Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda

by Jacky Law

Last year, the pharmaceutical industry had sales in excess of $300 billion. Clearly, we all pay in one way or another — whether by buying drugs directly or through taxation. But it is less clear if we are getting value for our money.

Author Jacky Law shows how a small number of corporations have come to dominate the global healthcare agenda. She reveals a system in which the relentless pursuit of profit is crowding out the public good. Effective regulators are under intense pressure from corporate lobbies, and companies spend more money on marketing than they spend on research and development. Meanwhile, the cost of new drugs rises relentlessly, while the number of original new products declines.

All is not well with modern medicine. In what is both a diagnosis and a recommended course of treatment, Big Pharma reveals a world where market considerations, not medical need, are determining the research agenda. The author points to a future where the public and the medical profession once again have a voice in the kind of healthcare we want — and the healthcare we pay for.

Genres: Nonfiction, Health, Politics, Science, Health Care, Business, Medical

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 26, 2006

Reviews

[Colin Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to the affect of market forces on the pharmaceutical industry and in turn our health.

[Amber Mendoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for Mental, Emotional and behavioral disorders and reviewed for extra credit.

The work Big Pharma: How the World's Biggest Drug Companies Control Illness is appropriately titled because it represents the major theme of corporate control of illness, which runs throughout the book. Law explains various mechanisms related to the implementation and maintenance of corporate control, and discusses the implications of such control by revisiting personal accounts and major news stories. Law offers a unique perspective for American readers because Law is British. Law discusses the differences between the European Union's free and universal state funded health care system and the United States, where most health care, even if publicly financed is delivered privately.

As a second year graduate student studying mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders, my reservations about the book come from Law's critique of the DSM.The author states that diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder are "impulsivity or failure to plan ahead" (p. 65). She states that diagnostic criterion for dissociative fugue is "an overwhelming urge to travel away from home or one's customary place of work" (p. 65). The author normalizes these disorders and says that everyone has experienced these symptoms at some point in their lives. While it may be true that everyone has experienced the urge to travel away from home or work, and everyone has displayed impulsivity, Law omits key diagnostic criteria in her critique, and of the minimal diagnostic criteria she does mention, the wording is inaccurate and does not accurately portray the criteria of the DSM-IV.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

No surprises here, anyone who knows basic economics can guess what happens when enormous companies try to maximize profits - pricing drugs based on ability to pay instead of efficacy (anticancer drugs costing >$40k/yr), patient marketing (in 1999, Merck spent more than $160 million to promote Vioxx, more than what PepsiCo spent to promote Pepsi or Budweiser spent to advertise its beer), hiding data on clinical trials (Vioxx), lobbying the government for enormous concessions (medicare Part D), etc. Just another day in the office in Milton Friedman land. I wish I read a book was written later (so much has happened since 2004) and one focused on the US instead of the UK, but was still interesting to read.

In Jurassic Park, the genetics company, InGen, in deciding to build the park, asked the question, "what is the biological equivalent to the Sony Walkman?" Sadly, pharmaceutical companies discovered that the answer lies in lifestyle drugs to treat chronic conditions like cholesterol or depression, with drugs like Lipitor making ~10 billion a year with >80% profit margins. So no dinosaurs. :(

[Anastassiya · Rating 3 out of 5]

as big pharma companies say:
there are two things you can do wrong to patients- you either kill them or you cure them...

The penetration by Pharma of all spheres of healthcare is devious and disturbing. Big boys quitely owing it/us all.
Inventing diseases is pretty sick as well...the author mentions the nonexistent over-reactive bladder syndrom that is profitably promoted via media.

It owuld have been nice if the author mentions the Swine flu scam in the next editions.
Just think of the scandal at World Health Organisation around the swine flu...a number of "advisers" accidently had ties to the industry, one of them being a professor at Imperial College London who was on the advisory panel of WHO to raise the threat of swine flu to critical and who happen to have received thousands consultaion fees from the Big Pharma...6 billion pounds spent on vaccines...

[Kristi Siegel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have read tons on big pharma and their illicit practices. The detailers (or drug reps) are chosen for their looks first - college cheerleaders are often approached. Their job is to document what types of inducements influence doctors. They already know their prescribing habits because chain pharmacies supply the reports, and the numbers used to theoretically protect doctors' anonymity are undone by the report pharma buys from the American Medical Association.

Medical journals are largely controlled by big pharma - their so-called peer reviews are often far from objective. One editor, of The New England Journal of Medicine no less, quit in disgust.

[Linda Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

yeash. What have we gotten ourselves into? In making pharma a business, we seem to have turned loose the matrix without any central computer. Now we get treated instead of cured, and medicine is made for those that can pay for it rather than those that need it. Kinda scary.

[Austin High]

338.4 LAW