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Listed below are the individual questions.
These links are handy when you want to see a specific question answered.
- Does Neuromod have any financial relation to Tinnitus Talk?
Just a very quick comment about the question someone asked about a financial relationship between Neuromod and Tinnitus Talk. I was really glad to see in the video that Tinnitus Talk doesn't have one with Neuromod!! The question is quite understandably treated humorously in the video, but actually this is a very significant and serious issue with medical devices. I've done a lot of campaigning round this issue after being harmed by a device. The issue of device regulation is suddenly receiving far more coverage as part of a new worldwide investigation. The UK partners in this are the Guardian, the BBC and the BMJ.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/implant-files/
https://www.theguardian.com/society/series/the-implant-files
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0btjr55
The larger companies will often conduct marketing campaigns that involve payments to consultant doctors and increasingly sometimes to patient groups as well!
This article sums up the situation quite well as it happened for robotic surgery - until recently most robots were made by Intuitive surgery. a model called Da Vinci. Intuitive/Da Vinci courted not only doctors, but also made payments to e.g. a popular forum where women discussed hysterectomy surgery. The article explains how one woman partly based her decision to have hysterectomy surgery with a Da Vinci robot on the fact that no one on the hysterectomy patient forum seemed to have had problems with it and plenty had good experiences. She did not realise they the forum was receiving money from Intuitive Surgical who make the Da Vinci robot. When she posted about her own negative experience, her post was removed, suggesting that this might have happened before with similar negative experiences.
https://www.healthnewsreview.org/20...-match-many-hysterectomy-patients-experiences.
The Bleeding Edge documentary on Netflix explains some of these types of practices quite well - features a woman who initially had a good experience with the Essure contraceptive device and was then engaged by the company to speak about her good experiences.
The campaign group I am in were offered money from a device manufacturer and turned it down - independence is gold dust and to sell it would be to sell the credibility built up through 1000s and 1000s of hours of hard work in our free time.
Just felt moved to post that as there's so little knowledge about the level of marketing that goes on with devices. HOWEVER I get the very strong impression that the offenders are more likely to be the large, extremely rich device manufacturers - Neuromod appear to be quite a small company from their website and I hope would not go in for these practices. If their device works for tinnitus there will be no need, it will sell itself!
I look forward to seeing the first published clinical trial on the device.
And also, many medical devices are implantable in the body or used in surgery making them inherently more dangerous that this devices sounds like it could be.
Of course even if Neuromod are doing what many device companies do to market the device, it does not mean it won't work, it's just... industry money is so pervasive in medicine now, people have no idea how valuable independence is.