Dominatrix Natalie Rowe: I don’t think he’d seen anything like that before

CLOSE: Vice girl Natalie was attracted to the young George Osborne

VICE QUEEN: Natalie said Osborne was kinder than his rowdy friends

ROTHSCHILD: Accused old pal in donation row

OSBORNE: Was “picked on” by his posher pals

By Sara Nuwar, 26/10/2008

THE hunger to hob-nob with the super-rich that landed George Osborne in such trouble this week came as no surprise to the vice queen who knew him well in his formative years.

For dominatrix Natalie Rowe saw at first hand the desperate longing of a gauche Oxford student struggling to fit in with the fabulously wealthy like university pal Nat Rothschild.

As the vice girl watched this week’s scandal unfold over Osborne’s dealings with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska on his yacht, she recalled how the young George-from the Osborne & Little fabrics family-was once snubbed by the sons of the gentry.

And she revealed how she and the young Tory were drawn together as she supplied girls and drugs to parties for some of Oxford’s notorious Bullingdon Club drinking circle. Its members included both Osborne and his former pal Rothschild, the man now accusing the top Tory of soliciting a £50,000 donation from aluminium tycoon Deripaska.

Slaves

Natalie told us: “I felt an empathy with George because we were both treated like outsiders. There was a bond between us.

“The others picked on him. He hadn’t gone to Eton, he wasn’t really one of them. He didn’t have blue blood, that’s why he didn’t quite fit in.

“They were all snobs. They called his dad a ‘curtain maker’. Because he was overweight they called him Jelly Belly and Georgie Porgy. He used to wear baggy jumpers to hide the flab.

“But he’s always been ambitious and he tolerated that bunch because he used them as a stepping-stone. He knew he had to hang around in the right circles to get where he wanted.”

And while Osborne loved rubbing shoulders with the mega- rich and aristocrats, he also found himself magnetically attracted to the sleazier side of life.

Miss Whiplash and vice madam Natalie, 45, revealed: “George was fascinated when he heard what I did for a living. He wanted to know about the clients, how much I charged, what went on. He seemed a bit more than curious about what went on.

“He wanted to see the equipment-the whips, the chains, the belts. He was particularly interested in the dog collars we put on clients and the rubber underpants they wear as submissive slaves. I don’t think he’d seen anything like that before.”

“George was intrigued by all my stories and wanted to be shown how hard it would be to be hit. I told him that most of the guys tend to use the sex drug amyl nitrate. He smelt it but I don’t think he was too keen on it. He even met a client. Once George and his friends were at my flat while I was actually having a session with a paying customer.

“I had the man on all fours with a collar on and beat him. I was making him bark like a dog and act like a slave. They found it quite funny.

“None of them hid the fact they liked it and they weren’t embarrassed. They were turned on by it.”

Natalie, who styled herself as Mistress Pain and ran an escort agency called Black Beauties, met Osborne and Rothschild through her boyfriend at the time, fellow Bullingdon member William Sinclair, grandson of Winston Churchill’s wartime air minister Sir Archibald Sinclair. He wanted to be shown how hard it would be to be hit.

Our exclusive photograph of Natalie in a figure-hugging PVC dress was taken at her west London flat where she threw a string of wild parties. Osborne was a regular guest.

It was there the pair grew close. “George was attracted to me,” she recalled. “And I actually fancied him. In the beginning it was a turn on because it was our little secret, that electricity.

“I did kiss George. But to be honest he wasn’t that sexually experienced and he was a bit fumbly.

“I used to think he was a little bit of a wimp but I quite liked that.”

Osborne was offended when some members of the Oxford group would hurl racial slurs at Natalie. But she says that he was still so desperate to fit in that he didn’t have the courage to stop them. “There was one occasion they were taking the mickey out of me at a party,” she told us.

“They were making monkey noises and saying abusive things. They even used the word n*gger. George was there and I was hurt that he didn’t say anything.

“But he’d put his arms round me and comfort me and I did feel a connection. He didn’t stand up to the others, though. He didn’t want to upset them.” Despite that, Natalie insists she was still very fond of Osborne who she considered the nicest of the group of friends.

I felt an empathy with George. There was a bond between us

She said he was more compassionate than the others and would offer her advice on her rocky relationship with William.

“George and I would cuddle on the sofa and talk to each other about his friends,” she said.

“If I hadn’t been with William perhaps I could have been with George. We could have gone out with each other. There was an attraction and there was a time when we thought ‘Why is William in the equation?'”

