Big Bucks, Big Pharma: Marketing Disease & Pushing Drugs

Created on Wednesday, 28 July 2010 20:38

Big Bucks, Big Pharma – Marketing Disease & Pushing Drugs (2004) pulls back the curtain on the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry, to expose the insidious ways that illness is used, manipulated, and in some instances, created, for capital gain.

 

Focusing on the industry's marketing practices, media scholars and health professionals help viewers understand the ways in which Direct-To-Consumer pharmaceutical advertising and promotion to doctors, glamorize and normalize the use of prescription medication. Combined, these industry practices shape how both patients and doctors understand and relate to disease and treatment.

 

Ultimately, Big Bucks, Big Pharma challenges the viewers to ask important questions about the consequences of relying on a for-huge-profit industry for their health and well-being. The viewer needs to be aware of the fact that for the pharmaceutical industry disease is ultimately a good thing…  It's their only source of income and reason for existing.

Civil Disobedience Is Not The Problem. The Problem Is Civil Obedience

Created on Saturday, 21 March 2015 17:47

In this clip from 1971 the late and great Howard Zinn defends the importance of civil disobedience against social injustices. What's astounding is that the comments he made then, still apply to the world today. 

 

In the video below actor Matt Damon reads an excerpt from a speech that Howard Zinn gave in 1970 as part of a debate on civil disobedience.

 

We Become Silent – The Last Days Of Health Freedom

Created on Friday, 12 March 2010 18:34

International award-winning filmmaker Kevin P. Miller of Well TV announced the release of a new documentary about the threat to medical freedom of choice.

'We Become Silent: The Last Days of Health Freedom' details the ongoing attempts by multinational pharmaceutical interests and giant food companies — in concert with the WTO, the WHO and others — to limit the public’s access to herbs, vitamins, and other therapies.

'We Become Silent’ is narrated by Dame Judi Dench.

 

Project Camelot interviews Jane Burgermeister about The Avian Flu

Created on Saturday, 12 September 2009 08:50

Jane Burgermeister is a young woman living in Vienna who, while working as a medical editor, was horrified to learn in early 2009 of the fiasco in which a Baxter International research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria, sent a quantity of human H3N2 viral material to 18 European laboratories.

Such a supply of experimental material would have been totally normal – except that in this instance the H3N2 had been somehow contaminated with live H5N1… the far more lethal Avian Flu.

As a medical editor, Jane immediately realized the importance of what had happened – and what had nearly happened – and raised the alarm. But no one in the Austrian media was interested. She then took matters into her own hands and filed legal charges against those who she considered to be the perpetrators.