Placebo fraud rocks the very foundation of modern medical science; thousands of clinical trials invalidated

Well "acid reflux" & "heartburn" is easily treatable AND cured within 30 days. There is no need to take antacids for the rest of your life. They only treat the symptom, not the cause. There are plenty of other examples where western medicine has no idea HOW to treat while other medicine practices do. Traditional medicine from India & Chinese medicine has better chances and WAY safer than western medicine.
Fibromylagia/Lupus is treatable AND curable within 3 months. There is no need to be on steroids for the rest of your life.
And I do not TRUST Big Pharma at all. They are only in it for the money and have no qualms killing people to get rich.

as I do not read their newsletters and view stories on their website, I know enough to see some kernel of the truth. I do believe this story. I've done my part to repost it. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.
Personally, I do not take man-made crap as it deadly, will kill you slowly and painfully. And I do believe Big Pharma performs their "clinical trials" to favor their drug, which took millions upon millions to create. They need to recoup their losses, which is why its patented. Oh, when the patent is ready to expire, they change one thing and renew the patent and rename the drug, so they can reap more riches from the same drug.

I happen to know a great deal more about the evils perpetrated by pharmaceutical companies than you may think. My uncle worked at Pfizer for 20 years as a robotics engineer (much of their product line is created by automation), and the stories of corporate stupidity and scheming he's witnessed take no prompting for him to tell. He left this year after a multi-year dispute with management could not be resolved (to be precise, they refused to put in place any method of examining if the machines were working as programmed. So maybe that Celebrex has the prescribed dose. Or not. Who knows?).

So I agree that your suspicion of these companies is well founded, not only because they have great incentive to be evil, as all corporations are designed, but because that have repeatedly shown their lack of concern for human safety. What you cannot draw from this is the assumption that all trials are faked because placebos are not a regulated substance. By definition, they are not supposed to be a drug, and the kind of placebo to use would change based on the known effects of the largely inert material (e.g. sugar pills NOT being done in diabetes tests, as the article claims it could). Now you could argue that the kind of placebo should be disclosed in all cases, and with that I do agree. Secrecy here only invites abuse, even if it does not prove it has taken place.

You could also argue that in-house tests are rigged, and I would agree with that suspicion to an extent. My uncle explained that while they would do rigorous testing of the drugs and their effects, they would often choose promotions based on the appearance of success in any department. If you kept sending work back to R&D during trials, you were the stick in the mud who would be last in promotions. So their internal culture, not simply the profit motive, is at work in this problem. And the final problem here is that the company gets to choose the handful of tests they show the FDA for approval, which always skew towards the drug being safer and more effective than is shown by the independent trials.

However, it is important to realize that much of the testing that takes place for medication is done by independent organizations and universities. We could go into funding incentives and other problems here as well, but the point being that not all "92%" of studies cited would be done by these companies with the incentive to fake the results. And it's important to realize that many tests are done, and not all of them involve the same kind of placebo, or one at all. Much of the testing is done by direct observation of effects, as opposed to those not treated at all (i.e. not with a placebo). This is not to suggest that the testing methods for medications in the U.S. is as safe and effective as possible. It most certainly is not. But this particular point about placebo non-standardization is not as alarming as it may sound at first, and is really about an organization that feeds on the narrative that "science based medicine is impure and bad and only herbs and folk wisdom will cure illness." It was that stupidity that I was speaking out against.

I am so glad we have so many scientists, such as yourself, to debunk this otherwise PROVEN data. I am surprised you have time to comment between all your research and lab tests.

Simply because you use all caps does not make it true (or proven).

The article is complete and utter horse shit. If you lack the rudimentary intellectual ability to determine this, than you do indeed have my sympathy.

can you prove it? using scientific methods? are you going to use actual placebos to prove your statement? or deny the whole article without facts?

A major point of the article is that their is no FDA regulation of placebos.
Is this "complete and utter horse shit?" No, it's not; it's a FACT.

It probably is fraud because there are no FDA rules regarding placebos in clinical trials

It turns out there are absolutely no FDA rules regarding the choice or composition of placebos used in clinical trials. Technically, a clinical trial director could use eye of newt or lizard's legs as placebo and would not even be required to mention such nefarious details in the trial results. That would cause trouble, trouble, boil and bubble! (Shakespeare reference for all you literary fans...)

We already know that clinical trials are rife with fraud. Most of the clinical trials used by pharmaceutical companies to win FDA approval of their drugs, for example, are funded by pharmaceutical companies. And it is a verifiable fact that most clinical trials tend to find results that favor the financial interests of whatever organization paid for them. So what's to stop Big Pharma from scheming up the perfect placebo that would harm patients just enough to make their own drugs look good by comparison?

Fact: Placebos are usually provided by the very same company funding the clinical trial! Do you detect any room for fraud in this equation?

How drug companies can fake clinical trials with selected placebo pills

Placebo performance strongly influences whether drugs are approved by the FDA, by the way. As the key piece of information on its regulatory approval decisions, the FDA wants to know whether a drug works better than placebo. That's the primary requirement! If they work even 5% better than placebo, they are said to be "efficacious" (meaning they "work"). This is true even if the placebo was selected and used specifically to make the drug look good by comparison.

You see, if there are no regulations or rules regarding placebo, then none of the placebo-controlled clinical trials are scientifically valid.

It's amazing how medical scientists will get rough and tough when attacking homeopathy, touting how their own medicine is "based on the gold standard of scientific evidence!" and yet when it really comes down to it, their scientific evidence is just a jug of quackery mixed with a pinch of wishful thinking and a wisp of pseudoscientific gobbledygook, all framed in the language of scientism by members of the FDA who wouldn't recognize real science if they tripped and fell into a vat full of it.

Big Pharma and the FDA have based their entire system of scientific evidence on a placebo fraud! And if the placebo isn't a placebo, then the scientific evidence isn't scientific.

Someone who doesn't know the basic principles of science =)

Right.