By Stephen J. DubnerThis blog has regularly featured items on the pharmaceutical industry, including posts here, here, and here.It was this post in particular, highlighting an interview with the CEO of Genentech, that made me want to post a quorum on the subject. So we’ve gathered up some willing and able candidates — Dr. Stuart Apfel, Zola P. Horovitz, Dr. Harlan Krumholz, Ray Moynihan, and Dr. Cyril Wolf — and asked them the following question:
What’s something that most people don’t know, pro or con, about the pharmaceutical business, whether from an R&D, economic, or political perspective?
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This really gets my restless leg syndrome up. This pricing abyss in not the shock as much as the continual lapse in proper clinical controlled studies.
ReplyDeleteWhat really eats me is the R&D song and dance, then they underfund the research and falsify the findings. EG: Paxil.
No doubt Spitzer was going to glean some fines from GlaxoSmithKline for their crimes. That is until the shadow government was instructedto bury his career.
As one commenter noted, their advertising budgets exceed their R&D budgets. It's "create a need and fill it."
ReplyDeleteIf we ever manage to make graft illegal and get lobbyists to stop writing legislation, Pharma advertising should not be tax deductible. Let them spend whatever they want as long as it comes straight out of profits.
I say ban them like ads for booze and tobacco.
ReplyDeleteDrugs are for physicians to prescribe. Pandering their toxins to gullible, sick or desperately ignorant
patients is despicable.
They know it too. A patient tells his doctor he wants the latest designer drug for condition X and the doctor is looking at the junket vacation to Hawaii they get for prescribing.
These Sally Fields and other celeb peddlers must get a tidy sum out of that Ad budget.
Agree Patrick. I used to think Sally Fields was a decent person but after watching her shill for glaxo-smith kline's "boniva" I've lost my respect for her.
ReplyDeleteLately there are ads all over the tv to have our kids vaccinated against meningitis and our girls against cervical cancer. Girls have been getting very ill and dying after being given the latter injection.
I don't believe these every growing numbers of vaccines we are required to have our children take is just about making money for the drug companies. I believe it is more sinister than that. I believe it is an orchestrated attempt to sterilize & or sicken our young people in a eugenics program to depopulate.
I posted an article titled "Generation RX" just the other day. It's a documentary which illustrates how our children are being unnecessarily drugged by the medical profession. Their own parents and teachers, mostly through their ignorance, are willing participants.
People need to wake the hell up and start thinking about what these drugs are doing to themselves and society in general, especially the children.. These kids being pumped up at such an early age
with big pharma's poison are the future. God help us.
agree with the above. add this;
ReplyDeleteSymbion (now bought out) owned 6! leading chemist health food and supermarket herbal labelled supplements, and 2 pharmacy chains, supplie(d?)s most major pahrmacies with drugs, does or did? diagnostic sub clinics that took over hospital owned and run departments. they also owned the biggest once private Direct to consumer Australian chain or supplement/herbal options, too. Friends were couriers used old invoices as notepaper, what I saw had me fuming at the Massive!! markup prices the chemists are charging, and how odd that many varying brands all come from same place, at near same cost? labels a different colour bottle is too, and thats about the Only difference.
As to generics, well most of Australia uses them and we have less incidences of problems than the big branded drugs, curious that?
I have attended several oconolgy trade shows and I am bewildered at what I call frankenstein science.
ReplyDeleteJust stand on the show floor and look around the show.
You seen hundreds of pharmaceutical companies all hawking their chemicals as cure alls. Hundreds of them!
How can each company have their own unique cure all the next one don't have?
Truth is, they don't. Some sell wonder drugs while others are peddaling poisons, but how do you know which one is what?
The pharmaceutical companies are indeed practicing frankenstein science until people die and then big brother steps in to say no, don't sell that one.
They are using all of us as their guinea pigs.
Should have written "oncology." Sometimes the fingers don't work the way I want them to!
ReplyDelete