Download or read book Government Big Pharma and The People written by Mickey C. Smith and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2020-12-02 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pharmaceuticals constitute a relatively small share of the total Health Care expenditure in most developed economies, and yet they play a critical role in the ongoing debate over how best to advance, improve, and afford Health Care. Despite this, and perhaps because of this, the industry has had, for many years, an outsized claim to fame and controversy, praise and criticisms, and support and condemnation. Unfortunately, many participants in the debate do not fully understand the complexities of the industry and its role in the overall Health Care system. The analytical tools of economics provide a strong foundation for a better understanding of the dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry, its contribution to Health and Health Care, and its dual and often conflicting priorities of affordability and innovation, as well as the various Private and Public Policy initiatives directed at the sector. Everyone is affected by Big Pharma and the products they produce. At the Drug store, the physician’s office, in front of the television, in everyday conversations, Drugs are a part of our lives. Society shapes our values toward Drugs and Drugs shape society. ("The Pill" and minor tranquilizers are good examples.) And, of course, the way Congress deliberates and Big Pharma responds has a huge impact on how Drugs affect our lives. This book is well-researched on the subject of the pharmaceutical industry, its struggles with Government, and its relationship to the consumer from the early twentieth century until the present. The Dynamic Tension between the three participants – Government, Big Pharma, and the People – is described and explained to lead to an understanding of the controversies that rage today. The author describes how the Government, its many investigatory efforts, and the ultimate legislative results affect the industry and the consequences of their activities are explored in light of their effects on other players, including the patients and consumers who rely on both Government and Big Pharma for their well-being and who find sometimes unexpected consequences while giving special attention to the attitudes, beliefs, and misadventures of less-than-optimal Drug use. Stakeholders are identified with physicians as a major focus, as well as describing the significance of prescriptions as social objects and the processes by which physicians make choices on behalf of their patients. The author ties it all together with how Big Pharma affects and is affected by each of these groups. The author utilizes his 50-plus years’ experience as an academic, practicing pharmacist, and Big Pharma employee to describe the scope of the pharmaceutical industry and how it affects us on a daily basis, concluding with an inside look at Big Pharma and how regulations, marketing, and the press have affected their business, both good and bad.
Download or read book Big Pharma Big Greed The Inside Story of One Lawyer s Battle to Stem the Flood of Dangerous Medicines and Protect Public Health written by Sidney Kirkpatrick and published by . This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Truth About the Drug Companies written by Marcia Angell and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2005-08-09 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 of an industry that has spun out of control.
Download or read book Pharma written by Gerald Posner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Exorbitant prices for lifesaving drugs, safety recalls affecting tens of millions of Americans, and soaring rates of addiction and overdose on prescription opioids have caused many to lose faith in pharmaceutical companies. Now, Americans are demanding national reckoning with a monolithic industry. In Pharma, award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author Gerald Posner uncovers the real story of the Sacklers, the family that became one of America's wealthiest from the success of OxyContin, their blockbuster narcotic painkiller at the centure of the opioid crisis. The unexpected twists and turns of the Sakler family saga are told against the startling chronicle of a powerful industry that sits at the intersection of public health and profits. Pharma reveals how and why American drug companies have put earnings ahead of patients"--
Download or read book Bad Pharma written by Ben Goldacre and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that doctors are deliberately misinformed by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies that casually withhold information about drug efficacy and side effects, explaining the process of pharmaceutical data manipulation and its global consequences. By the best-selling author of Bad Science.
Download or read book Owning the Sun written by Alexander Zaitchik and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Bad Blood and Empire of Pain, an authoritative look at monopoly medicine from the dawn of patents through the race for COVID-19 vaccines and how the privatization of public science has prioritized profits over people Owning the Sun tells the story of one of the most contentious fights in human history: the legal right to produce lifesaving medicines. Medical science began as a discipline geared toward the betterment of all human life, but the merging of research with intellectual property and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry warped and eventually undermined its ethical foundations. Since World War II, federally funded research has facilitated most major medical breakthroughs, yet these drugs are often wholly controlled by price-gouging corporations with growing international ambitions. Why does the U.S. government fund the development of medical science in the name of the public only to relinquish exclusive rights to drug companies, and how does such a system impoverish us, weaken our responses to crises, and, as in the cases of AIDS and COVID-19, put the world at risk? Outlining how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against Big Pharma and their allies in government, Alexander Zaitchik’s first-of-its-kind history documents the rise of privatized medicine in the United States and its subsequent globalization. From the controversial arrival of patent-wielding German drug firms in the late nineteenth century to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations—including the influential Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—that stymie international efforts to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, Owning the Sun tells one of the most important and least understood histories of our time.
