Before I go in, I need to say pharmaceuticals and surgery have their place, and can be life saving. That being said, there is a blanket lack of integrity in the system. Today, I’m going to go over the strategies big Pharma uses to manipulate data, doctors, and the public.

Strategies

Detailing-

This is a practice for the sales reps who find out everything about the doctor. This includes giving them gifts, finding about what the doctors like to get them lecture on it, and discussing matters over a steak dinner. This report shows how detailing doctors is more likely to have doctors accept and prescribe the drug. Doctors don’t often have time to read the literature themselves, so they rely on the sales reps of industry to tell them about the drug.

Lobbying-

In 2020, pharmaceutical companies spent 306 million on lobbying. There were 1,502 pharmaceutical lobbyists in 2020, 63.58%  were former government employees. Part of the reason for this is to keep drug prices high. The government should not be paid by pharmaceutical companies to make decisions.

Marketing-

This is the only country where commercials for drugs are allowed to this degree. As a matter a fact Switzerland is the only other country that allows it period, but they adheir to much more integral practices. Pharma spends most of it’s money on marketing rather that drug research. In 2020, they spent $7 billion alone.

Examples of Fraud

Vioxx-

When research gets submitted to journals, only the summary data and the manuscript are submitted. The peer reviewers and the medical journal editors don’t get to see the real data. This is exactly what happened with Vioxx. A study published in the new England journal was published which said that there was no cardiovascular risk with the drug. It turned out that there were 2.4 times more cardiovascular events in those who took Vioxx. This data was not published. The pharmaceutical company new it existed, but the doctors and the medical journal did not. By the time this was taking off the market in 2004, 40-60 thousand Americans died.

Statins-

The information for statin trials are not given to the people who write the guide lines for them. There were 15 experts in 2013 who wrote the cholesterol lowering guidelines, of which 8 had financial ties to the industry. Part of the deception is that in the trials they focus on the relative risk reduction, which is measured effectiveness between trials. The absolute risk reduction should be focused on, which accesses the risk of the patient. The RRR is usually about 20%, while the ARR is only about 3%. Statins should only be used in high risk category, which are people people who already had a heart attack, or stroke.

Insulin-

People with type 1 diabetes used to be treated with pancreas extract, which had insulin in it. This was patented, and sold for a dollar each. It was believed that research was for the betterment of the public. In 1982, we genetically engineered insulin. This was claimed to be better than the past, and was rapidly adopted. The problem was that there was no evidence for the effectiveness of it, and costed 3 times more. Then we created insulin analogs, which again was not backed by science, but now costed $330 a bottle.