Medische fraude Dr. Timothy Kukio & Medtronic

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Naar aanleiding van een bericht in Wetenschap NRC 30+31mei09 eens
gegoogled op die Dr. Timothy Kukio.

Doet Medtronic ook 'zaken' in Nederland?

Groet / Cees

http://www.beforeyoutakethatpill.com/index.php/2009/05/26/kukie-kukie-lend-me-your-drugs/
Kukie, Kukie
 Lend Me Your Drugs

I think the actual tune ended with “comb” rather than “drugs” and I don’t
remember what TV show that was from, maybe Happy Days or something. Anyhoo
there has been developing the odd story of Timothy Kuklo, MD, a physician
at the Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center who was performing research on a
drug developed by Medtronic (a company he also worked for as a paid
consultant) called Infuse that was designed to promote bone growth, on
soldiers who had sustained bone injuries in combat in Iraq. Apparently he
wrote an article based on “research” related to the drug claiming that
over 90% of patients treated showed favorable results. After the article
was published in a British medical journal, one of the supposed “authors”
recognized it as an article that he knew nothing about. An internal
investigation by the military found that four of the “authors” had had
their signatures forged by Dr. Kuklo on the letter submitting the article,
that the patients supposedly involved in the research could not be
confirmed as having existed, and that the results appeared to have been
fabricated.

This isn’t the first time that Medtronic has made the sleaze bag page of
the daily news. They made the bogus TENS unit which gave electrical
stimulation to the back for treatment of back pain. When a study came out
showing that it didn’t work, and when they figured out they couldn’t do
anything to punish the researchers, they took the creative step of using
their political influence to cut the budget of the federal agency that
funded the research, as outlined in the book Hope or Hype (google it
yourself, bitches). A couple of years ago it came out that Medtronic was
providing kickbacks to surgeons for using one of their spinal devices off
label, in the form of free trips and picking up the tab for “VIP services”
at the Platinum Plus stripper club in Memphis (where the corporate
headquarters of Medtronic are located) as well as paying for a fishing
trip to Alaska complete with covering the tab for prostitutes for the
surgeons.

Dr. Kuklo has since left the military and is an Associate Professor of
Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. And have
they done anything to look into this matter? Nothing at all of course. In
fact they still proudly list him on their website as one of their own, and
identified as one of the “Best Doctors in America”. Now I don’t really
like this institution, first of all for their bogus efforts relating to
DSM, stating that ”familial” depression is ”real” and by implication other
types of depression are not, but also for a radiologist who was paid
several hundreds of thousands of dollars by Roche under dubious
circumstances to help them fight off law suits related to their acne drug
Accutane and its relationship to depression and suicide.

Having been involved in academic medicine for a while and seen all the
frivolous “inquiries” initiated on the basis of bruised egos I am ashamed
to be associated with a profession that does nothing about such flagrant
abuses of research and medical power. Nuff said.

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