Download or read book Making Medicines Affordable written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thanks to remarkable advances in modern health care attributable to science, engineering, and medicine, it is now possible to cure or manage illnesses that were long deemed untreatable. At the same time, however, the United States is facing the vexing challenge of a seemingly uncontrolled rise in the cost of health care. Total medical expenditures are rapidly approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product and are crowding out other priorities of national importance. The use of increasingly expensive prescription drugs is a significant part of this problem, making the cost of biopharmaceuticals a serious national concern with broad political implications. Especially with the highly visible and very large price increases for prescription drugs that have occurred in recent years, finding a way to make prescription medicinesâ€"and health care at largeâ€"more affordable for everyone has become a socioeconomic imperative. Affordability is a complex function of factors, including not just the prices of the drugs themselves, but also the details of an individual's insurance coverage and the number of medical conditions that an individual or family confronts. Therefore, any solution to the affordability issue will require considering all of these factors together. The current high and increasing costs of prescription drugsâ€"coupled with the broader trends in overall health care costsâ€"is unsustainable to society as a whole. Making Medicines Affordable examines patient access to affordable and effective therapies, with emphasis on drug pricing, inflation in the cost of drugs, and insurance design. This report explores structural and policy factors influencing drug pricing, drug access programs, the emerging role of comparative effectiveness assessments in payment policies, changing finances of medical practice with regard to drug costs and reimbursement, and measures to prevent drug shortages and foster continued innovation in drug development. It makes recommendations for policy actions that could address drug price trends, improve patient access to affordable and effective treatments, and encourage innovations that address significant needs in health care.
Download or read book Sickening written by John Abramson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inside story of how Big Pharma’s relentless pursuit of ever-higher profits corrupts medical knowledge—misleading doctors, misdirecting American health care, and harming our health. The United States spends an excess $1.5 trillion annually on health care compared to other wealthy countries—yet the amount of time that Americans live in good health ranks a lowly 68th in the world. At the heart of the problem is Big Pharma, which funds most clinical trials and therefore controls the research agenda, withholds the real data from those trials as corporate secrets, and shapes most of the information relied upon by health care professionals. In this no-holds-barred exposé, Dr. John Abramson—one of the foremost experts on the drug industry’s deceptive tactics—combines patient stories with what he learned during many years of serving as an expert in national drug litigation to reveal the tangled web of financial interests at the heart of the dysfunction in our health-care system. For example, one of pharma’s best-kept secrets is that the peer reviewers charged with ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the clinical trial reports published in medical journals do not even have access to complete data and must rely on manufacturer-influenced summaries. Likewise for the experts who write the clinical practice guidelines that define our standards of care. The result of years of research and privileged access to the inner workings of the U.S. medical-industrial complex, Sickening shines a light on the dark underbelly of American health care—and presents a path toward genuine reform.
Download or read book Government Big Pharma and The People written by Mickey C. Smith and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2020-12-02 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pharmaceuticals constitute a relatively small share of the total Health Care expenditure in most developed economies, and yet they play a critical role in the ongoing debate over how best to advance, improve, and afford Health Care. Despite this, and perhaps because of this, the industry has had, for many years, an outsized claim to fame and controversy, praise and criticisms, and support and condemnation. Unfortunately, many participants in the debate do not fully understand the complexities of the industry and its role in the overall Health Care system. The analytical tools of economics provide a strong foundation for a better understanding of the dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry, its contribution to Health and Health Care, and its dual and often conflicting priorities of affordability and innovation, as well as the various Private and Public Policy initiatives directed at the sector. Everyone is affected by Big Pharma and the products they produce. At the Drug store, the physician’s office, in front of the television, in everyday conversations, Drugs are a part of our lives. Society shapes our values toward Drugs and Drugs shape society. ("The Pill" and minor tranquilizers are good examples.) And, of course, the way Congress deliberates and Big Pharma responds has a huge impact on how Drugs affect our lives. This book is well-researched on the subject of the pharmaceutical industry, its struggles with Government, and its relationship to the consumer from the early twentieth century until the present. The Dynamic Tension between the three participants – Government, Big Pharma, and the People – is described and explained to lead to an understanding of the controversies that rage today. The author describes how the Government, its many investigatory efforts, and the ultimate legislative results affect the industry and the consequences of their activities are explored in light of their effects on other players, including the patients and consumers who rely on both Government and Big Pharma for their well-being and who find sometimes unexpected consequences while giving special attention to the attitudes, beliefs, and misadventures of less-than-optimal Drug use. Stakeholders are identified with physicians as a major focus, as well as describing the significance of prescriptions as social objects and the processes by which physicians make choices on behalf of their patients. The author ties it all together with how Big Pharma affects and is affected by each of these groups. The author utilizes his 50-plus years’ experience as an academic, practicing pharmacist, and Big Pharma employee to describe the scope of the pharmaceutical industry and how it affects us on a daily basis, concluding with an inside look at Big Pharma and how regulations, marketing, and the press have affected their business, both good and bad.
