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: 13430

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

Stanbridge N.
Bogus pharmacist case scrutinised
BBC News 2008 Apr 4
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7330027.stm


Full text:

The medicines regulator is re-examining how a bogus pharmacist bought large quantities of slimming pills and got funding from a pharmaceutical giant.

Robin Huxley, a salesman from Barnsley, was jailed last month for 14 months for illegally prescribing Xenical.

Roche, which markets Xenical, believed Huxley was a pharmacist running a group of slimming clinics alongside a doctor.

The company says it was simply the victim of crime, but an ex-employee has raised concerns about its practices.

Dr Ryta Kuzel, the former head of regulatory affairs, said: “I feel strongly Roche’s business practices have put people’s lives at risk and they haven’t been called to account.”

Roche has dismissed the claims.

In a statement, it said: “We checked the GMC number of the doctor. We had no reason to believe the pharmacist was not legitimate nor had any reasons to check his credentials.

“Companies can sell prescription-only medicines to practices as long as there’s a healthcare professional who can prescribe.”

Concerns

In 2005 Roche and Dr Kuzel learned the Department of Health was investigating the Huxley case.

Only a few days later Dr Kuzel was sacked – unfairly according to a later employment tribunal.

Dr Kuzel also knew that Roche had long had concerns about Robin Huxley. At one point he was the biggest buyer of the slimming drug outside the NHS, buying nearly £1m a year.

But large sales to his clinics did not seem to match patient numbers, and Roche employees had been sent to investigate.

But far from stopping sales when concerns were raised, Roche decided instead to invest and help expand Huxley’s slimming business, according to a report by a Roche employee.

The report said: “I would advise against closing down the trading terms. I feel we may be sacrificing sales just because we are scared of the potential of the private sector.

“Rob does have plans to expand to other clinics and on the face of it this seems to be in the interest of Roche.”

In 2004 Roche gave Robin Huxley £20,000 towards a new diet clinic and had plans to invest more.

Roche insists this funding was unrestricted and in no way linked to the prescribing of Xenical.

Had it been linked, it would be against the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) professional code.

Two investigations are underway, by the ABPI and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

Roche says it is cooperating with both and that there has never been any suggestion of wrong-doing on Roche’s part.

 

  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








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909