New Year's Resolutions for the Pharmaceutical Industry
Our Reps Will Wait Their Turn To See The Doctor
They will not be dressed to star in music videos. Prior experience at Hooters or Work Out World will not be sufficient for hiring. They will not call the doctor dude. We understand others waiting to see the doctor are sick.
We Will Leave Poor Countries Alone
We'll stop conducting clinical trials on people who can't give informed consent and think they're getting medical care. We will stop marketing cholesterol drugs, HPV vaccines and lifestyle drugs to poor people whose major health problems are malaria, diarrheal diseases and potable water.
We'll Stop Extortion Pricing and Looting Medicare/Medicaid
We admit that pricing drugs at $52,321.80 a month(Actimmune),$42,570 a month (Chenoda) or $87,800 for a course of treatment (Harvoni) is extortion. Frankly we're amazed we have gotten away with it.
We Will Stop Financing Patient Front Groups ("Astroturf")
We admit the flash mobs that materialize at FDA hearings to beg for an expensive drug to be approved are paid by us. So are groups that swarm Medicaid offices demanding that a cheaper drug not be substituted for an expensive one. We admit we originated the meme that "one out of 4 has mental illness" to sell psych drugs. It's working.
We Renounce Our Love Affair With Biologics
Sure Humira, Enbrel, Remicade etc. make us multi billions every year but we admit they are the ultimate dupe. Despite our cagey marketing, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic plaque psoriasis and Crohn's disease are hardly the country's main health problems. Worse, they invite cancers in the young, frequently-lethal T-cell lymphoma and two types of skin cancer. Sorry for the dupe.
We'll Stop Selling Diseases
We admit we convinced people with real life problems and their doctors that they had depression, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety and assorted "spectrum" disorders and made billions doing it. We further admit that almost no one has exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, shift work sleep disorder and non-24-hour, sleep-wake disorder despite how much we advertise them but hey, people are gullible.
We'll Stop Selling Risk of Diseases
We admit that scaring people into taking meds for abstract risks -- the risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, cancer, asthma, osteoporosis, menopause and old age--is one of our most successful marketing gambits. Patients never know if the expensive meds they take every day are even working--so we have a lifelong customer.
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