Biased advertising...Cancer Treatment Centers of America in spotlight

"Special Report: Behind a cancer-treatment firm's rosy survival claims"

by

Sharon Begley and Robin Respaut

March 6th, 2013

Reuters

When the local doctor who had been treating Vicky Hilborn told her that her rare cancer had spread throughout her body, including her brain, she and her husband refused to accept a death sentence. Within days, Keith Hilborn was on the phone with an "oncology information specialist" at Cancer Treatment Centers of America.

Hilborn had seen CTCA's website touting survival rates better than national averages. His call secured Vicky an appointment at the for-profit, privately held company's Philadelphia affiliate, Eastern Regional Medical Center. There, the oncologist who examined Vicky told the couple he had treated other cases of histiocytic sarcoma, the cancer of immune-system cells that she had.

"He said, ‘We'll have you back on your feet in no time,'" Keith recalled.

Vicky's cancer treatment was forestalled by an infection and other complications that kept her at Eastern Regional for three weeks. In July 2009, when she got back home, things changed. Despite Keith's calls, he said, CTCA did not schedule another appointment. As his wife got sicker, Keith, a former deputy sheriff in western Pennsylvania, was reduced to begging.

The oncology information specialist "said don't bring her here," he recalled. "I said you don't understand; we're going to lose her if you don't treat her. She told me I'd just have to accept that."

Vicky Hilborn never got another appointment with CTCA. She died on September 6, 2009, at age 48.

CTCA is not unique in turning away patients. A lot of doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers in the United States decline to treat people who can't pay, or have inadequate insurance, among other reasons. What sets CTCA apart is that rejecting certain patients and, even more, culling some of its patients from its survival data lets the company tout in ads and post on its website patient outcomes that look dramatically better than they would if the company treated all comers. These are the rosy survival numbers that attract people like the Hilborns.

BEATING THE AVERAGES

CTCA reports on its website that the percentage of its patients who are alive after six months, a year, 18 months and longer regularly tops national figures. For instance, 60 percent of its non-small-cell lung cancer patients are alive at six months, CTCA says, compared to 38 percent nationally. And 64 percent of its prostate cancer patients are alive at three years, versus 38 percent nationally.

Such claims are misleading, according to nine experts in cancer and medical statistics whom Reuters asked to review CTCA's survival numbers and its statistical methodology.

The experts were unanimous that CTCA's patients are different from the patients the company compares them to, in a way that skews their survival data. It has relatively few elderly patients, even though cancer is a disease of the aged. It has almost none who are uninsured or covered by Medicaid - patients who tend to die sooner if they develop cancer and who are comparatively numerous in national statistics.

Carolyn Holmes, a former CTCA oncology information specialist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said she and others routinely tried to turn away people who "were the wrong demographic" because they were less likely to have an insurance policy that CTCA preferred. Holmes said she would try to "let those people down easy."

Equally significant, CTCA includes in its outcomes data only those patients "who received treatment at CTCA for the duration of their illness" - patients who have the ability to travel to CTCA locations from the get-go, without seeking local treatment first. That means excluding, for example, those who have exhausted treatment options closer to home and arrive at a CTCA facility with advanced disease.

Accepting only selected patients and calculating survival outcomes from only some of them "is a huge bias and gives an enormous advantage to CTCA," said biostatistician Donald Berry of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The company defends its practices. Spokeswoman Pamela Browner White said CTCA's survival data are in "no way misleading, nor do they deviate from best practices in statistical collection and analysis." As for the Hilborns, she said, the company does not discuss individual cases.

Cancer Treatment Centers of America got in trouble with regulators in 1996, when the Federal Trade Commission accused it of, among other things, presenting survival claims it couldn't support. The company entered into a consent decree with the FTC and, without admitting any of the allegations, agreed not to make unsubstantiated outcomes claims. The company also "implemented a voluntary, robust compliance program," White said.

Asked if CTCA's current outcomes claims conform to the consent decree, Richard Cleland, the agency's assistant director for advertising practices, said: "No one at the commission can comment on non-public information."

"A FREE-MARKET GUY"

Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which estimates it treats 4 percent to 8 percent of U.S. patients with complex and late-stage cancer, was founded in 1988 by Richard J. Stephenson, who has served as chairman ever since.

Stephenson, who declined to comment for this article, serves on the board of FreedomWorks, a non-profit group that advocates for small government and low taxes, and he is "very much a free-market guy," CTCA President and Chief Executive Stephen Bonner told Reuters.

