Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17908

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

Gottlieb S
Drug companies maintain 'astounding' profits.
BMJ 2002 May 4; 324:(7345):1054
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/324/7345/1054/b

Abstract:

Pharmaceuticals again ranked as the most profitable sector in the United States, topping the annual Fortune 500 ranking of America’s top industries, released this month.

The pharmaceutical industry topped all three of Fortune magazine’s measures of profitability for 2001, making this decade the third in which the industry has been at or near the top in all the magazine’s measures of profitability.

The occasion was seized by critics of the industry as reflecting corporate greed. Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, said: “During a year in which there was much talk of sacrifice in the national interest, drug companies increased their astounding profits by hiking prescription prices, advertising some medicines more than Nike shoes, and successfully lobbying for lucrative monopoly patent extensions. Sometimes what’s best for shareholders and chief executive officers isn’t what’s best for all Americans, particularly senior citizens who lack insurance cover for prescription drugs.”

Overall profits of . . .

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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