Melody Petersen
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 Most of the leading physicians in the various medical specialties, he said, were now paid consultants to one or more pharmaceutical companies. "The reach goes very, very far," the former executive said. "These corporations are not paying these physicians or anybody else out of disinterested philanthropy. They expect something."
Mr. Jones's testimony that day raised questions about pharmaceutical executives' often repeated claims that they needed to charge high prices to cover the cost of scientists working to discover new drugs. Mr. |
| Why do the pharmaceutical companies need to spend 25 percent or more of their revenues on promotion? Because for one thing, the drugs don't work for large numbers of people who take them. The industry's own scientists, executives, and clinical studies confirm this.
"The vast majority of drugs—more than 90 percent—only work in 30 or 50 percent of the people," Dr. Allen Roses, a top executive at Glaxo-SmithKline, said at a meeting in London in December 2003. Dr. Roses was referring to the work of one of his peers, Dr. Brian B. Spear, a scientist at Abbott Laboratories. In 2001 Dr. |
| IntraMed had dozens of medical writers and editors at the ready to help pharmaceutical companies shape science for their corporate marketing needs. Firms like IntraMed called themselves medical education companies because their public face was one of teaching physicians about medicine and new pharmaceutical products. But these companies described their work differently when they were talking to drug executives and trying to win new accounts. "Even good science needs a little magic," said one ad placed in 2002 in Med Ad News, an industry magazine, by ApotheCom, one of IntraMed's competitors. |
| As the pharmaceutical companies realized the power of this marketing technique, they increased spending on what they called research and development, although it would have been more accurately described as "selling and promotion."
At the same time, they gradually took control of most of the country's medical research. In 1980 the pharmaceutical industry paid for just 32 percent of the nation's medical research. By 2000 the companies' share of total research spending had grown to 62 percent, while the percentage paid by the federal government fell. |
| Yet these firms were part of a fast-growing business of creating scientific publications for the marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies. By 2002 these firms had become so powerful in the practice of medicine that they could rightly claim to have helped shape what doctors and the public knew about most of the big-selling medicines introduced in the previous ten years.
The leaders of these marketing firms did not often publicly boast about their influence, however. Instead, they and the hundreds of ghostly wordsmiths the firms employed were content to stay in the shadows. |
| Some pharmaceutical companies had helped fuel the nation's epidemic of drug abuse by advertising even those products that were the most addictive, despite an international treaty that prohibited such promotion. The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was signed by dozens of countries in 1971 to limit the abuse of addictive psychoactive drugs like barbiturates, amphetamines, and LSD. Some of the most frequent violators of the treaty have been companies selling prescription stimulants to American children with attention deficit disorders. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 Its president, Nancy Norton, spoke at all three FDA advisory meetings and as the transcripts show she never revealed that her foundation receives significant amounts of money from pharmaceutical companies, including GSK. At the time of her appearances, that industry funding was reportedly in the order of six hundred thousand dollars a year.35 Asked for an interview about this failure to disclose, Norton declined the invitation, but said in a statement that she was not specifically asked to disclose at the FDA meetings, and that these financial ties were disclosed on her foundation's website. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Doctors: Without the pharmaceutical companies, what would all the doctors do for work? After all, most so-called "medicine" involves little more than scribbling out a prescription for the latest mass-advertised drug. Without drugs, doctors might actually have to TALK to patients. Horrors!
5. Ethics: With Enron gone, we need a new, national example of strong ethics that properly communicate the essence of American corporate greed. pharmaceutical companies could make Enron look like the Girl Scouts.
6. |
| The Economy: never mind that most pharmaceutical companies sell useless products at ridiculous prices. All that money changing hands is great for the economy. You may be diseased, but think on the bright side: your Big Pharma stocks are soaring! (With all that money, you might even be able to afford health insurance...)
