corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12456

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Reps. Dingell, Stupak Raise Concerns, Questions on Enhance Trial: Call on Merck, Schering-Plough and FDA to Provide Information
PharmaLive 2008 Jan 16
http://www.pharmalive.com/News/index.cfm?articleid=506667&categoryid=10


Full text:

Rep. John D. Dingell (D-MI), Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee today wrote to Andrew von Eschenbach, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and to the CEOs of Schering-Plough Corporation and Merck & Co, Inc., requesting information about the ENHANCE study trial. The ENHANCE study compared the brand-name drug Vytorin to the generic drug simvastatin, both of which are used to treat patients with high-cholesterol. The study results show that Vytorin, which is a combination of Zetia and the generic simvastatin, resulted in no significant difference when compared to simvastatin alone.

The Committee on Energy and Commerce began an investigation into the ENHANCE trial on December 11, 2007. The investigation was launched following concerns that, although the ENHANCE trial ended in April 2006, the data had not yet been released. The results were recently released on January 14, 2008.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963