The pair’s close friendship drew suspicions that they had fallen in love and, on one occasion jealous William even fought with the future Shadow Chancellor.

Natalie recalled: “George and I were sat on a two-seat sofa and William got offended when George whispered something to me.

“William demanded to know what we were talking about then lunged at George and chairs went flying. But they weren’t trying to punch each other out and it was all over in 20 seconds.

“They were all really close in that group, all of them.” Natalie said Osborne would be present when members of the group returned to her home for parties often involving cocaine, which Osborne has categorically denied taking with Natalie.

“When they had coke they would probably divvy up a gram and a half,” she said. “They’d have competitions to see who could snort the longest line and get completely wasted.

“George would drink vodka and white wine. When he drank he’d get really p***ed and start dancing and we’d have our little laughs together.

Dominatrix

“They all loved music by Elvis Presley. They’d also sing Gold by Spandau Ballet and George liked David Bowie’s Heroes.”

Remarkably, while sat in the home of a dominatrix, the 22-year-old Osborne bragged how he would one day become Prime Minister.

Natalie said: “He was absolutely sure about what he’d be doing. And I joked that I had all the evidence on him.”

On another occasion, after the birth of her son in 1996, Natalie says she met Osborne’s future wife at a dinner party. Frances, who married the MP in 1998, seemed shocked and disgusted at her line of work.

Natalie was this week intrigued how, given their once close friendship, the damaging claims that today threaten Osborne’s political future actually came from financier Nat Rothschild, heir to a family baronetcy and a £500 million banking fortune. She recalled how the two students and their band of pals would head to the country for wild weekends.

“The Bullingdon Club thought they were untouchable,” she said. “They thought they could do what they wanted. They had money and arrogance. They thought there were no consequences, anything goes.”

She said the group’s bad behaviour came to a head in March 1994 at the Rothschilds’ stately home, Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. She thinks both Nat and Osborne were among the 40-strong party.

Natalie sent three strippers and was asked to make sure the women were “tall, dark and slim and with figures like Naomi Campbell.”

Around six grams of cocaine were also provided for the club members to snort. As well as stripping, it was made clear that the girls’ services would extend to “extras”-sex with guests.

But Natalie claims the party degenerated into a humiliating experience for the girls who were abused by some braying Bullingdon boys.

Spitting

“The girls were made to feel like they were nothing,” she said. “They climbed on to the bar or a table and started to strip and gyrate. But the guests were mauling them and jeering. It was horrendous. The guys were trying to touch them and shouting abuse, throwing champagne and spitting.

“There was nothing decent in the way they treated the girls.

“Then it got down to who would sleep with who. Who was going to have the girls first.”

The woman were left shaken by the experience and enraged when one wealthy punter refused to pay the agreed £350 for his sex session.

As the girls tried to leave their car was surrounded by men who started to rock the vehicle. The police were called but no action was taken. Afterwards Osborne visited Natalie to apologise and Rothschild called to say sorry. “I was furious,” she said.

As Natalie this week surveyed the debris of Osborne’s relationship with his accuser Rothschild and pondered the reasons behind the row, she admitted: “I can’t believe George would want to annoy Nat. He knows so much about him.

“I can’t imagine why he’d want to get on the wrong side of him.

“But Osborne’s sloppy isn’t he?

“Remember that photograph he had taken with me and there was cocaine on the table? Who would do that. He’s not very careful.”

STUDENT PALS: Osborne (left) and Rothschild became friends in the notorious Bullingdon Club at Oxford Uinversity

by Thelen Paulk

I had a dream the other night I didn’t understand.

A figure walking through the mist with a flintlock in his hand. His clothes were torn and dirty, as he stood there by my bed. He took off his three cornered hat and speaking low, he said:

“We fought a revolution, to secure our liberty. We wrote the Constitution, as a shield from tyranny. For future generations, this legacy we gave, in this, the land of the free and the home of the brave. You buy permits to travel, and permits to own a gun. Permits to start a business, or to build a place for one. On land that you believe you own, you pay a yearly rent. Although you have no voice in choosing, how the money’s spent.”

“Your children must attend a school that doesn’t educate. Your Christian values can’t be taught, according to the state. You read about the current news in a regulated press. You pay a tax you do not owe, to please the foreign I.R.S. Your money is no longer made of silver, or of gold. You trade your wealth for paper, so your lives can be controlled.”

“You pay for crimes that make our Nation turn from God in shame. You’ve taken Satan’s number, as you’ve traded in your name. You’ve given government control, to those who do you harm.”

