SSRI Makers Use Media To Reel In Pregnant Women as Customers

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By Evelyn Pringle (about the author) Page 3 of 5 page(s)

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Over the last decade, the drug companies have intentionally poured so much money into advertising that the overall operating budgets of the major media outlets and television networks are now highly dependent on the pharmaceutical industry.

In addition to advertising dollars, Big Pharma has mastered the art of using the media to promote the sale of drugs and downplay their risks. Stories featured as health care news, based on rigged studies carefully planted in medical journals are promoted through reports written by PR firms and sent out to all the major media outlets in press releases.

A 2005 report by the UK Parliament found that 75% of clinical trials published in the major journals, including The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, were funded by the drug industry.

Experts say medical professionals can no longer rely on what they read. "The sources of knowledge that doctors have been trained to trust have been taken over by the medical marketing community," says Dr John Abramson, author of the book Overdosed America.

Each year, the Prescription Access Litigation Project announces the "Bitter Pill Awards" to expose Big Pharma's efforts to manipulate consumers through the media. For the year 2004, the group granted, "The Cure for the Human Condition Award," to Paxil maker Glaxo, "For Hawking Pills to Treat the Trials of Everyday Life."

In support of the award, PAL cited an FDA warning letter sent to Glaxo about false advertising in a Paxil TV ad, saying it wrongfully "suggests that anyone experiencing anxiety, fear, or self-consciousness in social or work situations is an appropriate candidate for Paxil CR," when these are simply not approved uses of the drug, PAL noted.

For 2007, the Bitter Pill Award should to go CNN for granting the most airtime to industry-paid front men to downplay the risk of birth defects, with special thanks to Dr Sanjay Gupta.

After hearing Dr Gupta say the use of SSRI's was ok for nursing mothers on CNN on June 12, 2007, without discussing any of the risks of drugs, Larry Bone, an avid advocate for protecting the unborn child from the birth defects linked to SSRI's, wrote this author to state that the use of the TV news segments in recent weeks to promote the sale of these drugs to pregnant women and nursing mothers was "horrifying" and must be stopped.

"The public has a right to be honestly informed about the dangers of SSRI's," he wrote, "and the media has an ethical responsibility to see that pregnant women and nursing mothers are adequately informed about the dangers of these drugs."

"At the very least," he says, "media companies should carry disclaimers at the end of such news segment stating that SSRI's all carry warnings on their labels that the public should read."

The Reported Risks

Experts say it's a crapshoot prescribing these drugs to nursing mothers. "No one yet knows what effects SSRI's may have on nursing infants," Dr Jackson warns, "because no one has studied the long term consequences of administering SSRI's to infants via breast milk."

Furthermore, she adds, no one understands how the in utero exposure to SSRI's changes the wiring of the newborn's brain and, "it has never been proven that there is no effect of giving infants these drugs during the first months or years of post-uterine existence."

Researchers from Columbia University published a study in the October 2004 journal Science, suggesting that exposure to Prozac in the womb and in early childhood may permanently alter the brain's circuitry and disrupt neural development, leading to serious emotional disorders later in life.

The warnings that Mr Bone says viewers should be instructed to read are many. On December 8, 2005, the FDA issued a Public Health Advisory and a press release to announce that the agency was asking Glaxo to change the pregnancy category from C to D, a stronger warning which means, "studies in pregnant women (controlled or observational) have demonstrated a risk to the fetus."

The Advisory said that the FDA "has determined that exposure to paroxetine in the first trimester of pregnancy may increase the risk for congenital malformations, particularly cardiac malformations."

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