience. You would think that a physician who did have some knowledge of the research, the real research on antidepressants would say “I’m not going to do this,” and yet physicians do prescribe these drugs, and cognitive dissonance can explain that. After all, if you have told this patient and that patient and the next patient “you ought to try these drugs” because you were convinced, and now you know the truth, do you really want to get on the phone and call those people and say, “Guess what? You need to stop that drug I prescribed. You’re more likely to get diabetes. You’re more likely to get tardive dyskinesia.” You don’t want to do that. And so what do you do? You play a game in your mind. You have two cognitions. One says “I prescribed these drugs,”-
RM: Yes.
TS: -another says “I shouldn’t have prescribed these drugs, they harm people’s health.” Dissonance is going on because those things are clashing, cognitions are clashing. They’re not in harmony, they’re clashing. The physician has to make a decision, “What do I do?” And very often they’re going to do what everyone does. We then kind of diminish- “oh it probably doesn’t do that much harm,”-
RM: We talk ourselves out of it?
TS: -“oh, it may actually work,” “maybe of the studies that say that these drugs are harmful, maybe they weren’t really good studies,” and so we talk ourselves out of doing what we really should do.
RM: That’s cognitive dissonance?
TS: That’s cognitive dissonance.
RM: So this is another reason why the doctors-
TS: It’s another of many reasons why doctors prescribe these drugs, even after they find some of the studies or a book like my book that lays out the research saying these drugs are harmful.
Johan’s Comments:
We have learned to rely on information that appears to come from sources of trust. When we rely on these sources and these sources are not trust-worthy, have abandoned our best interest, have sold-out for profit then we have been ‘betrayed.’ These betrayals lead us to inability to trust issues, in the case of the example above leads us into an out-of-control poor health spiral that we are often unable to recover from.
This abandonment, betrayal issue is deep rooted in our ‘collective consciousness.’ Deep in our psyche, our sub-conscious, lie these issues that soon become discontent, frustration and anger. These issues smolder there for years. Each time we are triggered in our life energy around one of these many issues, it is, for our body, an experience that triggers destructive chemicals from our own hormone system. We become a toxic chemical factory, literally aging ourselves, creating dis-ease.
Must we spend our life seeking therapy, counseling, healing to uncover and rationalize and cope with these issues? Until now, that has been the method.
Dr. Ed Carlson, has spent decades researching and developing and alternative set of processes. These processes are called Core Health, Heart Forgiveness and Funny With Money. Researchers like Dr. Bruce Lipton, Dr. Norm Shealy and Greg Braden have endorsed these processes. Scores of Facilitators have been trained by Dr. Carlson to facilitate these processes with individuals and small groups. The results are always gained quickly and throughly releasing participants from long standing life energy issues that are root issues to ineffectual, limited living and dis-ease.
For more detailed information about these process and how you can access them see: Core Health – Heart Forgiveness – or my Facilitator website Johan Miller
Our objective is ‘to live free to be powerfully me!’ You can achieve this for yourself, we can be your guide.