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Medicine for the 99%

"Can we incentivize pharmaceutical companies to produce much-needed drugs? In a Talk at TEDxCanberra, Thomas Pogge proposes a $6 billion plan to revolutionize the way medications are developed and sold.

Drug Company Scams

The biggest introduction of a generic drug in pharmaceutical history is being met with tough business strategies by Pfizer and pharmacy benefit companies, according to recent letters to pharmacists.  A pharmacy group and an independent expert say the tactic will benefit Pfizer and benefit managers at the expense of employers and taxpayers, who may end up paying more than they should for the drug.  Lipitor is the best-selling drug ever, accounting for $106 billion sales over the last decade, or almost one-quarter of Pfizer’s total. Pfizer has told analysts it is preparing for the loss of Lipitor’s patent with a variety of business moves to preserve market share.

Big drug companies will go to extraordinary ends to protect their market share.  Who suffers?  The public, of course.  See: Plan Would Delay Sales of Generic Lipitor.

This article is important because it discusses and exposes a common PhRMA ploy to maximize their profits at the expense of patients and the government.

Prescription Data Mining

Pharmaceutical companies buy doctors’ prescribing records from pharmacies and use the information to target their marketing to physicians. This practice negatively affects:
    Public Health
    Cost
    Privacy
To read more about this see:  Download Rx Data Mining Fact  

Bogus Drug Trials

The pharmaceutical industry, in a cynical attempt to sell more drugs, has come up with yet another mechanism to push prescriptions:  the "seeding trial."   Pfizer recently used these trials to promote gabapentin (Neurontin) and increase prescribing among investigators.  PhRMA's Marketing departments are extensively involved in the planning and implementation of "seeding trials."  This is just another way that PhRMA strives to increase sales.  Unsurprisingly, patients both die and suffer in these bogus trials.

This practice is exposed in a recent article in the Archives of Internal Medicine (A Narrative Account ot the Neurontin STEPS Trial) and a fine Op-Ed piece in the NY Times (see  Download Useless Studies, Carl Elliott  ).

The business of PhRMA is business; and this is just one of the many ways that drugs are pushed in the U.S and elsewhere.

Definition from Wikipedia: "A seeding trial or marketing trial is a form of marketing, conducted in the name of research, designed to target product sampling towards selected consumers. In medicine, seeding trials are clinical trials or research studies where the primary objective is to introduce the concept of a particular medical intervention—such as a pharmaceutical drug or medical device—to physicians, rather than to test a scientific hypothesis.