How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It
by Sage Crystal, ND
During her two decades at The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She sympathized as the American public, particularly the elderly, struggled and increasingly failed to meet spiraling prescription drug prices. Now, in this bold, hard-hitting new book, Dr. Angell exposes the shocking truth of what the pharmaceutical industry has become–and argues for essential, long-overdue change.
Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers.
Zeroing in on hugely successful drugs like AZT (the first drug to treat HIV/AIDS), Taxol (the best-selling cancer drug in history), and the blockbuster allergy drug Claritin, Dr. Angell demonstrates exactly how new products are brought to market. Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective.
The American pharmaceutical industry needs to be saved, mainly from itself, and Dr. Angell proposes a program of vital reforms, which includes restoring impartiality to clinical research and severing the ties between drug companies and medical education. Written with fierce passion and substantiated with in-depth research, The Truth About the Drug Companies is a searing indictment Dr. Angell was for a decade the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the US. Any NEJM chief editor knows medicine, science, medical economics and politics up one side and down the other. Dr. Angell got fed up with the extraordinarily high prices being charged for many brand name drugs, the huge profits the drug manufacturers were making, and the mendacity behind their explanations of why their products were priced so stratospherically high “the risk and cost of developing and producing new drugs”). This book was the result of her investigation of the obscene actual profits of “Big Pharma” for a typical year (2004), and the astonishingly small number of actual genuinely new drugs they brought out for the same year. Her carefully-researched conclusions should have generated nationwide outrage and resulted in curative legislation and/or substantially more responsible self-policing by the pharmaceutical manufacturers, but it doesn’t seem to have had the long term impact we needed, and the situation seems even worse today. This is a book which should be read by everybody, especially our doctors, pharmacists and legislators – even including those owned by Big Pharma’s Lamborghini-driving army of lobbyists (we have the finest Congress money can buy!), and should be thought of as a serious call to activism. I am a physician, and utterly appalled by Big Pharma’s continuing robbery of my patients! This is one of the most scientifically researched and documented eNow a bit dated, but only the faces have changed. These ARE the practices that are driving Americans into bankruptcy and putting pharmaceutical companies into the “axis of evil” once reserved for oppressive regimes. With much the same disregard for basic human decency and human life. If you are late to the revelations that come about almost every day — welcome– this will show just how these aren’t “accidents” or “unfortunate circumstance”, but rather a well plotted strategy to separate the maximum amount from the many to line the pockets of the few. “Healthcare” revealed for what it is, a sickness management for profit system. Positions of a gigantic national rip-off Read this book. You owe it to yourself and the future of your children.
Dr. Marcia Angel is giving you the opportunity to truly understand how massive corruption by big pharma grew out of government malfeasance . Wake up ! I’ve ever seen of an industry that has spun out of control.
Good book exposing the lies and corruption in the medical industry, government regulatory agencies and associated science. The love of money is the root of all evil. This was 20 years ago. How much worse is it now!!!
She does not however impinge on the virus/vaccine controversy which has been raging beneath the establishment facade always See Del Bigtree and Janine Roberts.
Most will say; How is it possible that corruption and lies could be institutional?
Or; the world is not so bad. It could be a lot worse. Man does a good job overall.
Answer most people are prepared to lie when it benefits them so the world is full of liars and lies. Don’t trust man’s knowledge. Don’t trust the establishment.
Interesting. Good companion to Ben Goldacre’s ‘Bad Pharma’ (which I’d actually recommend over this), but Angell’s book is an easier read—especially if you’re not in academia.
