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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Threatened by a herb
Jerome Burne The Guardian
Thursday 03 May 2001 Researchers are trying to discredit St John's wort. They are funded by a pharmaceutical company What a gullible lot depressed people are. In America they spend $400m a year on the anti-depressant herb St John's wort that has as much effect as a sugar pill. So says a study published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) last month. A trial, involving 200 people who'd suffered from a "major depression" for at least four weeks, found the herb was no better than a placebo. Time magazine's follow up last week devoted two pages to the news, including an interview with a self-appointed "quack-buster" who declared that he wasn't surprised. Several other things about the trial are not surprising. The researchers received "unrestricted funding" from the drug company Pfizer, who also manufacture the pre scription anti-depressant Zoloft, along with a "me-too" herbal product containing St John's wort. It is also the latest in a series of drug company sponsored drug trials that have raised doubts about efficacy or safety of St John's wort. The researcher advises people currently taking the herbal extract to consider one of the "two dozen prescription medications whose effectiveness has been proved". Protecting the public from harmful or useless medicines is of course a laudable aim. But, quite apart from the fact that more than 20 other studies have found St John's wort to be beneficial for "mild to moderate" depression, the drug companies credentials in this field are not exactly impressive. For a start, as the recent South African court battles over patents and generic drugs for Aids illustrated, the companies are prepared to go to great lengths to protect their profits. The rising spending on St John's wort and other herbal remedies is certainly a threat. Even more pertinent is the growing concern, by both academic institutions and top medical journals, about the way drug companies are prepared to conceal or manipulate results that put their own products in an unfavourable light. Last autumn JAMA announced that the results of a trial into the effectiveness of an immune boosting drug were incomplete, because the unnamed drug company involved were withholding them. The trial had showed the drug to be ineffective and the company wanted the results suppressed. It was far from an isolated incident. Only last month the Lancet published a letter from a doctor claiming that the drug company Bayer, when asked for supplies of a certain drug so that he could run a trial on it, demanded he sign a letter promising not to reveal any results without their permission. The journal made this damning comment: "The efforts by the drug companies to suppress, spin and obfuscate findings that do not support their commercial purposes was first revealed to their full lethal extent during the thalidomide tragedy. [Since then]... the insidious tactics of the big pharma have changed very little." What has changed is that many more researchers have drug company links. A study published last December found that only one of the top 10 medical schools in the US has clear regulations forbidding researchers from having a financial involvement in the companies they are supposedly impartially testing. Dr Ian Chalmers, director of the Cochrane Collaboration, an organisation dedicated to promoting evidence-based medicine, believes that secrecy has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths because doctors were not alerted to the dangers. The impartiality of drug-company funded research into herbal medicine must be called in to question. The problems created by herbal medicines are minuscule by comparison, even allowing for some under-reporting. The worst recent case of damage from a herbal product involved 30 people who developed cancer as a result of being prescribed a Chinese herb, in error, in Belgium. Even if herbs can occasionally prove harmful, abuse of medicinal herbs (with the exception of marijuana) is unheard of. The same is not true of prescription drugs. A report out in April, but not covered at length in Time magazine, revealed that an estimated 4m Americans were abusing them - compare that with the official figure of 5m hard-core street addicts. The pharmaceutical approach to medicine, for all its undoubted scientific brilliance and health benefits, is far from the final word in treatment. A study published last month found that 40% of Aids patients who are receiving the best pharmaceutical companies can offer - protease inhibitors - are also using a range of complementary medicines. Instead of occasional bits of research aimed at damaging a competitor, what is needed is a serious and properly funded programme to discover how the obvious benefits of herbal and other complementary treatments can best be put to work. Only 40% of news stories about drug breakthroughs reveal the financial links between drug companies and the researchers involved. Perhaps the really gullible are those who don't take drug company claims with a big pinch of salt.
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