He also has a history of pushing limits. A graduate of Northwestern University Law School, Stephenson started out as an investment banker. In 1966 he became a trustee of Americans Building Constitutionally, an organization that helped wealthy individuals set up not-for-profit corporations and personal trusts to avoid paying federal income and inheritance taxes.

In 1969, a California state court found the group's top official and six others guilty of grand theft or conspiring to commit grand theft. Stephenson had pleaded no contest to false advertising, a misdemeanor, and testified for the state, according to media reports at the time.

Stephenson ventured into healthcare in 1975, when he and partners bought Zion-Benton Hospital in Zion, Illinois, renaming it American International Hospital. By the late 1980s, American International was facing financial problems and its "reputation had been severely damaged" by local press reports about its use of unproven cancer treatments, according to a 2004 court opinion on a successful petition by a former CTCA president seeking an increased valuation for his share of the company.

In 1988, Stephenson founded CTCA. He was motivated, said CEO Bonner, by the difficulty he had identifying and obtaining the best therapies for his mother after she developed bladder cancer. She died in 1982.

Stephenson began building what was to become a national network of cancer centers that would uphold "the Mother Standard," described on the company website as "a warm, nurturing approach (that) involves caring for patients as we would want care for our own mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and other loved ones."

The hospitals also would seek patients "who were willing to travel to receive treatment" and "who were covered by private commercial insurance and could afford those expenses not paid by insurance," according to the 2004 court opinion.

THE TOUGH CASES

Today, CTCA - with hospitals in Illinois, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, plus an outpatient clinic in Washington state and headquarters in Schaumburg, Illinois - is the only hospital system in the country that specializes solely in complex and advanced cancers. It does not release revenue or profit figures.

The company has treated about 50,000 patients since 1988, CEO Bonner said. (By comparison, the non-profit MD Anderson, a leading cancer center, treated about 115,000 patients last year.) CTCA expects 6,000 new patients and 15,000 to 16,000 continuing patients this year, he said, and is considering expanding in the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast and even Asia.

At each facility, the standard cancer treatments - radiation and chemotherapy - adhere to national guidelines, Bonner said. "But because we see mostly patients with later-stage, complex cancers, they often need something else," he added - psychological and spiritual support as well as "holistic" interventions such as yoga, acupuncture and reiki, a laying-on of hands.

More and more academic cancer centers offer such alternative medicine, which some insurers cover.

"Patients who feel they are understood and empowered will have a better outcome," Bonner said. They'll summon the strength to continue therapy, "even if the last thing they want to do is another round of chemotherapy."

The CTCA formula resonates with many patients. According to Healthgrades, a doctor- and hospital-ratings site, CTCA facilities consistently beat national averages in patient satisfaction.

"We were very impressed with the personal attention," said Rose Weistock, whose husband, Harvey, was treated for non-small-cell lung cancer at the Zion hospital, now the Midwestern Regional Medical Center, after his local physician gave him three to five years to live. "You didn't feel like you were just a number," she said.

CTCA flew the couple at no charge from their Maryland home to Chicago - complete with limo from the airport - to tour the hospital and undergo tests. Harvey, an accountant who had medical insurance through his job, began chemotherapy on that 2004 visit. The Weistocks appreciated the emphasis on what CTCA calls a cancer-fighting diet and on boosting the immune system through mind-body and spiritual practices.

Harvey died in a Maryland hospital in 2005. The family sued CTCA, alleging that he died after receiving chemotherapy he couldn't tolerate, and settled out of court. Still, Rose's admiration for the hospital's personal attention remains unwavering.

HOPEFUL PITCH

"They market hope," Gail Robison, a staff nurse at the Zion hospital from 2003 to 2007, said of CTCA.

The marketing typically features CTCA's state-of-the-art care and holistic approach. Ads note that featured patients might not be representative: "You should not expect to experience these results."

The ads also challenge viewers to "compare our treatment results to national averages." Doing so, on the company's website, shows that CTCA's reported survival outcomes regularly beat those averages.

Experts in medical data who reviewed CTCA's claims for Reuters say those claims are suspect because of what they called deviations from best practices in statistics - in particular, comparing its carefully selected patients to those nationwide.

"It makes their data look better than it is," said Robert Strawderman, professor and chairman of biostatistics at the University of Rochester. "So the comparisons used to suggest that CTCA has better survival rates are pretty meaningless."