“So they can padlock churches, and steal the family farm. And keep our country deep in debt, put men of God in jail. Harass your fellow countrymen, while corrupted courts prevail. Your public servants don’t uphold the solemn oath they’ve sworn. They defy and rape the nation, and leave it’s fabric tattered and torn.”

“Your leaders ship artillery and guns to foreign shores. And send your sons to slaughter, fighting other people’s wars. Can you regain the freedom for which we fought and died?”

“Or don’t you have the courage, or the faith to stand with pride? Are there no more values for which you’ll fight to save? Or do you wish your children to live in fear as a slave?”

“People of the Republic arise and take a stand! Defend the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land! Preserve our Great Republic, and God Given Right! And pray to God, to keep the torch of Freedom burning bright!”

As I awoke he vanished, in the mist from whence he came. His words were true, we are not Free, we have ourselves to blame. For even now as tyrants trample each God Given Right, we only watch and tremble, too afraid to stand and fight.

If he stood by your bedside, in a dream, while you’re asleep, and wonders what remains of our Rights he fought so hard to keep, What would be your answer, if he called out from the grave;

IS THIS STILL THE LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE BRAVE?

His comments come on the heels of remarks made by his Swiss counterpart who said that the Swiss National Bank purchased euros to buttress the single currency.

“It is a regular procedure of central banks,” to intervene in currency markets, Bruederle said. “It is not a secret,” that central banks have a foreign exchange rate target, he added.

Bruederle said “eruptive” movements have to be avoided. He previously said that China holds 25 percent of its foreign exchange reserves in euros.

-By Roman Kessler, Dow Jones Newswires, +49 69 2972 5514;

roman.kessler@dowjones.com

(MORE TO FOLLOW) Dow Jones Newswires
05-28-101127ET
Copyright (c) 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Source: Nasdaq.com

John P. Holdren, advisor to the World Bank and many banker foundations, now science advisor to the Obama administration, doesn’t like you. He wants you sterilized, your parents and grandparents euthanized, and your children aborted. All in the name of building the establishment’s managed global society, which is to be a very depopulated one. For “sustainability’s” sake — Hitler and Stalin didn’t remember that one.

In fact, it’s just economics and the fact that a small population is easier to control and manage, as many of the establishment’s inbred schizoids have stated, including Charles Galton Darwin, in his blueprint for ‘global governance’, “The Next Million Years”.

Holdren is just one more (though at a very high level) of a long entourage of maniacs who are recruited into academia and high office to provide made-up pseudo-scientific legitimacy for modern-day eugenics and genocide.

Remember: all the policies that are coming into place right now, all over the West, are informed by the pseudoscientific, irrational beliefs of this clique of neo-malthusian madmen. They’re the ones who give you your rationed ‘healthcare’ and your ‘climate change/carbon tax/population control’ policies, your ‘family planning’ policies.

These people will rationalize and sell the utter destruction of human life, in exchange for a shining spot the banksters will always grant them in academia and society.

Here are a few articles on Holdren, and the links to a 3-part video series on the history of Eugenics, well-worth looking into. Eugenics is the driving ideology behind neo-malthusianism and its obsession with population reduction; so you truly have to understand its nature and history.

A Brief History of Eugenics
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtCG4q…
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WetjfG…
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA8yQ5…

Holdren Urged a ‘World of Zero Net Physical Growth’ in 1995 World Bank Publication
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/5…

Obama’s Science Czar: Traditional family is obsolete, punish large families
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opi…

Obama’s Science Czar Considered Forced Abortions, Sterilization as Population Growth Solutions
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/…

John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, says – Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/

Rockefeller Refers to Obama’s Science Czar as ‘Walking on Water’
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/5…

Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren involved in unwinding “Climategate” scandal
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index….

John Holdren and Harrison Brown – Eugenicists
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren_an…

Science Fiction Czar – The disturbing intellectual record of Obama’s science czar
http://reason.com/archives/2009/07/15…

Topics of show covered in following links:

The Keynesian Fraud

Lord Monckton Wins Climate Debate at Oxford Union

Sprayed from Air with Aluminum Oxide-Now Monsanto Creates Aluminum Resistant Gene

EU holds First Meeting on Joint Economic Governance

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Obsessed with Climate Change

Truthmediaproduction

— May 24, 2010 — “What in the World are They Spraying?” – Official Trailer
http://www.realityzone.com/angels.html

The Reality Zone is producing a documentary that explores the murky world of atmospheric geo-engineering, commonly called chemtrails. The title of the program is: What in the World Are They Spraying! and we can tell you with confidence that it will be one of the most important programs you will ever see. There are plenty of dramatic video clips of chemtrails on the Internet, and your innate intelligence tells you that what you see in the sky with your own eyes is not caused by mere vapor trails from jet aircraft, but no one yet has probed the questions: WHO is doing this and WHY. All of that is about to change. We are working with two young journalistic film makers, Michael Murphy and Paul Wittenberger who already are far advanced in the development of this incredible story.

