Pill Pushers
I should have know that this was forthcoming.
A clinical trial of Zetia, a cholesterol-lowering drug prescribed to about 1 million people a week, failed to show that the drug has any medical benefits, Merck and Schering-Plough said on Monday....
This trial was designed to show that Zetia could reduce the growth of those plaques. Instead, the plaques actually grew almost twice as fast in patients taking Zetia along with Zocor than in those taking Zocor alone....
Dr. Steven Nissen, the chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, said the results were "shocking." Patients should not be prescribed Zetia unless all other cholesterol drugs have failed, he said.
"This is as bad a result for the drug as anybody could have feared," Dr. Nissen said. Millions of patients may be taking a drug that has no benefits for them, raising their risk of heart attacks and exposing them to potential side effects, he said.
Zetia is the anti-cholesterol drug whose current marketing campaign features actors not playing doctors (the usual direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising trick) but actors playing other professions, such as television chef and a waitress, who explain why Zetia "works differently." (This campaign came after one featuring actors playing a medical school professor and medical students stopped airing.)
Oh, it works differently, all right. It doesn't do a damned thing for you.
Labels: Big Pharma, Merck, Schering-Plough, stupid advertising tricks