The selection process begins when a prospective patient first contacts CTCA, by phone or web chat, and speaks to an oncology information specialist. "The first thing you do is be kind and greet them, but you're qualifying them," said Carolyn Holmes, the former oncology information specialist. "You ask, ‘How old are you?' meaning, ‘Are you Medicare-age?'"

Holmes says she learned to recognize callers with "Cadillac insurance policies" and those from poor zip codes. She said she tried to redirect undesirable patients away from CTCA.

"You don't want them," Holmes said about Medicare patients. Medicaid? "Absolutely not." Other former employees confirmed her account of screening patients based on their means of payment.

Holmes sued Southwestern Regional Medical Center, CTCA's affiliate in Tulsa, in 2012 for terminating her job after she says she experienced symptoms consistent with multiple sclerosis.

CTCA denies any knowledge of Holmes's possible disability and claims she failed to satisfy performance standards, according to court records. The case is pending in Oklahoma federal court.

CTCA spokesman White said that the company has an "insurance-screening process and established criteria" and trains its specialists to direct callers to other resources when CTCA is unable to offer treatment.

CTCA accepts Medicare patients "in some hospitals," said CEO Bonner, and "a tiny bit" of Medicaid. It also has a fund, named for Stephenson's mother, that provides $2.5 million a year in charity care.

SKEWED POOL

The practices Holmes described result in a patient pool that looks very different from the nation's.

At the Zion hospital, about 14 percent of patients were covered by Medicare and 4 percent by Medicaid in 2011, according to data the hospital submitted to Illinois health authorities. Over the previous 10 years, the Medicaid percentage was often in the single digits. Reuters was not able to obtain data from CTCA's other hospitals.

In the database CTCA compares itself to, called SEER and run by the National Cancer Institute, 53 percent of patients were diagnosed at the Medicare-eligible age of 65 or older, and 14 percent are below the poverty level, an indication of those covered by Medicaid or uninsured.

SEER includes patients "with and without insurance, with and without other serious medical conditions, at or not at cancer centers, treated by all types of doctors, not just oncologists, and even including those who never received treatment because the cancer was diagnosed too late," said Celette Skinner, associate director for Population Science & Cancer Control in the Harold C. Simmons Cancer Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Those factors all depress the survival of SEER patients, making CTCA's results look better by comparison.

For instance, patients without insurance, whom state filings show CTCA rarely accepts, are only half as likely to undergo a screening test for cancer, says American Cancer Society statistician Elizabeth Ward. And screened patients are alive longer after diagnosis than are unscreened patients. That reflects the effect of screening, not treatment.

Poor people, whom CTCA rarely treats, also tend to have worse health, such as heart disease and susceptibility to infection. Those "co-morbidities" are responsible for as many as half of all cancer deaths in the year after diagnosis, said Soneji Samir, an expert on cancer statistics at Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, New Hampshire. CTCA's patients "have less risk of other causes of death."

CTCA makes every effort to adjust its data so comparisons to the national database are legitimate, said biostatistician Chengjie Xiong of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who performed CTCA's survival analysis as a consultant to the company.

But "comparisons cannot be done between CTCA and SEER database on income level," he said in an email. That means "there are some differences" between the two patient populations.

Xiong said he is doing new survival calculations using more recent data from CTCA, trying to make sure the comparison to the national database is rigorous. The new results, Xiong said, are expected to be posted on CTCA's website this month.

For some cancers, CTCA will still have better survival rates, he said. For others, "the survival difference in favor of CTCA is no longer statistically significant" after adjusting for several differences between CTCA's patients and those in the national database.

"VERY RED FLAG"

CTCA also excludes from its survival calculations thousands of patients it does treat but who did not receive "treatment at CTCA for the duration of their illness."
"‘The duration of their illness' is a very big and very red flag," said MD Anderson's Berry. CTCA's patients will "tend to be healthier" than those in the general population from which SEER draws its data, he said, adding: "Ability and willingness to travel is an independent factor" associated with longer survival.

No federal or state law requires hospitals to report their cancer outcomes, let alone mandates how to do the calculations. But many healthcare providers voluntarily err on the side of inclusion.

"We follow them for the duration of their illness and still report them even if they were treated elsewhere," said oncologist Alan Campbell, medical director of Spectrum Health, which runs medical practices and hospitals in Michigan. "Doing otherwise could skew your survival numbers."