BE AN ANGEL
Internet video sites such as YouTube and Google Video have become powerful platforms for breaking the media cartel’s monopoly over public information. Through these channels, millions of people now are exposed to truth that is blacked out in the corporate media. This undoubtedly has slowed down the progress of The New World Order, and it will play an increasingly important role in our battle for the minds of the public in the days ahead.

That’s all for the good, but on the downside is the fact that viewers have come to expect free access to these programs, which makes it almost impossible for producers to sell enough DVDs to sustain themselves. Sometimes, they cannot even recover production costs. The economic model that has emerged from this new technology is that programs from a freedom perspective either must be subsidized or sponsored, just as traditional TV programs are.

In Hollywood, those who provide funding for feature films often are referred to as angels. As you might guess, that word has little to do with their spiritual quality. It is just a colloquialism for someone with lots of money; and, usually, it is a hard-nosed investor with a team of attorneys to negotiate a deal with maximum profit as the sole object.

NOT THE HOLLYWOOD TYPE
We need angels, too, but not the Hollywood type. We are not looking for one or two tycoons to invest millions of dollars. We are seeking a hundred-or-so average-income donors to provide an amount approximately equal to what they routinely pay for sixty day’s of cable service. For this, they will receive a copy of the exclusive “Angels’ Edition” of the program, which will be the first edition released and will be given only to those who contributed, so it definitely will be a collector’s item. Each copy will be autographed by me, Michael Murphy, and Paul Wittenberger. In addition, the names of all donors (whether they are individuals, families, or business enterprises) will appear on screen in the credits at the end of the program under the heading: “Funding Angels.”

That is our “deal.” We cannot offer an investment for profit. Our goal is to create a highly important documentary that corporate media does not want to public to see. Reality Zone angels must be motivated by a passion for freedom and have an abundance of spirit. In other words, they must be the real thing.

CHERUBS, TOO
If you are unable to become a Funding Angel, please consider being one of our cherubs. (Definition: An angel of the second order, usually depicted as a small child with wings.) Cherubs purchase one or more copies NOW for delivery when completed. That’s it. Advance purchases will help us cover production costs and are greatly appreciated.

WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE THEY SPRAYING! is scheduled for release in October, provided we can obtain $24,000 to complete the job. That goal can be met if only 120 Zone Dwellers become Funding Angels by donating $200 each. That sounds like a realistic goal to us. I hope you agree. If you are looking for something meaningful to do in this battle against collectivism but are unable to spend time in organizational work, here is a way to make a huge difference. Thank you.

http://www.realityzone.com/angels.html

91177info — May 23, 2010 IMPORTANT HELP SAVE LIVES- The more people in the world who know the less likely any harm will come to them as Israel is going try and stop these ship at all costs. See links below-

Remember Palestine facebook group-
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Remembe…

Gaza Friends YouTube channel-
http://www.youtube.com/gazafriends

The facebook group- Free Gaza – Break the Siege- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid…

Join the news letter here- https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscrib…

Website- http://www.freegaza.org/

Reuploaded from PressTVGlobalNews’s channel-
http://www.youtube.com/user/PressTVGl…

What about emerging markets? Goldman Sachs is fond of reminding us that they coined the term “BRIC” for the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China in November 30, 2001. Despite all the hype about China’s enormous growth in recent years and the fantastic performance of these markets in the last decade, when priced in gold, the Shanghai Stock Exchange has lost 63% in value since the start of 2002. The Brazilian Bovespa Index? It eeked out a 2% gain over this same time period And the Bombay Stock Exchange? It was up a respectable 20% over an 8 ½ – year period.

Thus, gold’s performance slaughtered the performance of the developed global market indexes and that of China, just about broke even with Brazil, and only lost to India. If we look at gold’s performance denominated in the world’s two leading currencies during this same 8 ½-year investment period, gold soared by 207% denominated in Euros and an even more spectacular 324% denominated in US dollars. Even when priced in live cattle and lean hogs, the value of gold increased enough to buy 1.85 times as many cattle and hogs in a span of just 4 ½ – years.

