My beef with prescription medicines

Where to start? The wrongdoing of big pharma is so vast that many books have been written about the ways in which drug companies deceive us. One good one is The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It. The author is Marcia Angell, M.D., who is the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. She describes the pharmaceutical industry as having “moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs” to becoming “a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit.” The companies now “use their wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the U.S. Congress, the Food and Drug Administration, academic medical centers and the medical profession itself.” Since the early 1980s and with few exceptions, pharmaceutical companies have consistently ranked as the most profitable in the United States (more than $200 billion a year).

Here are some of the ways big pharma deceives:

·         Over charging. The cost of the drug is unrelated to the costs of research and development, as they would have you believe. Instead, the costs, which are continually rising, are based on what the traffic will bear.

·         Manipulating research findings to make drugs look good. As much as 90 percent of published medical information—the kind of information that doctors rely on—is flawed, according to the world’s foremost expert on the credibility of medical research.

·         Rewarding doctors to promote their drugs. Companies spend more than four billion dollars nationwide in payments to doctors for attending and promoting drugs at industry-sponsored conferences.

·         Rewarding doctors to prescribe their drugs. The rewards range from meals to generous honoraria for speaking at conferences. As a rule, the doctors who prescribe the most are rewarded the most.

·         Promoting old drugs as new. Most of the new drugs approved by the FDA are “me too” drugs—old drugs whose molecules have been only slightly altered so they can appear as new. They are more expensive but no more effective than the old models.

·         Passing off their professionally-written articles as the work of academics. Drug companies pay professional writers to produce academic papers according to the companies’ specifications then get the academics to put their names to them.

·         Passing off marketing as “education.” The drug companies’ so called “education” programs come out of their marketing budgets, which, collectively in 2001 amount to $19 billion. By masquerading marketing as education, big pharma can evade legal constraints on marketing activities.

Next week: Drug companies over charge

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.