Cook Medical is a part of the Cook Group, an oddly diverse multinational (emphases mine):
Since 1963, Cook Group companies have been among the leaders in developing healthcare devices that have improved lives around the world. COOK remains at the forefront of medical research and worldwide sales of products for endovascular therapy, critical care medicine, general surgery, diagnostic and interventional procedures, bioengineered tissue replacement and regeneration, gastroenterology and endoscopy procedures, urology, and obstetrics and gynecology.
Our COOK corporate family also includes companies that manufacture specialized industrial parts and offer commercial services in the travel, real-estate development and management, and retail fields.
COOK is a global company with a global focus - and a global future.
Real estate services and endovascular devices? Now that's weird. I suspect they're privately held, which probably explains their idiosyncratic portfolio.
The medical device company, among other things, sells the Surgisis Biodesign Peyronie's Repair Graft
... The Surgisis Biodesign Peyronie's Repair Graft can help restore a patient's lifestyle and confidence. Surgisis Biodesign provides strength and flexibility for reinforcement and correction of penile curvature. The graft signals the body's surrounding cells to grow across the scaffold, remodeling into functional tissue. Surgisis Biodesign is easy to hydrate and suture, minimizes scar tissue formation, and is resistant to infection....
The Surgisis line appeared on "The History Channel" a few months ago, which leads to some cynical speculation on how that channel is funded. I couldn't find any medical articles referencing this product, a scholar.google.com search had one hit.
Which brings me to Peyronie's - Getting Information and Help. This is billed by Cook Medical as a "social networking site" (from an email I was sent):
... Cook Medical is launching MensHealthPD.com, and leveraging social networking capabilities to create a safe and interactive destination for physicians, patients and their partners to learn about symptoms and treatments, discuss and share thoughts and opinions and have access to the latest information around Peyronie’s disease. Physicians can also engage in a secure, physicians-only Q&A forum to foster knowledge exchange...
Unsurprisingly their therapy reference includes this blurb:
... Plaque Incision or Excision and Grafting: This procedure removes tissue on the inside of the curve and replaces it with a graft to allow the penis to straighten. The graft can either be tissue from the patient or a biological "off-the-shelf" material such as Cook Medical's Surgisis® Biodesign™ Peyronie's Repair Graft or a cadaveric pericardial graft...
Well.
Ok, so it's a time honored practice in the pharma industry to create "patient friendly" web sites which, oddly enough, slip in some marketing on the side. Even so, this one feels a bit a bit edgy to me. There are NO references to any published research about their "Surgisis Biodesign" graft material, and it's obviously the entire reason the site exists.
If you do visit this site, please remember why it exists.
1 comment:
Hi Hortenis,
Thanks for your post. I can appreciate your skepticism about corporate sponsored websites. That is why we took so much care to ensure that we provided a balanced representation of all the treatment options available to men who suffer from Peyronie’s. We also tried to keep the tone and voice of the site accessible to everyone, which is why you don’t see references to clinical and academic articles on the home page.
If you scroll through the “options for treatment” listed under “Explore Current Treatments,” it links to recently published Peyronies research articles on PubMed, the foremost resource for physicians. (Most of those articles refer to Surgisis Biodesign as Small Intestinal Submucosa, Surgisis ES or SIS rather than the brand name.)
We hope that Menshealthpd.com develops into a platform for people to share their experiences and have access to tools and research to alleviate the challenges that accompany Peyronie’s disease, many of which you have written about in your blog.
Thank you again for mentioning our site and for the work that you do to inform people about Peyronie’s disease.
Kind Regards,
Jerry French
Senior Vice President
Urology Global Business Unit Leader
Cook Medical
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