Even though gold is going through a corrective phase right now, remember that in the article I wrote last week titled, “The Safest Bet During Uncertain Markets”, I warned readers: “As long as Central Banks and their governments scheme against PMs, gold and silver will continue to have sharp, scary drops in the future at times.” Still, the long-term future for gold is still solidly higher. If you look at the above performance of gold against alternative investments, it is easy to realize that all the managers and financial consultants that are jumping on gold’s bandwagon now are enormously late in acting in their clients’ best interests (though still early as far as the end game is concerned). Their arguments that gold is only now, a “safe” and “rational” investment, only further expose their lack of understanding about the mechanisms of our global monetary system – a scary reality when they are serving as advisers to many clients.

Granted, I wasn’t as early to the party as others with greater vision. But when my research led me to the conclusion that a monetary crisis was inevitable in late 2005/ early 2006, I started advocating gold at about $530 an ounce and silver at $9 an ounce. And what about silver’s performance from 2002 until present day? A mere 290% return (denominated in US dollars) as illustrated by the 10th and final chart (admittedly a silver and not a gold chart, I know).

Again, you may visit the link in the article “The Safest Bet During Uncertain Times” to understand why gold and silver have never been a favored asset of large commercial investment firms. Even with the reality of the deeper stages of the monetary crisis descending upon us, many commercial investment firms are still directing their clients into fiat gold and fiat silver in the form of the GLD and SLV ETFs. In the process of doing so, they are sadly ensuring that their clients will never join the party.

About the author: JS Kim is the Chief Investment Strategist and Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU, LLC, a fiercely independent wealth consultancy company that guides investors in the best ways to invest in gold and silver through the progression of this global financial crisis. His Crisis Investment Opportunities newsletter has significantly beat all major developed stock market indexes since the first day of its launch, outperforming the Australian ASX 200, the UK FTSE 100 & the US S&P 500 by 308.89%, 304.87%, and 300.85%* during the period of June 15, 2007 to May 12, 2010 (*in a tax-deferred account). JS also maintains an investment blog, the Underground Investor, in which he presents financial knowledge rarely covered by the mainstream media.

The above article may be reprinted on other sites provided all text and links are kept intact, including the above author acknowledgment.

A Denver grandmother of eight, who happens to be a trained nutritionist, decided to see for herself just how effective the preservatives used in large segments of the U.S. food system actually are.

She left an untouched McDonald’s Happy Meal on a shelf in her kitchen for 12 months and has just released photos of the result. As some might expect, the year-old meal of beef, bun and French fries looks hardly different a year after it was first purchased. Hollywood note: Those of you looking to dial back the years may want look into this a little more.

Even the flies didn’t want it
The most revealing and somewhat scary part of this experiment was that she said the left-out food didn’t attract a single fly or any other insect over the entire year. Flies swarm almost anything with an odor. They turn out in droves to hover over a dog pile but apparently had no interest in the kids’ meal.

“I had the windows open many times, but flies and other insects just ignored the Happy Meal,” said Joann Burso. “What does that tell you, if they can’t be bothered with it?” She conceded to the website Mail Online that the arid climate where she lives in Colorado might have something to do with the Happy Meal’s long “shelf life,” but still…

A closer look inside that Happy Meal
So, what exactly is in the preservatives that make the Happy Meal the Dean Clark of fast food? Let’s take a look.

The bun:
High fructose corn syrup – of course.
Sugar
Soybean oil
Calcium sulphate
Calcium carbonate
Wheat gluten
Ammonium sulphate
Ammonium chloride
Dough conditioners (whatever those are)
Stearoyl lactylate
Datem (again, no idea)
Ascorbic acid
Stearoyl lactylate
Azodicarbonamide
Mono- and diglycerides (not even going to try)
Ethoxylated monoglycerides
Monocalcium phosphate
Enzymes
Guar gum
Calcium peroxide
Calcium propionate and sodium propionate
Soy lecithin

The fries:
Hydrogenated soybean oil
Natural beef flavor (Don’t ask)
Citric acid
Dextrose
Sodium acid pyrophosphate (to maintain color)
Dimethylpolysiloxane (added as an anti-foaming agent)

The “beef”:
Supposedly 100 percent beef. Of course, it’s undoubtedly not grass-fed beef, so much of it is actually corn. Almost half the corn grown in the United States goes to feeding cows and chickens.

