"cine (U.S.) is for sale?" - Marcia Angell question, ex-editor head of the New England Journal of Medicine. The answer he received: "The academic medicine for sale? No! The current owner is very happy with it! "
This type of information is discussed in the indispensable book" The truth about drug companies' Record of the publisher.
The enormous mistrust that drug makers have been receiving from the consumer public in the United States seems more than justified. Reading this detailed examination, performed by one of the most influential people in American public opinion, can at times be similar to reading a book of horror and suspense, and it would be great if it was only after all the reports and comments refer to drugs that billions of people use, believing in good faith that the manufacture, even if prices love their personal budgets or impede the public policy of drug supply Free to the public. Incidentally, the term - free - could never appear as an adjective in the disclosure of supply programs for medication (and vaccines), because everything that comes to population is exceptionally well paid by all taxpayers of the country, even those who buy these drugs in the pharmacies (which are few in the current urban landscape, which lead us to confirm the idea that high profitability is to assist people to remain on medication).
Dr. Angell gives a very comprehensive course on the evaluation of laboratories and their considerations are very consistent, because it uses data from the perspective of an insider system.
course the pricing is the target of extensive exploration. We could understand the high costs of new drugs and useful for complex machine that allegedly involves research of new substances. But it touches on the amazing revelation that most research is carried by National Institutes of Health (NIHS), subsidized by the U.S. government money, so the taxpayers themselves. Thus the overwhelming majority of investments consumed by the noble part of the production of a product - R & D: Research and Development - is bankrolled by future consumers. The huge numbers involved in spending by the pharmaceutical industry are depended on ... marketing! Aggressive marketing is the most researched by the major laboratories than anything else. The wave of absurd direct advertisements or stylized in the media is one of the most obvious expressions of this. But there are also a lot of money involved in the dissemination of "alleged" free samples to doctors and hospitals. It is obvious that the free samples will be fairly compensated by the final consumer price.
examination of the author of the widely accepted attitude of laboratories and scientific symposia to afford even finance the Continuing Education Program, and offers all kind of toast and gifts to doctors, leaves us with the unpleasant impression of the word corruption was an almost gentle adjective for this type of procedure.
After all pharmaceutical companies are financial corporations that have as their number one goal of profit. Although this may seem unsympathetic to the gullible that there is kindness and sympathy at the highest levels of capitalism, the data shown in this impressive book will not give rise to very kind with companies such as Bayer, Ely Lilly, Johnson, among a few other, forming a cartel ostensible .
The FDA (the board of American medicine and food), seen by many in Brazil as an entity of respect and reverence is only a small institution to validate the insatiable desire of these laboratories to remain in a curious band of exclusivity and monopoly of health research. Believe in the impartiality and capacity of the FDA is so naive as the belief that we had that DDT was harmless to humans, that the initiative to put fluoride in drinking water would be the idea of \u200b\u200bdentists, or that someone could ever put caustic soda in the milk of children.
trade of drugs in the U.S. is an intricate network of interests and so well defended in political circles as there are Americans who believe in a positive suitability as a predicate that industry. Billions of dollars are involved! And the political game is taken to extremes in defending these values!
The makeup of drugs is another very curious as raised by the author. This happens by the existence of a curious law of patents in force in that country. The story of Claritin ® and Aerius ® is bleak, (they are strictly the same substance, but the second is derived from the first, a process that effectively runs the human body), the highest prices of the second are not explainable by any spent research and development. But more incredible is the story of AZT, the popular drug to combat AIDS. As we all know is a disease that has gained notoriety in the '80s (1983), and imagine that it would be justifiable for drugs as a serious disease that could have cost a high price for his research. But would not the case of AZT, which was synthesized in 1963, years before, and besides, a federal institution by the Michigan Cancer Foundation. High prices have more to do with the applicability of this drug (originally designed for cancer treatment, besides being useful for viral infections like herpes) in a disease that has gained evidence, than with any laborious discovery of a New Molecular Entity . In this case certainly nothing new was created. In this and many, many more.
This is part of the relentless struggle to create other medicinal uses for well known or very restricted use. This might explain the use of old drugs in new situations and high profitability, by an unexpected need. For example, the use of anticonvulsant drugs in the new group difficult to describe how the drugs mood stabilizers! (Such as Depakene ®, Topamax ® or Lomatrigina ®). Or the return of an outmoded anti-inflammatory such as ibuprofen (Alivium ®), suddenly brought the first choice to treat fever in children, despite the notion more careful not to blindly medication tables are not well defined as a sudden fever without other symptoms . Everyone knows that anti-inflammatory drugs may obscure the clinical expression of a disease in its earliest manifestations. But marketing was very effective and that drug much is sold. The use of fluoxetine on symptoms of the enigmatic pre-menstrual elaborately named premenstrual dysphoric disorder in the form of colorful pills, but with a different name known Prozac ®, is another example of maquiação (in the U.S. with the product name serafi ® is the substance fluoxetine pills in a different color of Prozac ®, and being with color and different name got new indication), but this can be a much more common than we would have liked ..
discouraging, too, is to ascertain that in recent years very few truly new drugs were offered to the population, and the vast majority of that small contingent does not came out of the powerful pharmaceutical industry. From
heavy buying of political influence and legal research for the production of ridiculous that compare new products with placebos and not with their ancestors already proven efficiency, through the creation of a strongly sofismável notion that new drugs are better than old ones ( to the problem of hypertension seems certainly are not), and the creation of new diagnostic and largely inaccurate, and changing the popular perception of the therapeutic needs (after all for those who marketing is directed to sell products such as Viagra ®, but that for young people who in theory would not be the natural candidates for their consumption), Marcia Angell information may seem a heavy excess of reality.
But reading is fundamental. Can often be rude to the reader. But the consumer must know the assumptions that built the drug culture of modern times. And health professionals should not give up his right to build a society that needs fact a genuine and independent scientific research, far from the wicked and constant conflicts of interest that built the ubiquitous scientific capitalism - muddy and redundant, but sovereign in drug prescriptions expensive, dangerous and unnecessary prescriptions of the majority of the population has been receiving.
Book: The truth about the pharmaceutical companies - as we are deceived and what we can do about it - Marcia Angell, editor Record, 2007 edition, 319 pages. English translation: "The truth about the drug companies."
By Jose Carlos Peixoto Brazil - 021,107
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