Financial Ties Are Cited as Issue in Spine Study

[ZorroSF]

In the (ProDisc) study results submitted to the F.D.A., moreover, an unusually large number of patients were not included, and some of those patients have said they fared poorly. As a result, some patients and doctors critical of the research say the study may have cast the Prodisc in an overly flattering light.

The Prodisc, used on thousands of patients, has been shown to benefit many people with back pain, they say. It is unclear, however, whether the disk’s maker fulfilled its legal obligation to inform the Food and Drug Administration of the researchers’ financial interests before it used the study’s results to approve Prodisc in August 2006.

http://www.irbforum.org/forum/read/2/162/162


I know my surgeon is listed there. What's more ironic I even questioned him about this 3-months post-op. All he had to say was that it was nonesense. Yet look at me now, I was not even a candidate.

I have a feeling the reason Maverick hasn't been approved yet might be because of this process.

[ZorroSF]

Looks like I might be right. Medtronic distributes the maverick disc and the x-stop.

[Terry]

There are so many ethical traps for many of us to fall in to now-a-days.

It's not at all uncommon in the Enron days of corporate scandal and greed. Big business rules all and, greed is common in America.

I hope that we get our moral compass back on track in this country.

It has gotten ugly when the Hippocratic oath means less and less.

"Above all; Do no HARM".

Wise words for all of us to live by.

Terry Newton

[ans]

My brother who's a retired doc/professor told me that despite my training in reading research in another field, to forget it in researching back stuff. Of course this was insulting but he was thinking of the NIH scandals then and that not all journals (then?) require the authors' to disclose funding sources. Even then, nobody knows how the sample populations were accepted as there's often an inherent bias in most research.

So I think.. - ans