I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll grab something with fewer than 29 ingredients for lunch today.

The article is adapted from a talk she gave at Harvard last December. Angell, of course, has written about this topic many times before, most notably in her 2004 book, “The Truth About the Drug Companies.”

Writes Angell:

The boundaries between academic medicine — medical schools, teaching hospitals, and their faculty — and the pharmaceutical industry have been dissolving since the 1980s, and the important differences between their missions are becoming blurred. Medical research, education, and clinical practice have suffered as a result.

The article provides plenty of examples of exactly why health consumers should worry about this money-driven blurring of missions. Here are some highlights (but do read the entire article):

• “To a remarkable extent … medical centers have become supplicants to the drug companies, deferring to them in ways that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago. Often, academic researchers are little more than hired hands who supply human subjects and collect data according to instructions from corporate paymasters. The sponsors keep the data, analyze it, write the papers, and decide whether and when and where to submit them for publication. In multi-center trials, researchers may not even be allowed to see all of the data, an obvious
  impediment to science and a perversion of standard practice.”

• “[Drug] manufacturers typically prefer to work with academic medical centers. Doing so increases the chances of getting research published, and, more importantly, provides drug companies access to highly influential faculty physicians — referred to by the industry as ‘thought leaders’ or ‘key opinion leaders.’ These are the people who write textbooks and medical-journal papers, issue practice guidelines (treatment recommendations), sit on FDA and other governmental advisory panels, head professional societies, and speak at the innumerable meetings and dinners that take place every day to teach clinicians about prescription drugs.”

• “Medical centers increasingly act as though meeting industry’s needs is a legitimate purpose of an academic institution…. Academic leaders, chairs, and even deans sit on boards of directors of drug companies. Many academic medical centers have set up special offices to offer companies quick soup-to-nuts service.”

• “Increasingly, industry is setting the research agenda in academic centers, and that agenda has more to do with industry’s mission than with the mission of the academy. Researchers and their institutions are focusing too much on targeted, applied research, mainly drug development, and not enough on non-targeted, basic research into the causes, mechanisms, and prevention of disease.”

• “[D]rug companies often contract with academic researchers to carry out studies for almost entirely commercial purposes. For example, they sponsor trials of drugs to supplant virtually identical ones that are going off patent…. There’s a high scientific opportunity cost in serving the aims of the pharmaceutical industry. For example, new antibiotics for treating infections by resistant organisms are an urgent medical need, but are not economically attractive to industry because they are not likely to generate much return on investment.”

• “In addition to distorting the research agenda, there is overwhelming evidence that drug-company influence biases the research itself. Industry-supported research is far more likely to be favorable to the sponsors’ products than in NIH-supported research.”

• “Conflicts of interest affect more than research. They also directly shape the way medicine is practiced, through their influence on practice guidelines issued by professional and governmental bodies and through their effects on FDA decisions.” Angell offers several examples, including this one: “[I]n 2004, after the NIH National Cholesterol Education Program called for sharply lowering the acceptable levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol, it was revealed that eight of nine members of the panel writing the recommendations had financial ties to the makers of cholesterol-lowering drugs.”

• “Drug companies support educational programs even within our best medical schools and teaching hospitals, and are given virtually unfettered access to young doctors to ply them with gifts and meals and promote their wares. … This is marketing masquerading as education. … But doctors do learn something from all the ostensible education they’re paid to receive. Doctors and their patients come to believe that for every ailment and discontent there is a drug, even when changes in lifestyle would be more effective. And they believe that the newest, most expensive brand-name drugs are superior to older drugs or generics, even though there is seldom any evidence to that effect because sponsors don’t usually compare their drugs with older drugs at equivalent doses.

Angell offers several recommendations for reforming the current, broken system:

• Medical schools that conduct clinical trials “should not accept any payments from drug companies except research support, and that support should have no strings attached.”

• Doctors “should not accept gifts from drug companies, even small ones, and they should pay for their own meetings and continuing education.”

• Finally, “academic medical centers that patent discoveries should put them in the public domain or license them inexpensively and non-exclusively.”

“[A]pologists might argue that, despite its legal transgression the pharmaceutical industry is merely trying to do its primary job — furthering the interests of its investors — and sometimes it simply goes a little too far,” Angell concludes. “[But] doctors, medical schools, and professional organizations have no such excuse; the medical profession’s only fiduciary responsibility is to patients and the public.”

Source: Min Post.com