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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1171

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Drug costs: research and development costs: the great illusion
Prescrire Int 2004 Feb; 13:(69):32-6


Abstract:

(1) The commonly stated average cost of researching and developing a new drug is 802 million dollars. (2) This figure comes from an institute largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and is based on confidential information also provided by industry sources. (3) It includes the cost of failures and financial charges, and is the pre-tax figure. Out-of-pocket spending actually represents only half this sum, and the true costs are halved again when tax is deducted. A detailed analysis of this estimate reveals many other methodological flaws. (4) This estimate only concerns new chemical entities entirely developed by the company in question. (5) It is based on clinical development costs which are far higher than those quoted by other sources. (6) Drug companies claim this estimate is the “official” figure. (7) Data on the many drugs that are not fully developed by the company in question are even less consistent. (8) The true costs of research and development must be determined transparently if national authorities are to make rational decisions on patents, data protection, and drug pricing. (9) Research and development costs must be viewed in the light of drug company profits, which remain the highest of any economic sector.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909