HONEST MEDICINE: My Dream for the Future

Audio Interview: Burt Berkson, MD, PhD, Talks With Honest Medicine About His Work With Alpha Lipoic Acid and Low Dose Naltrexone

It is my honor to introduce you to Dr. Burt Berkson, one of the few physicians I believe to be a true visionary. In this interview, you will hear the true story of Dr. Berkson's successful use for over thirty years of Alpha Lipoic Acid to regenerate livers and other organs. It is also the story of the unfortunate link between money-driven medicine and medical research.

Dr. Berkson’s story originates in the mid to late 1970s, just as the shift from true scientific research to pharmaceutical-company based (and pharmaceutical-company-controlled) research was beginning to take place.

This is the story of an inexpensive, very effective treatment which initially received support from the National Institutes of Health, but was, in the end, abandoned, because no pharmaceutical company would take up the expensive task of officially studying the drug.

In the meantime, though, several studies were conducted, including one, conducted by Dr. Berkson and the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Fred Bartter, of 79 people with extreme liver disease. 75 of these people fully recovered. Still, no pharmaceutical company was interested in pursuing this drug.

Dr. Berkson suspects that this lack of interest was because liver transplants were becoming very popular and Big Pharma didn’t want to interfere with the business of making money. (Don’t forget. Big Pharma makes a lot of money producing anti-rejection drugs for patients who have undergone organ transplants.)

Dr. Berkson practices medicine in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Patients come to him from all over the world. I know you'll find Dr. Berkson's story fascinating.

DOWNLOAD DR. BERKSON’S INTERVIEW HERE:

(The Interview is also transcribed here.)

Pharmaceutical News by Press Release? (OR: Low Dose Naltrexone Study Doesn't Make the News)

In the article, “Statins (Crestor) for Everyone?”, I wrote about how the AstraZeneca-funded JUPITER study (JUPITER stands for “Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention: an Intervention Trial Evaluating Rosuvastatin”) made a case for putting many more people on statins, especially on AstraZeneca's own Crestor. In the article, I pointed out several troubling facts, including that studies funded by pharmaceutical companies are much more likely to have positive results than those that are not industry-funded, and that many of the “news stories” about the JUPITER study reported “the facts” of this study, almost word for word, as they appeared in AstraZeneca’s press release. 

In her November 14, 2008 Columbia Journalism Review article, "Science Reporting by Press Release,”  Cristine Russell calls this kind of “reporting” the “dirty little secret of journalism.”

The subject came up recently in a conversation I had with Burt Berkson, MD, PhD, pioneer in the use of alpha lipoic acid, and more recently, of low dose naltrexone (LDN), as well, for treating some very serious diseases and conditions -- without the side effects of more toxic pharmaceuticals. Dr. Berkson was telling me that, at one of the conferences he spoke at, LDN researcher Dr. Maira Gironi told about the wonderful results she was having in Italy, reversing multiple sclerosis with LDN. (You may read about Dr. Gironi's work with LDN here, here and here.)

Dr. Berkson noted: “But you hear nothing about it because there are no very wealthy corporations promoting it.”

Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption -- by Marcia Angell, MD

INTRODUCTION: When an email from Vera Sharav alerted me to the fact that Dr. Marcia Angell, a woman whose writings I have admired for a long time, had just written a book review for the New York Review of Books, I was eager to read it -- AND, after reading it, I immediately decided that I wanted to print it, in its entirety, on HonestMedicine.com.

I want to thank both Patrick Hederman, the New York Review of Books' permissions/rights person, and Dr. Angell herself, who gave me reprint permission.

Although most of my readers probably know this, Dr. Angell is a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, a publication that most often is referred to as “prestigious”! For those of you who don’t know of her work, for years, she has been critical of the pharmaceutical industry and its financial ties to researchers, doctors and medical journals –- in fact, to almost every aspect of the conducting and reporting of clinical trials by the pharmaceutical companies.

Currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Angell is the author of the book, The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, as well as, of several articles, including “Is Academic Medicine For Sale?,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine, May, 2000. I have quoted from her articles in several of my postings, most notably, in “Is It Possible Some Doctors Still Don’t 'Get' the Extent of Big Pharma’s Financial Ties to 'Standard of Care' Research?"

I am happy to reprint Dr. Angell’s most recent article here, and hope the New York Review of Books  won’t mind that I have provided hyperlinks to actual articles, instead of using footnote form (as is used in print publications.)

On a personal note, The New York Review of Books was one of my husband Tim’s two favorite publications. The other was Fanfare. Whenever he’d come across an article like this one, he’d say, “This one’s for you, Boo.” He always knew which articles I’d love. (You may read about Tim, and his love of books and music, here and here.

Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption -- By Marcia Angell

 

(In this article, Dr. Angell reviews these three books. But her article is far more than just a book review!)

1) Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial -- by Alison Bass, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 260 pp., $24.95

2) Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs -- by Melody Petersen, Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $26.00

3) Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness -- by Christopher Lane, Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50; $18.00 (paper)

Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn't had to look very hard.

Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.