Posted by Shawn. T. on July 25, 2002, at 20:19:41
http://biopsychiatry.com/bigpharma/index.html
"When it comes to spin, the drug companies make the government look clumsy and amateurish. At the heart of the worries over SSRIs is the growing belief that the drug companies have been less than honest in their account of the risks involved."
"As a striking illustration of this gap between secret and public knowledge, Healy is fond of quoting a story from an American newspaper, the Boston Globe, which appeared in May 2000. It concerned a new form of Prozac, known as R-fluoxetine, which had been patented in 1993 (US patent no 5,708,035) and which Eli Lilly planned to market when the existing patent ran out in 2002. A patent application requires that you say why your new version is an improvement. So what were the benefits of R-fluoxetine? "It will not produce several existing side effects, including akathsia [agitation], suicidal thoughts and self-mutilation . . . one of its [Prozac's] more significant side effects" - precisely the side effects that the company had been denying for a decade."
poster:Shawn. T.
thread:113731
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020725/msgs/113731.html