Moewackit
Welcome edit
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Unclear COI report edit
At WP:COIN#Mefloquine, you should add the name of the editor you are complaining about. Asking to have articles removed that were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association will not be an easy task. If there is a controversy about the best therapy, you could try to add references to show the disadvantages of mefloquine. Be aware that medical articles need to rely on reliable sources. Your comments at Talk:Mefloquine are not easy to understand. Thank you, EdJohnston (talk) 18:02, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
Mefloquine NPOV issue edit
Ed,
Thanks for the response on the Mefloquine article.
The author of the two papers under "external Links" with the NPOV conflict is Patricia Schlagenhauf. She is a paid consultant to the drug company that maufactures Mefloquine and is probably one of the biggest paid apologists for the drug. If she were paid to support Thalidamide, she would. SHe is not a medical doctor and does not have clinical experience dealing with people injured from Mefloquine.
The article "The position of mefloquine as a 21st century malaria chemoprophylaxis" is authored by employess of Hoffman LaRoche and Shlagenhauf. It is essentially a paid advertisment for the drug under the guise of a reserach paper.
Unfortuantely this is the current state of affairs with the medical journals. The large drug companies fund these papers that appear as legitimate peer reviewed research. As long as the authors post their conflicts of interest, the medical journals publish them. It is definielty a fox in the hen house scenario.
In contrast, I have posted numerous other papers that provide an update on the current research. None of those authoers are in any way connected to the manufacturers of the drug.Moewackit (talk) 16:30, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
- It is unlikely that any action will be taken on your post at WP:COIN unless you can make a more convincing case. The editors of JAMA presumably keep an eye on conflicts of interest. Whatever survives their review should be OK to present here. We assume that JAMA would not publish nonsense regarding malaria. See WP:MEDRS for the peer-reviewed sources which we trust. EdJohnston (talk) 17:47, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
- Ed, that's too bad. I have been part of the Mefloquine issue since 2003. It very complicated and political. The drug company and its paid "researchers" have promoted this drug for profit and glossed over the new information being published that the drug is dangerous and not effective. It is my experience that the FDA and the med Journals are financially infuenced by the large drug companies. It is too bad that wikipedia then passes this infuence on to the unknowing public without a better highligh of the conflicts of interest. The problem is that since wikipedia advertises a neutral point of view, the public will then assume everything posted is neutral. Unless everyone is aware enough to read and uderstand what the conflicts of interest strements really mean, only the medical professionals will know and understand the corporate bias.
Also, I have really tried to properly insert my references at the bottom, but I find the machine language format very cumbersome. I will work to try and get them properly inserted.
Thanks, BillMoewackit (talk) 16:30, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
- If there is a genuine controversy regarding Mefloquine, you should be able to document it from reliable sources. Both the pro and the con about mefloquine are acceptable here, but your apparent crusade against Patricia Schlagenhauf is not likely to succeed. You should counter her arguments from what published scientists have asserted. Removing citations to her articles is not going to be acceptable. EdJohnston (talk) 18:35, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
- Ed, I do not have a direct crusade against Schlagenhauf. She is just one of many. However, I agree that the best way to address the controversy is to keep publishing the latest research from legitimate scientific resources.
- It has only been in the past few years that the medical journals have required authors to post conflicts of interest statements. This is a positive step forward, but the journals are still have a heavy corporate influence.
- You must understand that Mefloquine is a very complicated issue that is hard to address in a few sentences here. It all started back in the 1970's when the Army invented the drug the first ever PPV(public private venture) with Hoffman LaRoche. The Army pushed Mefloquine through the FDA approval process by skipping the phase three safety trials. In 1989, the drug was then approved for use as a prophylactic by the FDA. But the transcripts of the approval process show that the doctors only addressed compliance and flat out overlooked safety and efficacy. They were just not interested. So this opened up a pandora's box of safety issues in the 1990's and early 2000's with the drug company deliberately cherry picking data and hiring paid consultants to write papers. The FDA even had to come in and make them update their product guides twice to include neuropsychiatric and suicide warnings, but by then many people had already died.
- Another key issue with Mefloquine is that the people who take the drug and have side effects rarely go back to the same doctor who issued it to them. They have the side effects when they are travelling in distant countries. Most all of the initial side effects are psychiatric, so instead of going back to their MD, they end up seeing a psychiatrist or worse yet a psychologist who are not trained in the triage of a toxic insult from a drug, and walk away with a handful of antidepressants and a diagnosis for panic disorder. No adverse reaction reports are then issued so the medical community gets the impression the drug is "safe".......so the reason why you see the proponents always start their papers with "Mefloquine has been safely used by millions of travellers". This is the main hypocracy of their argument, they never gather the data to back that statement up....
