CMEs, required by state boards for doctors to keep their licenses, are often undisguised pharma commercials and also being probed by Sen. Grassley. A CME on Medscape funded by a vaccine maker promises participants on completion of the "educational activity" they will be able to "specify the currently recommended age" for the vaccine. Gentlemen--start prescribing! An osteoporosis CME offered by the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine unabashedly tells participates to "lobby your legislators" to restore reimbursement for bone density testing, a lucrative pharma racket.
Wyeth's ghostwriting firm DesignWrite introduced seven "corporate-sponsored" CMEs on postmenopausal hormone therapy in 2004--two years after WHI was discredited--in addition to establishing the $12 million Council on Hormone Education at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health which closed in 2008.
Though the 20 million women who quit hormone therapy since 2002 and pulled down breast cancer rates in the process, didn't do so because it "wasn't cost effective" (or because of the "publicity" as Warren says) a Wyeth-funded article in the Journal of Women's Health (Volume 18, Number 10) discovers that hormone therapy is cost effective.
The article compares the financial and quality of life costs of breast cancer, heart attack, stroke and blood clots linked to HT with the hip, vertebral and wrist fractures and colon cancer HT might prevent and finds hormone therapy is cost effective--at least for Wyeth. "Some of the data used in the model were based on assumptions that introduce uncertainty to the results," the text admits perhaps referring to the fact that when colon cancer is found in women on HT, it tends to be more advanced. And HT's osteoporosis benefits require long term use, which is discouraged.
But the cleverest hormone therapy spin is the emerging proposition that a therapy that causes breast cancer and also makes mammograms harder to read, it is now known, is somehow good.
In a Menopause editorial (Volume 16, Number 6) about a breast density study which included women unwilling to discontinue hormone therapy for one to two months to improve readability of their mammograms, we're told in an ebullient aside "They might have intuitively made the right decision, albeit appearing unwise!" (Exclamation mark the editorial's.)
Even though density improved in hormone quitters their "recall" mammogram rate was not better than non-quitters, says the editorial, implying no immediate benefit to stopping. Of course women who remain on hormone therapy "may face higher mortality from breast cancer in years to come," the editorial concedes but an "existing body of knowledge" indicates it is "good prognosis" cancer.
Continuing the good cancer spin is Wyeth-funded doctor Leon Speroff, MD who taught CMEs at the now discreditedCouncil on Hormone Education and who is also a bazedoxifene fan.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