Other major cancer centers do not report outcomes at all, arguing that the statistics can be manipulated.

CTCA also appears to exclude the vast majority of its patients when it calculates survival data. In survival results from 2004 to 2008 posted on its website, CTCA reported 61 patients with advanced prostate cancer, 97 with advanced breast cancer, 434 with advanced lung cancer, and 165 with advanced colon or rectal cancer. These are the four most common solid tumors. In the same period, CTCA treated thousands of patients at its Zion facility alone, according to filings with state regulators.

"We agree that some of our sample sizes" are small "and have always stated this as a limitation of our study," said Xiong, the consultant to CTCA.

"I'd have some concerns about why and wonder if some cherry-picking was going on," said Spectrum Health's Campbell.

Moreover, while the standard reporting period for cancer survival is five years after diagnosis, CTCA on its website doesn't go that far; for the four most common tumors, it reports survival up to four years at most. And as Reuters found, the company's advantage often diminishes as the five-year mark approaches (see accompanying graphic).

Soon after Keith Hilborn got Vicky back home, her local doctor cleared her to travel. Keith started calling the CTCA oncology information specialist he had first spoken to. "She said things like ‘We'll have to get back to you,'" Keith said.

They never did. Vicky "was depending on me, and I couldn't get them to treat her," he said. "She never got a single cancer treatment from them."
Hilborn received a statement from CTCA saying Vicky's care cost $319,902.20. "This was just for treating her infection," he said. "My local hospital could charge like that, too, if they flew you around and sent limos for you."

He refused to pay, keeping the reimbursement Vicky's insurer had sent to him. CTCA sued him for payment and won. A sheriff's sale of his belongings is expected to raise money to pay the judgment.

"The Space Merchants"...satire on advertising

Wikipedia...

The Space Merchants is a science fiction novel, written by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth in 1952. Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine as a serial entitled Gravy Planet, the novel was first published as a single volume in 1953, and has sold heavily since. It deals satirically with a hyper-developed consumerism, seen through the eyes of an advertising executive.

Plot...

In a vastly overpopulated world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge trans-national corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and by far the best-paid profession. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market. Some of the products contain addictive substances designed to make consumers dependent on them. However, the most basic elements of life are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel. Personal transportation may be pedal powered, with rickshaw rides being considered a luxury. The planet Venus has just been visited and judged fit for human settlement, despite its inhospitable surface and climate; the colonists would have to endure a harsh climate for many generations until the planet could be terraformed.

The protagonist, Mitch Courtenay, is a star-class copywriter in the Fowler Schocken advertising agency who has been assigned the ad campaign which would attract colonists to Venus. But a lot more is happening than he knows about. It soon becomes a tale of mystery and intrigue, in which many of the characters are not what they seem, and Mitch's loyalties and opinions change drastically over the course of the narrative.

Mitch goes to a resort in Antarctica, only to become lost outside in a blizzard. He recovers to find that he has been shanghaied as an ordinary working stiff. His ID number tattooed on his arm has been altered so he cannot reclaim his old identity. However his skills remain intact. He becomes the propaganda specialist for a cadre of revolutionaries, in the process becoming a convert to the cause of those he once manipulated as mere consumers. In the end he confronts those who stole his life, who are not necessarily his enemies, and those from his old life, who are not necessarily his friends.

Origins...

Whilst serving in the US Army Air Force during the Second World War, Pohl had been posted to Stornara, in south-eastern Italy, as a weather forecaster. Shortly after learning of his mother's death in 1944, and feeling somewhat homesick, he decided to start writing a novel about New York. He chose to write about the advertising industry, thinking it to be the most interesting topic in the city, and patiently wrote "a long, complicated, and very bad novel" with the title of For Some We Loved.

After the war ended, in early 1946, he re-read the manuscript, and decided that its major flaw was that he had written it despite knowing nothing about advertising. Before rewriting it, he applied for a number of advertising jobs to gain some background, and on 1 April 1946 joined a small Madison Avenue agency as their chief copywriter. He later moved to Popular Science, finding that he enjoyed the work so much he lost track of why he originally took the job.

