In finding the truth among all the contention about the drug industry today,
there is a very good book written by an experienced M.D.:
The Truth About the Drug Companies by Marcia Angell M.D.
Here is part of a review of it:
Quote:
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In what should serve as the Fast Food Nation of the drug industry, Angell, former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, presents a searing indictment of "big pharma" as corrupt and corrupting: of Congress, through huge campaign contributions; of the FDA, which is funded in part by the very companies it oversees; and, perhaps most shocking, of members of the medical profession and its institutions. Angell delineates how the drug giants, such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca, pay physicians to prescribe their products with gifts, junkets and marketing programs disguised as "professional education." According to Angell, the cost of marketing, both to physicians and consumers, far outweighs expenditures on research and development, though drug makers invoke R&D as the reason drug prices are so high. In fact, says Angell, with combined 2002 profits of $35.9 billion for the Fortune 500's top 10 drug companies, the drug industry is America's most profitable by far, thanks to disproportionately high prices, generous tax breaks and manipulation of patents to extend exclusive marketing rights to blockbuster drugs like Prozac and Claritin. Angell mounts a powerful case (and offers specific suggestions) for reform of this essential industry—a case worth bearing in mind as "big pharma" continues to oppose importing cheaper drugs from Canada.
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Dr. Angell was editor of New England Journal of Medicine for 20 yrs.
Her experience and research are very revealing. One thing that surprised me is that the R & D departments of many major companies no longer do research.
They buy/lease patents from Universities and other research foundations who actually have the creative talent. Today drug companies mainly market.
While searching the net today, I also found this interesting doctoral thesis published on the Web. It echos Dr. Angell:
http://www.fdastudy.com/
And from the Wall Street Journal this echos the thesis above:
Quote:
FDA Goes, Hat in Hand, To the Drug Industry
Topics: U.S. government | pharmaceuticals | health | corporations
Source: Wall Street Journal (sub req'd), September 1, 2006
Pills
"Regulators usually don't negotiate their budgets with the industries they oversee," writes Anna Wilde Mathews, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does. In the early 1990s, drug companies started paying the FDA millions of dollars in user fees, to speed the drug approval process. The fees "now fund more than half the agency's critical drug-review process." Industry groups and the FDA renegotiate the fees and how they're used every five years, giving drug makers "considerable input into which programs receive funding." The FDA is currently negotiating the next agreement, with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and Biotechnology Industry Organization. The industry groups are pushing for faster decisions on "labels and other conditions on approval" of new drugs, and faster review of ads voluntarily submitted to the agency. The FDA wants more funding to monitor drugs' safety following their approval.
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What is a person to do? Well, for starters if you have an adverse reaction to a drug --insist on a Medwatch report being made. Postmarketing has become the time when serious side effects appear. And if reports are not made, these effects damage many people. Right now in the news is the controversy over the antibiotic Ketek.
We are living at a time when patients should have a say, and research their own treatments. And this is just too difficult for many, sadly.
This book is a real eye opener and now is available in paperback. I bought my hardcover copy a while ago from Amazon.
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All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.-- Galileo Galilei
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Weezie looking at petunias 8.25.2017
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