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.

I mean talk about bending over backwards to help out your pharma friends.

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.

I wonder if they have any devices to tickle MY spine?

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.