Some years later, Pohl again returned to For Some We Loved. In early 1950, he read through the original manuscript, but found the writing to be completely unsalvageable; he burned it, and decided to forget the idea. The following year, he began drafting a science-fiction novel, loosely themed on advertising, under the name of Fall Campaign, and had reached twenty thousand words by the summer, working at weekends and in the evenings. At this point, Pohl's old friend Cyril Kornbluth arrived, having quit his job in Chicago to freelance as a science-fiction writer, and offered to look over the manuscript. A short while later he returned, having incorporated some plot suggestions made by Philip Klass and written a new twenty-thousand word middle section; the two men collaborated on the final third, and after Pohl gave it a final revision, the novel was complete.

Critical reception...

In his study of the pioneers of science fiction, New Maps of Hell (1960), the novelist Kingsley Amis states that The Space Merchants "has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far." It is also ahead of its time in stressing the importance of limiting population growth and conserving natural resources. On its initial publication, Groff Conklin called the novel "perhaps the best science fiction satire since Brave New World." Boucher and McComas praised it as "bitter, satiric, exciting [and] easily one of the major works of logical extrapolation in several years. . . . a sharp melodrama of power-conflict and revolt which manages . . . to explore all the implied developments of [its imagined] society." Imagination reviewer Mark Reinsberg described it as "a marvellously entertaining story" and "A brilliant future satire." P. Schuyler Miller compared the novel to Brave New World, finding it "not so brilliant, but more consistently worked out and suffering principally . . . from its concessions to melodrama."

It was rated the twenty-fourth "all-time best novel" in a 1972 Locus poll, jointly with The Martian Chronicles and The War of the Worlds. In 2012 the novel was included in the Library of America two-volume boxed set American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe.

As with many significant works of science fiction, it was lexically inventive. The novel is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first recorded source for a number of new words, including "soyaburger", "moon suit", "tri-di" for "three-dimensional", "R and D" for "research and development", "sucker-trap" for a shop aimed at gullible tourists, and one of the first uses of "muzak" as a generic term. It is also cited as the first incidence of "survey" as a verb meaning to carry out a poll.

Audio presentation...

CBS Radio Workshop...

The Space Merchants [Part 1]

The Space Merchants [Part 2]

Einstein and the General Motors advertisement

"GM wins Einstein ad lawsuit..."

by

Jerry Hirsch

October 18th, 2012

The Los Angeles Times

General Motors is winning the nerd wars.

Earlier this week, it prevailed against Hebrew University of Jerusalem in a lawsuit over the use of the image of Albert Einstein in a People magazine advertisement in 2009.

...

According to the Detroit News, the Einstein ad for the GMC Terrain SUV depicted the face of the famous physicist on top of a fit, muscular man with the line, "Ideas are sexy too."

The Israeli university owns Einstein's publicity rights and sued the automaker. But U.S. District Judge Howard Matz ruled Monday that Einstein is perhaps the ultimate public figure.

Matz wrote that Einstein is "the symbol and embodiment of genius. His persona has become thoroughly ingrained in our cultural heritage. Now, nearly 60 years after his death, that persona should be freely available to those who seek to appropriate it as part of their own expression, even in tasteless ads."

GM had said that it believed that the Leo Burnett agency that worked on the advertisement had purchased a legitimate license to the image from Getty Images. The automaker declined to comment on the resolution of the lawsuit.

Cheap telescope advertisements

[Click to enlarge and read.]

Repair your scratch?...Billy Mays can--NOT

Vince Offer and Billy Mays

We have all seen them from 60 second commercials to infomercials--the carny barkers, charlatans, hucksters, snake oil merchants. They always have some revolutionary product that we must have. Two of the biggies are Billy Mays and Vince Offer. They are selling miracle goods that will change our lives all for $19.95 plus shipping and handling and, if you call within the next ten minutes we will double the offer. These guys are masters of the conartist's game. Talk fast, make the goods look great, grab the money, and run. Usually, it is junk. Yesterday, I saw Billy Mays, in his obnoxious loud voice, selling a scratch remover which reminded me of a genuine science involving polymer chemistry--that polyurethane can be "repaired". [See article below]. Billy claims that furniture and automobile scratches can be easily removed. So, I checked the Internet to see what people were saying about this great product. Nearly every one commenting had nothing good to say: The product never did what it promised to do, it left undesirable results, and customer service was terrible. The lesson to be learned is that most of these products are worthless and that the consumer should be more savvy.

