PHM-Exch> Money in the pharmaceutical world

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Gopal Dabade <drdabade at gmail.com>


http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/money-is-mammon-in-pharmaceutical-world/article4179010.ece

THE HINDU 9th Dec 2012

*Money is Mammon in pharmaceutical world*

PROFESSOR B. M. HEGDE**

*The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. — Jesus*

Wall Street has three major players — pharmaceuticals, oil and banking. The
first is the only one that has been growing at 20% a year in the last one
decade or so. The pharmaceuticals lobby is thrice as big and powerful as
that of oil, although oil is much bigger than drugs in total turnover! To
understand how the industry works one must read the new book by two French
medical specialists appointed by the former French President Nicolas
Sarkozy to study the working of the drugs lobby in the country. Although
the book is in French, Kim Wilsher of the *The Guardian* has written about
this book and the interview with the authors on September 14, 2012.

The best part of the interview was the answer given by the first author:
“There is nothing revolutionary in this book. This has all been known for
some time.” I was happy as I was writing about this in India, the U.K. and
the U.S. for at least four decades but to no avail. The powers that be do
not seem to take notice, at least in India. The two authors, Professor
Philippe Even, director of the prestigious Necker Institute, and Bernard
Debré, a doctor and member of Parliament, feel that removing what they
describe as superfluous and hazardous drugs from the list of those paid for
by the French health service would save up to €10bn (£8bn) a year. It would
also prevent up to 20,000 deaths linked to the medication and reduce
hospital admissions by up to 1,00,000, they claim.

The book, *Guide to 4000 Useful, Useless or Dangerous Medicines*, in all
its 900 pages, looked at the effectiveness, risk, and the prohibitively
high cost of the drugs. Among those which were completely useless the first
rank was taken by STATINS, the most fashionable and doctor-friendly
anti-cholesterol drug. The authors blacklisted a total of 58 drugs which
included anti-inflammatory drugs, painkillers; cardiovascular drugs many of
which are useless, anti-diabetics — many of them are dangerous to say the
least — and the useless drugs for osteoporosis, contraception, muscular
cramps and tobacco addiction! According to these specialists, roughly one
half of the drugs prescribed by doctors in France are useless and many of
them downright dangerous. The authors feel that the powerful companies keep
these drugs moving for their own benefit.

Most of these drugs are produced in France. Professor Evans felt that the
companies push these drugs on doctors who then push them on to patients.
“The pharmaceutical industry is the most lucrative, the most cynical and
the least ethical of all the industries,” he said. “It is like an octopus
with tentacles that has infiltrated all the decision-making bodies, world
health organisations, governments, parliaments, high administrations in
health and hospitals and the medical profession,” he felt. “For the last 40
years, patients have been told that medicines are necessary for them, so
they ask for them. Today, we have doctors who want to give people medicines
and sick people asking for medicines. There’s nothing objective or
realistic about this.”

The story is the same in India. The only difference is that the number of
useless drugs sold here will run into hundreds, if not thousands. The
Indian public have shown lukewarm response to my writings on the subject in
the last four decades. Now that the information comes from the West, people
might sit up and take note. That would be good for mankind as Oliver
Wendell Holmes put it succinctly thus: “If the whole pharmacopeia were to
be sunk to the bottom of the seas, that will be that much good for people
and that much worse for the fishes.” How true indeed? There is no pill for
every ill but there is definitely an ill following every pill!

How can we change all these? One would shudder to see this report in a
recent issue of the prestigious*The New England Journal of Medicine*: “The
global pharmaceutical industry has racked up fines of more than $11billion
in the past three years for criminal wrongdoing, including withholding
safety data and promoting drugs for use beyond their licensed conditions.

In all, 26 companies, including eight of the 10 top players in the global
industry, have been found to be acting dishonestly. The scale of the
wrongdoing, revealed for the first time, has undermined public and
professional trust in the industry and is holding back clinical progress.”

A fine of $3 billion, imposed on the U.K.-based GlaxoSmithKline in July
after it admitted to three counts of criminal behaviour in U.S. courts, was
probably the highest paid so far in the history of pharmaceuticals. Nine
other companies have had fines imposed, ranging from $420m on Novartis to
$2.3bn on Pfizer since 2009, totalling over $11bn.

*The be-all and end-all of life should not be to get rich, but to enrich
the world. — B.C. Forbes*

(The writer is a former Professor of Cardiology, Middlesex Medical School,
London, and former Vice-Chancellor, Manipal University. Email:
hegdebm at gmail.com)



-- <http://novartisboycott.org/petition>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://phm.phmovement.org/pipermail/phm-exchange-phmovement.org/attachments/20121210/c1272faf/attachment.html>