Does this bother you?
It obviously bothers the investors who wiped $1 billion off the share value of GSK after this story appeared.
Dr Peter Gøtzsche, the founder of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, recently described drug companies of behaviours which we would normally attribute to organised crime. He strikingly said
The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs.
A post I wrote a couple of years back about GSK being fined $3 billion mentioned that between 2009 and 2012 drug companies had paid $11 billion in fines. ProPublica summaries some of the biggest fines from 2009 to 2014 here.
An analysis by Dr Syndey Wolfe at the end of 2013 showed Big Pharma had paid $30 billion in fines from 1991 to 2012. He concluded
“There is a pathological lack of corporate integrity in many drug companies.”
Well fines like these, large as they seem to be, aren’t stopping these behaviours and why is that?
Over the past decade, the 11 largest global drug companies reaped about $711 billion in profits, according to a new analysis from the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) advocacy group. In 2012 alone, the drug companies’ annual profits totaled nearly $84 billion.
No wonder there are profits like this. A recent report titled “Health, United States, 2013” — found
the percentage of Americans taking prescription drugs has increased dramatically. During the most recent period, from 2007 to 2010, about 48 percent of people said they were taking a prescription medication, compared with 39 percent in 1988-1994.
and
One in 10 Americans said he or she had taken five or more prescription drugs in the previous month.
and, shockingly,
About one in four children took one or more prescription drugs in the past month, compared to nine in 10 adults 65 and older, according to the study.
Don’t you think we have a problem here?
Are prescription drugs the best way to increase the health of human beings? And if it is, why are more and more people needing more and more drugs? Or are more and more drugs being prescribed because of the way drug companies behave?
Heroes Not Zombies 
Reblogged this on Lorraine Cleaver and commented:
it bothers me, greatly. Especially the newly manufactured ‘diseases’ like CFS when we know many are suffering from undertreated hypothyroidism on synthetic Levothyroxine only. A healthy thyroid makes five hormones, not one. Still, drug companies won’t get rich on £2 a month Levothyroxine but they will make a killing on the multiple drugs used to mop up the many unresolved symptoms.
Reblogged this on Chrys Muirhead .
Reblogged this on The Pharma Chronicles.
It bothers me a lot too..
Yes and it has bothered me for a long time.
When a new patient comes to see me and shows a prescription and repeat list some of therm astonish me. Multi pharmacy and regularly doubled up. Patients do not like to question their prescriber so take “their medicine like a good boy or girl ‘. Sometimes when we have resolved their problem with treatment and lifestyle advice the question is asked “well what should I do about my pills now?”
The power of the drug companies is undoubtedly a factor but medical education also needs be reviewed. How many student Doctors learn about alternative approaches to health before taking out the prescription pad?
I have been horrified recently with the move to offer Physiotherapists the chance to “do” a prescribing course or an injection course. So what will happen to the unique skills that we were previously known for? Does a newly qualified practitioner of any kind think that Physiotherapists hand out exercise sheets, provide crutches, prescribe NSAIDS or give cortisone injections? No doubt drug companies will now be targeting us as well?