4. Doctors: Without the pharmaceutical companies, what would all the doctors do for work? After all, most so-called "medicine" involves little more than scribbling out a prescription for the latest mass-advertised drug. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| Vmce Parry's insights into how pharmaceutical companies help to shape public perceptions about conditions are invaluable, because the strategies are often hidden from public view. Men and women like him with expertise in advertising, marketing, and public relations working from chic offices in Manhattan, London, Toronto, or Sydney are being paid to fundamentally change the way we think about our bodies, our health, and the conditions we supposedly suffer. |
| The epicenter of this selling is of course the United States, home to many of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and the stage on which most of the action in this book takes place. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. already makes up almost 50 percent of the global market in prescription drugs.3 Yet spending in the U.S. continues to rise more rapidly than anywhere else, increasing by almost 100 percent in just six years—not only because of steep increases in the price of drugs, but because doctors are simply prescribing more and more of them. |
| With rare candor Parry has explained how pharmaceutical companies now take the lead, not just in branding their blockbuster pills like Prozac and Viagra, but also in branding the conditions that create the markets for those pills. Working under the leadership of the drug marketers, Madison Avenue gurus like Parry get together with medical experts to "create new ideas about illnesses and conditions."9 The goal, he says, is to give drug company customers around the world "a new way to think about things. |
| The meeting is completely supported by pharmaceutical companies, and approximately half of the audience will be pharmaceutical representatives." As the email makes clear, drug company sponsorship is not simply a silent force. As in the world of political donations, money buys access. The email continued: "The goal is to foster active and positive collaboration between the two groups. Only investigators who have experience with, or special interest in working collaboratively with the drug industry have been invited." Nine drug companies sponsored that Cape Cod meeting. |
Bottom Line Health
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| That's because many major pharmaceutical companies have found that it is more profitable to fund research and development for new drugs that treat chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, arthritis and high cholesterol.
Self-defense: Write to your representatives in Congress and tell them that you support efforts to boost incentives (via tax credits and other means) for pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics.
To write to your congressional representatives online, go to www.firstgov.gov. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| The coming years will bear greater witness to the corporate sponsored creation of disease.8
While the business report might describe FSD as the classic example of the "corporate sponsored creation of disease," back at the Paris debate that wasn't the way the doctors and researchers saw it. Even though there was no formal process for choosing a winner, Leonore Tiefer and her debating partner lost their debate, with the audience, via a show of hands, largely rejecting the notion that FSD was being constructed by drug company marketing. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 REPPED: Most consumers think that street drugs are in an entirely different class than prescription drugs, and they believe that pharmaceutical companies would never manufacture or sell street drugs. But guess what? As you'll read here, drug companies actually invented many of the street drugs now considered to be the most devastating, including heroin and meth ("ice").
Here are seven facts you probably never knew about the connection between street drugs and pharmaceutical companies:
1. |
C. W. Randolph, M.D.
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 Without a patent, how could pharmaceutical companies protect their formulations and, most important, their profits? The answer is that they can't. Consequently, for almost three-quarters of a century, pharmaceutical companies have been developing, patenting, and marketing hormones that have a slightly different molecular structure from natural human hormones and bio-identical hormones. The pharmaceutically produced and patented hormones are correctly referred to as synthetic hormones. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Ethics: With Enron gone, we need a new, national example of strong ethics that properly communicate the essence of American corporate greed. pharmaceutical companies could make Enron look like the Girl Scouts.
6. Political Fundraising: We need drug companies to support the re-election efforts of honest national leaders like President Bush who, as we all know, is crucial for protecting our civil liberties.
7. Publishers: Without drug company advertising, who would support all the newspaper and magazine publishers in this country? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This would include all pharmaceutical companies, of course, and even national disease organizations such as the American Heart Association, which receives millions of dollars in funding each year from pharmaceutical companies. Why shouldn't you listen to these organizations? Because they have a clear conflict of interest. It is obviously in the interest of pharmaceutical companies to have more customers, and the way they have more customers is to find more and more people with diseases (or to redefine "disease" so that suddenly more people are diagnosed with something). |
C. W. Randolph, M.D.
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| The answer is a combination of ignorance, confusion, and marketing. pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars selling synthetic hormone products. In terms of the safety of synthetic versus bio-identical hormone replacement, pharmaceutical companies have a lot to lose. Consequently, these companies spend millions of dollars marketing synthetic hormones to physicians by sponsoring continuing medical education (CME) programs, office lunch presentations, and off-site forums at resort locations.