"Coating Fixes Its Own Scratches"

UV light helps replace broken cross-links in polyurethane

by

Sophie L. Rovner

March 16th, 2009

Chemical & Engineering News

IMAGINE YOU ACCIDENTALLY scratch your car's paint when you leave your garage in the morning. Now picture that paint repairing itself with the help of sunshine during your commute to work. That sort of application is the long-term goal of research that's just been reported by polymer scientists Marek W. Urban and Biswajit Ghosh of the University of Southern Mississippi (Science 2009, 323, 1458).

The paper describes a new self-repair approach for a polyurethane coating, says Nancy R. Sottos, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Several self-healing compounds already exist. For example, Sottos and others have designed materials that release embedded healing reactants when cracked. Other researchers have produced materials in which "the crack-mending process is initiated by an external thermal-, mechanical-, chemical-, or photo-induced stimulus," she says.

The first photochemical repair of a polymeric material was reported by a Korean team (Chem. Mater. 2004, 16, 3982). The researchers produced their polymeric film by irradiating cinnamate monomers with UV light to form cyclobutane cross-links. Any cross-links subsequently broken by cracking could be fixed with another dose of UV light.

Urban says his own work differs by incorporating a minimal amount of a self-healing additive into polyurethane. He believes his technique could be broadly applicable because the additive could be incorporated into many other types of coating materials.

The researchers synthesized the additive by linking chitosan, a polysaccharide derived from crab and shrimp shells, to oxetanes, which are four-membered rings containing three carbon atoms and an oxygen. The additive also covalently bonds to the urethane polymers. When a scratch damages the material, exposure to UV light initiates a free-radical process that cross-links broken chitosan and oxetane fragments, repairing the damage in less than an hour.

So far, Urban and Ghosh have demonstrated the technique with microscopic scratches that are about 10 µm wide. Further work will be needed to show the strength of the repaired material and whether the technique can handle macroscopic scratches.


Billy Mays

Vince Offer

Science--being manipulated on Madison Ave.?

We see this everywhere--scientists are revered in their opinion on just about everything. But is it ethical?

"The corporate takeover of 'reason' and 'science'"

by

David Miller

August 10th, 2008

RINF.COM: THE BREAKING NEWS ALTERNATIVE

Those who say that they favour science and rationality can end up supporting the opposite. Science and rationality retain a very significant force in public debate and is thus worth exploiting by vested interests. The strategic use of science is a well used part of the armoury of the public relations industry. Indeed it is true to say that the founding of the PR and lobbying industries were based on attempts to pervert rationality and science in the interests of vested interests. The very earliest PR practitioners such as Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, were adept at this. Bernays use of psychology was famously put to use in promoting cigarette smoking among women by styling them ‘torches of freedom’ and associating them with women’s equality and liberation.

Bernays was amongst the first to make a profession out of what he called the 'conscious' and 'intelligent manipulation' of the beliefs and behaviour of the public. Those who 'manipulate this unseen mechanism' of society were, he wrote, an 'invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.' 1

Today the PR industry is still based on the same philosophy. The promotion of 'science-i-ness' is an ever present talisman. It has two cardinal principles. The first - seen increasingly following the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s – is that where science or truth will undermine corporate interests, the science or truth must be changed. The second principle is to disguise the source of information where useful. When a message is likely to be disbelieved or treated with scepticism when said openly by a corporation or politician, the words must be put in the mouth of someone more believable and apparently disinterested. This is the famous third party technique and has led to a whole swathe of scientists taking corporate money to promote corporate friendly science.

Because science is still such a resource it is imperative for powerful interests to try and co-opt, undermine, distort, influence or buy 'science'. This is now so widespread that the issue is openly debated in the scientific journals and there is a small but growing number of studies examining the question of the potential bias introduced by corporate funding. 2 From the 50 year battle to protect the tobacco industry to today’s strategic use of science in climate change denial, and to muddy the waters as obesity and binge drinking become crisis issues, scientists have been recruited as a resource. For example they receive research grants, are paid as consultants or have their names added to academic journal articles ghost written by PR operatives. Some scientists are even kept on retainers by corporations or lobby groups and can be wheeled out to order.

The third party technique fits nicely into the co-option strategy. Scientists whose research budgets are nicely swelled by corporate money can often be surprisingly willing recruits to speak on behalf of industry. A study of toxic industrial contaminants in farmed Salmon published in Science in 2004, was greeted with a chorus of condemnation in the press. Many of the voices were described as academic scientists. In fact almost all had financial links to the industry undisclosed in the press. The study itself was well grounded. 3 Nonetheless the industry campaign to remove the stain of poisoned Salmon from the public mind was largely successful.

