 Book
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with Robin Osborne
The Truth About the Drug Companies
By Marcia Angell
Scribe $32.95
What consumer advocate Ralph Nader did to the automobile industry - proving it 'unsafe at any speed' - a range of researchers have been doing to what this author dubs 'big pharma,' the major pharmaceutical companies, and Dr Angell, who formerly edited America's prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, pulls no punches in damning an industry whose products we all depend on.
Asserting that the pharmaceutical business is 'Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit,' she alleges that 'the industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.'
Regarding the last point, she explains, 'Most of its marketing efforts are focused on influencing doctors, since they must write the prescriptions.'
Although penned for the US market, the expose also has strong local relevance, according to two noteworthy academics who added a foreword, 'The View from Australia,' noting that not only governments but Australian doctors have 'succumbed to the blandishments of the pharmaceutical manufacturers' and 'formed close links with industry.'
Meanwhile, the general media appears to have been 'just as naive as their counterparts in the USA when reporting on the latest 'breakthrough', cure or hope.'
Foreseeing a time when the drug companies will realise the 'party is over', the Australians express the hope that they will 'turn their undoubted abilities and technical skills to the tasks set by their founders - to produce the drugs we actually need.'
However, one suspects the author won't be holding her breath, believing as she does that the much-vaunted expenditure on research and development, used to justify high drug prices, is a beat-up aimed at disguising the fact that most medications are only more costly versions of existing formulae - 'me-too' drugs.
For instance, the FDA judged that in the years 1998 to 2004, only 22 per cent of new drugs released actually offered improvements over drugs already on the market to treat the same conditions, and most were not even made by major American drug companies.
So pharmaceuticals are products like any other, even if the science and manufacturing processes that surround them are incomprehensible to the outsiders who need to consume them, with those hurting most, as Dr Angell says, being senior citizens.
Familiar brand names abound, many controversial, some even taken off the market when found to have dangerous side effects. This sobering insight into an industry supposedly founded on trust is enough to make you feel sick.
- Books available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore and at Lismore Shopping
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