Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4387

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

Myers MJ.
Marketing and pharmaceutical development
Journal of Drug Issues 1992; 22:221-234

Abstract:

New pharmaceuticals are developed in response to therapeutic need, scientific feasibility, and market demand. As research and development (R&D) decision processes becomes more sophisticated, marketing input plays a greater role in these decisions. Industry-financed R&D is dependent on basic research financed by government. The political decisions which determine government-financed research are significant determinants of the scientific feasibility of a new drug. Many new drugs offer only minor advantages over existing therapies. The cumulative effect of these minor improvements are significant. In addition, new drugs often increase competition in a market. The Orphan Drug Act has contributed to the marketing of drugs where sufficient market demand may not otherwise exist. While some portion of R&D funds are spent on imitative drugs, the incentive for this use of R&D funds decreases as buyers become more sophisticated and as the cost of marketing a new drug increases.

Keywords:
*analysis/United States/drug company sponsored research/marketplace research/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: RESEARCH

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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