Download or read book Pills Power and Policy written by Dominique A. Tobbell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tobbell analyzes the political and economic history of the alignment of the pharmaceutical industry, academic institutions and their faculty and organized medicine. This book is essential reading for policymakers and their staff as well as persons who study the history of health policy and those who contribute to it through medical research, advocacy and journalism. " -Daniel Fox, author of The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States "Dominique Tobbell’s vivid, balanced and probing account of pharmaceutical politics is a significant, needed analysis of the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry, university researchers, the medical profession and government in the Cold War period. More than this, Pills, Power, and Policy shows why it continues to be difficult to agree in the United States on the relative roles of corporate enterprise, government regulation, technological innovation, freedom to prescribe, and consumer marketing and protection, all played out against the rising costs of health care. Timely and thought-provoking."--Rosemary A. Stevens. DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College "A superb and compelling account of the creation of one of America’s most reviled entities: Big Pharma. With clarity and subtlety, Pills, Power, and Policy weaves together the political, economic, and the medical to reveal the entangled history behind our modern pharmaceutical predicament."--Andrea Tone, Ph.D., Professor of History & Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine, McGill University “Pills, Power and Policy provides an outstanding description and analysis of the evolution of drug policy. It is an extremely important contribution to our understanding of the political, scientific, and economic nature of pharmaceutical regulation." -Daniel S. Greenberg, Washington journalist and author of Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion
Download or read book Big Pharma Big Greed Second Edition written by Stephen A Sheller and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: UPDATED AND REVISED EDITION: Throughout his distinguished legal career, Stephen Sheller has relished the role of the underdog, evincing a sharply honed sense of fair play and justice. Early in his career, he represented Black Panthers in Philadelphia when they were arrested on trumped up murder and conspiracy charges. Later, he was in the vanguard of lawyers who took on the tobacco industry in the 1990s and he reprised that strategy a few years later in targeting Big Pharma for its harmful products and their deleterious effects on public health. In Big Pharma, Big Greed The inside story of one lawyer's battle to stem the flood of dangerous medicines and protect public health Sheller tells a tale that is at once deeply personal but also with wide repercussions for the U.S. health care system and the hundreds of millions of Americans whose lives literally depend on it. Decades of litigating against the pharmaceutical industry taught Sheller one irreducible lesson: In too many instances, unneeded and at times dangerous drugs are foisted on the public without adequate warning as to risks, all in the service of boosting industry profits. All too often, achieving block buster status for a patent protected medication becomes an end in itself, as Big Pharma companies manipulate clinical trial data, draft scholarly articles for friendly physicians often in their pay, and market their drugs for uses that never had been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. This last practice proved to be something of an Achilles Heel for the industry. In litigation that resulted in settlement and fines in the billions, companies such as Eli Lilly acknowledged marketing drugs off label to a broad range of patients for whom the medications had never been approved. Sheller's litigation formed the basis for these settlements and the effort is ongoing. He and other plaintiffs' lawyers now are suing Janssen Pharmaceuticals for the adverse impacts of its drug, Risperdal, a second generation anti-psychotic that Sheller and others allege is linked to the growth of female breast tissue in young boys and men. Already there have been several big jury verdicts against Janssen with hundreds of more cases yet to be tried. In the book, Sheller not only recounts his major litigation battles but also makes sweeping proposals for industry reform. To restore regulatory credibility, Sheller proposes that responsibility for testing new medicines be taken away from the industry and given over to hospitals and other public entities partnering with government regulators. Pharmaceutical companies that betray the public trust would risk government- initiated dissolution. Harsh medicine to be sure, but Sheller believes entirely appropriate to the underlying malady.
Download or read book Orphans and Incentives written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1997-10-30 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infectious diseases remain a leading cause of prolonged illness, premature mortality, and soaring health costs. In the United States in 1995, infectious diseases were the third leading cause of death, right behind heart disease and cancer. Mortality is mounting over time, owing to HIV/AIDS, pneumonia, and septicemia, with drug resistance playing an ever-increasing role in each of these disease categories. This book, a report from a Forum on Emerging Infections workshop, focuses on product areas where returns from the market might be perceived as being too small or too complicated by other factors to compete in industrial portfolios with other demands for investment. Vaccines are quintessential examples of such products. The lessons learned fall into four areas, including what makes intersectoral collaboration a reality, the notion of a product life cycle, the implications of divergent sectoral mandates and concepts of risk, and the roles of advocacy and public education. The summary contains an examination of the Children's Vaccine Initiative and other models, an industry perspective on the emerging infections agenda, and legal and regulatory issues.