- I have had personal conversations with many of the key players including the former head of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research where the drug was invented. He publically admitted in an interview with with the Voice of America in 2001 that the department of defense(DoD) was concerned that Hoffman LaRoche would pull the drug off the market, so DoD agreed to continue to publically back the drug at a time adverse reaction reports about the drug were coming in..
- This individual also told me about the need for a loading dose never got FDA approval because of the side effects of taking such a large dosage initially. The leads to the latest revelation that the drug is not effective in preventing malaria in the first 7 to 9 weeks of use, putting anyone taking the drug at risk of contracting malaria in a high transmission area.........HOWEVER, you will never see this in any of the pie-in-the -sky papers from Shlagenhauf and others from the drug company. This information was actually generated in the 1993 DoD study as indicated in the Boudreau, et al paper that I reference. The proponents of the drug have conceiled this part since the 1990's in craftily prepared "research papers" and easily did so when they had DoD supporting them. This efficacy issue is the vary reason why the 44 of the 250 marines that landed in Liberia in 2003 contracted falciparum maloaria while they were taking mefloquine.
- If you want more details than discussed here, send me a phone number to my email at wlmjr2@hotmail.com I would hate to see wikipedia become an ad service for the drug companies.Moewackit (talk) 16:30, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
- A personal communication wouldn't help. If mefloquine has problems, somebody should have written about them in a peer-reviewed place. Or the controversy might have been covered in the newspapers. If the drug never went through a proper safety trial, that should be easy to document. EdJohnston (talk) 19:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
- You hit the nail on hte head......I have been posting excerpts about the problems from a few of the top tier peer reviewed papers in the Mefloquine discussion. Please read the discussion.....also note that I do not put in any personal diatribes.....just the facts. Also, if you google "Mefloquine Somalia", "{Mefloquine UPI", Mefloquine Ft. Bragg, Meflouqine Iraq", "Mefloquine Afhganistan", you will see the hundred or so newspaper articles that have been posted since the mid 1990's. And still the proponents of the drug keep publishing their pie-in-the-sky marketing propoganda.....they are in serious denial.Moewackit (talk) 16:30, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
- When I and others tried to post some of the newspaper articles in the Mefloquine discussion, they were quickly discounted and removed by the Mefloquine proponents. So the resaon why I only post peer revieed papers by researchers with no conflicts of interest.Moewackit (talk) 16:30, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
Your recent edits edit
Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You could also click on the signature button 
located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 01:33, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
- will do.....I want to be open and transparent on all my postings. I have nothing to hide. So the reason why I post from the Mefloquine product guide and from relevant peer reviewed papers. I try not to post from newspaper articles anymore and have taken them down. You must understand that most of my information comes from the key drug researchers, epidemiologists, and tropical med clinicians at Walter Reed, Balboa Naval Hospital and Bethesda, so I am just no reaching into a grab bag here pulling up random articles. THis is stuff that is not makeing it out to the public. I am still learning how to navigate through wikipedia and appreciate the help.Moewackit (talk) 16:26, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
Your recent edits edit
Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four halfwidth tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You could also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 05:19, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
Please read the article on what a secondary source is. There appears to be some confusion. If you us pubmed there is a button on the right that says reviews. If you do a search and restrict it to review articles these will be secondary source. Please use one in the last 10 preferably 5 years. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:13, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
Copyright edit
Hey Moe You must reword / summarize what you add from sources. Else we end up with copyright violations. Please reword what you have added. Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:32, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Doc,
Several years back, I reworded text from articles and got hammered pretty bad for inserting my opinon. I was only trying to shorten the text. Where is the fine line between the exact technical verbage and an interpretation? Does this not open the door for more credibility issue for Wikipedia?Moewackit (talk) 05:46, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Doc,
I make a living consulting in intellectual property protection. Please look up the concept of "Fair Use" when it comes to copyright infringement. For example, I would interpret exact quotes out of the product guide as Fair Use, particularly if they are referenced from the source. An example of fair use would be handing out copyrighted material as part of the instructional tools in a class you teach. You can literally stand on a street corner and hand out the Mefloquine product guide and not infringe the copyright as long as you don't sell it. Owners of a copyright can only claim financial damages. I do not seet that Wikipedia makes money from selling the information. A lot of times I see people get the actual law mixed up with personal interpretations. Happens all the time.Moewackit (talk) 18:54, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Also, in the case of the product guide...they do not sell it. They sell the drug. Financial damages from the use of the product guide cannot be established, so there is no case. On the contrary, if any of the review papers have a specifc notice to not copy or reproduce, that is a public notice that they will sue for any infringement. To note, US governement documents are free for the taking. They can even be resold.Moewackit (talk) 19:04, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
May 2014 edit
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