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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8902

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

Steele HB.
Prices and profits in the drug industry: An economist's view
New Physician 1971 Mar; 20:146-159


Abstract:

Economic analyses of competition in the drug industry, supply and demand for prescription drugs, and recommendations to alter marketing and prescribing practices to encourage competition were presented. It is stated that the market characteristics of the drug industry bias it in the direction of inefficient and noncompetitive performance in 5 major respects, each of which is discussed. The major costs incurred by drug manufacturers are categorized and analyzed. The drug market is extremely insensitive to price, and also unusual because of the way demand is mediated through the physician. Seven recommendations for bringing about drug price reforms were presented.

 

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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