In her book, The Truth About the Drug Companies, Dr. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Pharmaceutical companies handle this with finesse by taking responsibility for the full monthly incomes of most retired folks. It's a genuine public service. |
David Winston, RH(AHG), and Steven Maimes
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 In the last ten years, pharmaceutical companies once again have begun to search the plant kingdom for new plant-based medicines. They have realized that for thousands of years indigenous people depended on these herbs to treat illness and that exploring traditional medicines makes more sense than random plant screenings. Unfortunately, when the pharmaceutical companies do find something useful, they try to isolate one particular chemical and discard the rest of the plant. This is in contrast to traditional herbal medicine that favors using the whole herb. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The ACS is the wealthiest non-profit in America and has very close ties to pharmaceutical companies, mammography equipment companies and other corporations that profit from cancer. Notice the name, too: It isn't the American Anti-Cancer Society, it's the American Cancer Society! What they really stand for is right in the name!
Click here to read more about the ACS and its financial ties to chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies and radiology equipment manufacturers. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| This would include all pharmaceutical companies, of course, and even national disease organizations such as the American Heart Association, which receives millions of dollars in funding each year from pharmaceutical companies. Why shouldn't you listen to these organizations? Because they have a clear conflict of interest. It is obviously in the interest of pharmaceutical companies to have more customers, and the way they have more customers is to find more and more people with diseases (or to redefine "disease" so that suddenly more people are diagnosed with something). |
C. W. Randolph, M.D.
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| In terms of the safety of synthetic versus bio-identical hormone replacement, pharmaceutical companies have a lot to lose. Consequently, these companies spend millions of dollars marketing synthetic hormones to physicians by sponsoring continuing medical education (CME) programs, office lunch presentations, and off-site forums at resort locations.
In her book, The Truth About the Drug Companies, Dr. |
Bill Sardi
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 For the first time in history, cancer patients have more powerful molecules at their direct disposal than any therapies pharmaceutical companies could even think of developing. The utter failure of modern cancer therapy to prolong survival times, and the introduction of potent non-prescription anti-cancer molecules that have broader and more potent anti-cancer activity than approved cancer drugs, signals a day in the near future when most cancer patients may be self treating their tumors at home. Here is an example.
Mike is at the forefront of this new era in cancer prevention and treatment. |
Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D.
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 However, pharmaceutical companies are now able to "engineer" the drugs they develop so they can hit the target receptors while triggering fewer side effects.
The message I would like you to take home from this section of the book is that illnesses such as FM, CFS, TMD, or IBS are no longer "invisible" to researchers, whether they work in academia or in the pharmaceutical industry. That industry understands that fatigue and pain—whether localized to the mouth or the gut or widespread—are very common and need attention. |
Bill Sardi
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| Woman's Health Institute study on the effects of hormone replacement therapy. What pharmaceutical companies have pushed for decades as a 'preventive
Women have been conditioned to accept menopause as a period of life when life-long medication with hormones is a normal process. Although there have been many warnings against the use of hormone replacement, "they have either been ignored or trivialized." [Int J Health Services 31: 769-92, 2001] Not counting the cost of doctor's office visits, hormone replacement pills sales were nearly $2.7 billion in the United States annually. |
| In the meantime, a review of the medical literature reveals that nature may have beaten the pharmaceutical companies to a p38 blocker. The following seven natural agents-four herbal extracts and three micronutrients - have demonstrated ability to inhibit the p38 kinase inflammatory enzyme. [Cytokine 18: 266-73, 2002]
1. Green tea
It has been estimated that a daily consumption of 10 Japanese-size cups of green tea results in delayed cancer onset. Even five cups of green tea a day has been shown to delay the onset of breast cancer. |
| Doctors and pharmaceutical companies were profiting handsomely. The Tagamet patent ran out in 1994. That's exactly when a National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference panel concluded that H pylori plays a significant role in the development of ulcers and that their eradication with antibiotics can cure peptic ulcer disease. [Postgraduate Medicine 102: Nov. 1997] Health authorities had let the full term of the drug patent run its course while ulcer patients suffered.
How many people died of gastric cancer due to H. pylori infection while drug companies profited is unknown. |
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