In the US and UK the creation of 'front groups' is common. These are organisations usually including a science-like term in their title such as 'foundation' 'institute' or 'research'. In the UK the food industry has been able to sabotage healthy eating initiatives since the 1970s by – among other things - funding the apparently independent British Nutrition Foundation which is able to place representatives on a myriad of government committees. 4 The International Life Science Institute sounds a bit scientific. In fact it is a food industry lobby group funded by hundreds of the biggest food, pharma and chemical companies and was for years more or less directed by the Coca Cola company. It was able to infiltrate the WHO process on dietary sugars by covertly funding some of the scientists involved. 5 In January 2006 the WHO decided that ILSI ‘can no longer take part in WHO activities setting microbiological or chemical standards for food and water’, as a result of complaints about its lobbying tactics. 6

The PR industry is at the forefront of creating and managing front groups today. The Scientific Alliance turned out to be run from the offices of Foresight Communications a PR firm in central London and to be funded by Scottish quarry owner Robert Durward. The Social Issues Research Centre 'fosters the image of an ultraconcerned public spirited group' and of 'a heavy-weight research body'.7 It is also run by a PR/marketing company from the same address. That company - MCM Research - used to announce on its website its approach to open and truthful communications: 'Do your PR initiatives sometimes look too much like PR initiatives? MCM conducts social/psychological research on the positive aspects of your business… The results do not read like PR literature'. 8

Of course the corporations can do little else than lie and attempt to co-opt science. They require to extract maximum surplus from both labour and natural resources to be part of the global market. Their problem is that these qualities of corporate operations are not very attractive to the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. As a result corporations and their PR agents must try to undermine or co-opt science. The only defence is transparency, enhanced ethics standards and public funding of research.

NOTES:

1. Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928, New York: Horace Liverwright.
2. Kassirer, J.P. On the take: How medicine's complicity with big business can endanger your health. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 2005.; Lesser et al. 'Relationship between funding source and conclusion among nutrition-related scientific articles'. PLoS Medicine 2007.; Jorgensen AW, Hilden J, Gotzsche PC. Cochrane reviews compared with industry supported meta-analyses and other meta-analyses of the same drugs: systematic review. BMJ 2006;333:782-5.;Veronica Yank, Drummond Rennie, Lisa A Bero, Financial ties and concordance between results and conclusions in meta-analyses: retrospective cohort study BMJ 2007;335:1202-1205 (8 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.39376.447211.BE (published 16 November 2007); Jim Giles, Industry money skews drug overviews Nature 437, 458-459 (22 September 2005); DeAngelis, C. Comment on "Conflict of interest in medical research: facts and friction" in meeting proceedings, call to action: Managing financial relationships between academia and industry in biomedical research 2007; 15-16.;Peppercorn, J, Blood, E., Winer, E, Partridge, A. Association between pharmaceutical involvement and outcomes in breast cancer clinical trials. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2005.

3. David Miller 'Spinning Farmed Salmon (part 2 of 3)', Spinwatch, 28 May 2008 http://www.spinwatch.org/content/view/4953/8/

4. Geoffrey Cannon The Politics of Food Century Hutchinson, London, UK, 1987. John Yudkin, Pure, White and Deadly, Penguin, 1988.

5. Sarah Boseley 'WHO "infiltrated by food industry"' The Guardian Thursday January 9, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jan/09/foodanddrink; Sarah Boseley 'Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO' The Guardian Monday April 21, 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/apr/21/usnews.food; Sarah Boseley 'WHO 'buried' report to please food industry' The Guardian Wednesday November 3, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/nov/03/media.advertising

6. John Heilperin, 'WHO to Rely Less on U.S. Research', Associated Press, January 27, 2006.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/01/27/national/w150409S47.DTL

7. Annabel Ferriman 'An end to health scares?' BMJ 1999;319:716- ( 11 September ) http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/319/7211/716

8. Ibid.

Ethical advertising--name a star

There is nothing illegal here just an ethical issue. You can with great intentions name a star of a deceased individual, your pet, or whatever and as Wikipedia says: "Once the star is named..." the seller publishes "...its telescopic coordinates in a book called "Your Place in the Cosmos."" and "...is "registered in book form at the U.S. Copyright Office"...." The ethical issue is that the star name is not recognized as an official astronomical designation..."The International Astronomical Union (IAU)...has the internationally recognized authority to name and designate newly discovered stars, planets, asteroids, comets, and other heavenly bodies. The IAU's nomenclature...is the one used by professional and amateur astronomers all over the world. It is not for sale." No where is it stated that the star name is official. It's a gift of the heart and mind but just be aware of authenticity.

