Reddit reviews The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It
We found 3 Reddit comments about The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I read a book called the truth about drug companies and I highly recommend it. Medicine for profit creates a world of designer maintenance drugs. Why cure something when it's more profitable to create life long dependence! Plus, we can repackage the same drugs over and over as "New" and hike up the price. We've "improved" the formula by changing it just enough to legally call it new without actually improving anything.
More money is made by keeping people sick as opposed to actually helping them. It's counter intuitive to what we think medicine should be.
Yes... but it's complicated; to answer this would require a few pages. I recommend Steven Brill's "America's Bitter Pill". Or you can read over the Time article that lead to the book here. He does an excellent job laying out how hospitals are getting obscenely rich and how we got here. I strongly recommend the book.
Marcia Angell, former editor for New England Journal of Medicine, covers the pharma end well in "The Truth About Drug Companies".
She outlines the peverse incentives out there for pharma companies. Say you have a drug that is about to lose it's patent protection (meaning generics cannot be sold), why not get a 6 month extension granted for it by testing the drug on children? Maybe kids need Viagra right? How about a 6-month extension for pediatric oxycontin?
Maybe you've used up the pediatric patent exclusivity extensions. Why not simply take an existing drug and create a market? Sarafem is great for PMS, nevermind it cost 10x more than generic fluoxetine (Prozac) and that the only ingredient in it is fluoxetine.
I mean why spend hundreds of millions of $ on actual new drug research when you can simply make a time release version of an ancient drug? Focalin (methylphenidate ER) saved people from the horrors of having to take Ritalin (methylphenidate) twice a day and Daytrana (methylphenidate transdermal patch) saved people from the horrors of having to swallow a pill once a day. Oxycontin was marketed as a less addictive alternative to Oxycodone IR/Percocet. All Purdue Pharma did was take an old existing drug, oxycodone, and give it a time release. That way instead of patients having to take 15mg every 6 hours, they could take 30mg of Oxycontin every 12. Truly a miracle right?
Anyway I've already said more than I intended and am not writing in a appropriate tone for this sub, so I'll stop myself now. I strongly recommend the books linked above.
tl;dr Drugs are so expensive because everyone along the way gouges the process as much as possible. If anyone is more interested about this process they should read the truth about drug companies by Dr. Marcia Angell