Aseem Malhotra’s ‘First! Do No Pharm’ highlights pharma’s dark side

A BRITISH Asian cardiologist has premiered a documentary in Leicester Square to throw the spotlight on the global pharmaceutical industry’s approach towards healthcare.

Dr Aseem Malhotra’s First! Do No Pharm features testimonies from medical and sector experts from around the world on the unscrupulous behaviour of the pharma industry and medical research fraud.

The premiere last Monday (23) evening was introduced by British Asian filmmaker, Gurinder Chadha, who praised Malhotra for his commitment to his Hippocratic Oath, the ethics pledge historically taken by physicians. “Aseem is a very old friend of mine, and I have watched his brave and often perilous journey confronting corruption and malpractice,” said Chadha. “He does this in defence of the Hippocratic Oath, which he took in defence of my health and millions like me who constantly are looking for the truth about healthcare. He will not stop until we all understand his vital mission for our benefit,” she added.

Malhotra said, “This film is the most incendiary work I have ever completed. It is going to make a lot of profit-hungry people in the pharmaceutical industry unhappy. But it is going to save lives, and that is all that matters. We have a pandemic of misinformed doctors and misinformed and unwittingly harmed patients. It is time to put an end to this once and for all.”

Having previously campaigned against statins and the dangers of high sugar consumption, Malhotra said he wanted to explore the state of the broader health system and the feared corruption within that perpetuates certain myths around heart disease. Directed by documentary filmmaker Donal O’Neill, the film uses a personal storytelling style with interviews of experts, including Indian American Professor Jay Bhattacharya and Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva.

“We need to apply quite a big dose of scepticism to the medical literature. Journals will publish a pharmaceutical trial and then will be paid quite large sums for providing the pharmaceutical company with reprints of that article. And it’s very hard for an editor to remove that conflict when making an editorial decision,” said Dr Fiona Godlee, former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), who is among those interviewed in the film.

Sir Richard Thompson, former president of the Royal College of Physicians, calls for a public inquiry into the “murky practices of big pharma” so that doctors can know that when they prescribe a drug, they are truly putting their patients first and not the financial interests of the drug companies and their shareholders.

“For too long, doctors have had to make clinical decisions based on non-transparent data on the efficacy and side effects of drugs that are curated by the drug industry, whose basic motive is to put profits before patients. Therefore, invariably the safety and benefits of many important drugs, such as statins, are exaggerated, so that avoidable illness, and even deaths, occur from the side effects that have often been ignored or denied by the industry,” he explained.

Malhotra’s film concludes with a visit to Mount Abu in Rajasthan where cardiologist Dr Satish Gupta’s lifestyle modification methods to reverse heart damage from blocked arteries and the benefits of yoga are explored. The film is now available online; there will also be exclusive screenings across the US and India in the coming months.