"Buy a Star, But It's Not Yours"

by

Patrick Di Justo

December 26th, 2001

Wired

Winona Ryder got one for Johnny Depp. Nicole Kidman got one and named it "Forever Tom." Princess Diana has two, purchased for her after her death. And at least one widow of a fireman lost in the World Trade Center attack wanted to buy one in memory of her late husband.

What these people have is a 12-by-16-inch certificate from the Illinois company International Star Registry (ISR), claiming that a star had been named for them or their loved one.

They have a booklet with charts of the constellations, along with a large detailed star chart with "their" star circled in red. They also have a gap in their bank account where $48 used to be. What they don't have is any confirmation their star's new name is recognized and will be used by anyone outside International Star Registry.

Founded in 1979, ISR has sold over 1 million of their full-color "Name A Star" parchment certificates. Figuring there are between 400 billion and 1 trillion stars in this galaxy alone, selling names for them at nearly $50 each sounds like a license to print money.

But International Star Registry certainly doesn't have a license to name stars. Robert Naeye, editor of Mercury Magazine, a publication of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, puts it in no uncertain terms: "The star names sold by the International Star Registry are not recognized by any professional astronomical organization."

The International Astronomical Union is the only scientific body authorized to name astronomical bodies.

In other words, typing "Forever Tom" into the Hipparcos star data catalog will get you nothing but a 404.

The International Star Registry is not in the business of officially assigning star names; it is in the business of finding people willing to part with their money for a piece of paper that in a scientific sense means precisely nothing.

"We produce a good product, a fun product. We may have planted a seed with people, educated them even slightly about astronomy, about the stars," said Rocky Mosele, vice president of marketing and advertising for ISR. "For people to say, 'Well, it's not official' -- I think people are OK that it's not official. I'm sure of it. I know because customers call again and again and again."

Yet a significant number of people believe that the naming of a star is an official activity. Is ISR's star-naming business therefore a scam? No, not legally. The company promises to send you a piece of parchment, a booklet and a star map -- and it delivers. It also promises to copyright your star's new name and location in a book -- and it does.

Earlier ISR advertisements promised to store a star's name in a vault in Geneva, Switzerland, and there's no reason to believe this was not done. The company very carefully makes no claim that the star's new name will be recognized by professional astronomers.

"We've been given a clean bill of health by the attorney general of Illinois," Mosele said. "They find no problem with what we do; we're not trying to mislead people."

ISR doesn't even use the word "official" anywhere on its main Web page.

Yet this tacit acknowledgement hasn't stopped ISR from throwing its weight around. In 2000, they threatened to sue Ohio Wesleyan University for hosting a student's Web page criticizing the company's star-naming practices. Rather than face a lawsuit, the university removed the website. At roughly the same time, ISR threatened suit against a Florida planetarium for remarks against ISR made by one of its employees.

"I was actually hoping they'd sue me," said Laurent Pellerin, the employee in question. "But ISR went after (my employer, knowing) they couldn't afford even a successful lawsuit."

International Star Registry actually brought suit in 1999 against another star-naming company, claiming trademark infringement. (Oddly enough, this case was significant, as it determined that doing business over the Internet with inhabitants of a state was the equivalent of doing business in that state.)

What bothers most people in the astronomy and planetarium communities is that too many people buy these stars under the assumption that their star's name will be acknowledged worldwide by the astronomical community. "I would be perfectly happy if ISR said up front that the star name you're purchasing is not scientifically recognized," Pellerin said. "They do that on their Canadian website. Why can't they just say it here?"

"Why, after the astronomy community has been so nasty to us, should I do them any favors?" retorts ISR's Mosele. "They're requesting something of me. Why should I do it based on their request after they've been so nasty? I don't think our customers are confused."

To those who would like to honor a living or departed loved one with an astronomical gift, Marc Taylor of the Andrus Planetarium in Westchester County, New York, offers an alternative. "If you want to buy something for a child, why not get them a beginner's astronomy book, or even a pair of binoculars?" he said. "In memory of someone who has died, donating astronomy equipment -- even a magazine subscription -- to a school is a great way to keep their memory alive, because you open up the universe to others."