Download or read book Big Pharma written by Jacky Law and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pharmaceutical medicine is very, very big business. The top ten players earned more than $200 billion in 2003. One drug, Pfizer's cholesterol pill Lipitor, had sales of more than $9 billion. This kind of money buys an awful lot of friends among doctors and politicians. Most of those involved in the formulation of public health policy seems happy with the present system. The trouble is that the public is starting to have doubts. There is a growing sense that the vast profits of drug companies and their control of the research agenda might not be that good for our health. Jacky Law takes the reader on a journey through the pharmaceutical business and shows how the public is quite right to be concerned about conventional medicine, as it has developed since the late 1970s. She tells a story of spectacular regulatory failure, phenomenally high prices, betrayal of the public interest and a growing awareness among ordinary people that things could be very different. Sophisticated marketing and public relations, not scientific excellence, have helped corporations to preside unchallenged over matters of life and death. It is time, Law argues, for us to take responsibility for our health, not as passive consumers of pharmaceutical medicine, but as informed citizens.
Download or read book Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime written by Peter Gotzsche and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PRESCRIPTION DRUGS ARE THE THIRD LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH AFTER HEART DISEASE AND CANCER. In his latest ground-breaking book, Peter C Gotzsche exposes the pharmaceutical industries and their charade of fraudulent behaviour, both in research and marketing where the morally repugnant disregard for human lives is the norm. He convincingly draws close co
Download or read book Prescription for the People written by Fran Quigley and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Prescription for the People, Fran Quigley diagnoses our inability to get medicines to the people who need them and then prescribes the cure. He delivers a clear and convincing argument for a complete shift in the global and U.S. approach to developing and providing essential medicines—and a primer on how to make that change happen. Globally, 10 million people die each year because they are unable to pay for medicines that would save them. The cost of prescription drugs is bankrupting families and putting a strain on state and federal budgets. Patients’ desperate need for affordable medicines clashes with the core business model of the powerful pharmaceutical industry, which maximizes profits whenever possible. It doesn’t have to be this way. Patients and activists are aiming to make all essential medicines affordable by reclaiming medicines as a public good and a human right, instead of a profit-making commodity. In this book, Quigley demystifies statistics and terminology, offers solutions to the problems that block universal access to medicines, and provides a road map for activists wanting to make those solutions a reality.
Download or read book Follow the Science written by Sharyl Attkisson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Respected Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author of Stonewalled, The Smear, and Slanted exposes the corruption that has ruled the pharmaceutical industry and news media for decades. Through blatant lies, deep cover-ups, and high-level collusion with government and media, Big Pharma has continuously put profits over people with dangerous results. Now, with her signature investigative rigor and uncompromising commitment to the facts, Sharyl Attkisson takes readers on an eye-opening journey through the dark underbelly of the pharmaceutical industry. Follow the Science recounts, in exacting detail, how far the pharmaceutical industry and its supporters in medicine, media, and government will go to protect their profits. Attkisson provides shocking examples that reveal the disturbing callousness our government, public health officials, and top researchers are capable of when it comes to the most vulnerable among us. And she explains, in a graphic sense, how some of the most trusted within our society are willing to commit life-threatening ethics violations. When caught, they circle the wagons and marshal forces to defend their bad acts, and take steps to cruelly silence the injured and smear those who would expose them. Big Pharma’s critics are often silenced or labeled “science deniers.” Even major media stories have been suppressed to placate pharmaceutical advertisers. The rift has only grown since the major pharmaceutical companies and their allies attacked anyone who dared to question the Covid-19 vaccines, and new treatments that provided disappointing despite skyrocketing costs. Follow the Science will challenge your assumptions, open your eyes, and inspire you to take action. With its powerful message of truth and justice, this book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of our healthcare system and their own family's health.
Download or read book Overdosed America written by John Abramson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2005-06-14 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the examples of Vioxx, Celebrex, cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, and anti-depressants, Overdo$ed America shows that at the heart of the current crisis in American medicine lies the commercialization of medical knowledge itself. Drawing on his background in statistics, epidemiology, and health policy, John Abramson, M.D., an award-winning family doctor on the clinical faculty at Harvard Medical School, reveals the ways in which the drug companies have misrepresented statistical evidence, misled doctors, and compromised our health. The good news is that the best scientific evidence shows that reclaiming responsibility for your own health is often far more effective than taking the latest blockbuster drug. You -- and your doctor -- will be stunned by this unflinching exposé of American medicine.
