Pharma Blog Watch

'Seeding' Trials (GoozNews)
In his post, Merrill Goozner discusses a Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services hearing at which "an advisory committee debated whether Medicare should continue reimbursing the routine costs of caring for seniors who are enrolled in clinical trials." The committee decided in favor of reimbursing these trials, but "not all the Medicare-funded studies [are] so noble."

"One of the worst-kept secrets in medical research is that much of what passes for cutting-edge knowledge is actually thinly veiled advertising by the drug industry for drugs that have already been FDA-approved," he writes. "Example: A company has an anti-inflammatory pain pill that has been approved for arthritis pain; they now want to test it on dental patients with toothaches. Such studies add almost nothing to medical science, yet they routinely appear in the medical literature, especially in the less prestigious journals that cater to specialists."

"These trials are sometimes referred to as seeding trials because their real aim is to encourage the physicians who enroll patients in the trial (at a nice fee per patient, of course) to continue prescribing it for them and other patients once the trial is over," he adds.