During our last class, we discussed the concept about how drugs companies are extremely rich. I bought up the point that some poor countries, such as India (see the link in my previous blog post) use reverse engineering tactics to manufacture drugs which they cannot afford economically, but need as a population. Doing so, however, often breaks intellectual patent laws and results in drug companies losing profits. We continued our discussion, discussing the idea that profit created in a drug company usually doesn't go toward further clinical research or employees' salaries. Rather, the money goes toward further marketing and advertising. I was taken quite aback by this idea and decided to look a bit more into the details. A quick Google search, once again, revealed this article: "The Truth About Drug Companies" by the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell.
Before I even read this article, I wondered to myself why a drug company would really need to advertise. I've seen tons of drug company advertisements in tons of places, ranging from on billboards at major sports events to advertisements during prime time television. On the basic level, one may wonder why drug companies are advertising to the general population. Afterall, you need a prescription to receive just about any type of medication one may see on television. I always thought that it would make more sense to target physicians and hospitals with drug advertisements rather than the general population. I think this in itself creates a problem when I a patient sees a doctor and says, "Doctor, I've seen the Requip commercials on television and am pretty sure that I have Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS)." The doctor then proceeds to see if the patient actually has RLS or if the patient simply believes he has the disease. While this scenario may get more money for drug companies, I think it results in many extra diagnoses of RLS, earning the drug company more money. Morally, I think the right thing for drug companies to do is to present their drugs to physicians and hospitals only. Then, when a patient comes in with the symptoms of RLS, or complaining about symptoms that could be RLS, the doctor should see for himself if the patient has RLS rather than letting the patient self-diagnose and reveal his/her "professional" opinion.
Looking at the actual article, I am first taken aback by the fact that "the top U.S. drug makers spend 2.5 times as much on marketing and administration as they do on research." What bothers me most about this is that it's not a problem that's hard to fix. Budget reallocations done by the top administrators in any given fiscal year could solve this problem. I further don't understand why a drug company needs to spend so much money for advertising purposes. If they followed my earlier idea of advertising drugs, I'm more than confident that the drug companies could same tons of money on advertising. Drug companies could quite easily reallocate a portion of their marketing budget toward research and development. However, the way drug companies currently operate leads me to believe that there is actually some sort of an advantage to discovering drugs later than earlier. I'm not sure if it's a political or financial reason, but I would definitely like to know the reason.
The article continues to say that a major drug company "[paid] the NIH only 0.5 percent in royalties for [a] drug" which the NIH created and the drug company sold. We all know that drug companies are extremely rich...are they withholding funds from those that can research drugs and actually create them for financial reasons or political reasons? Are they holding money for purely greed or for other, more subtle reasons?
http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/09/09_401.html
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3 comments:
It is somewhat scary that drug companies spend so much more money on advertisement than on researching the drug. However, I do think that advertising directly to average consumers helps them be more informed about their own health and options, which is important especially when a person doesn’t have a close friend or relative that’s a doctor (as many of us do). Public awareness of drug options doesn’t have to be spread just by pharmaceutical companies—journalists and public organizations can do so as well—but there’s no reason a drug company shouldn’t advertise its own product to the public as a whole. Most of the advertisements that I’ve seen dealt with birth control, sexual impotence, sleep trouble, depression, allergies, and lowering cholesterol, and except for the last category, these might be conditions that a doctor doing a yearly physical might not prescribe any treatment for unless the patient brought up his/her condition and asked about a certain drug.
Also, drug companies already spend an excessive amount of money advertising directly to medical professionals anyway. They get pens, notepads, lunches, dinners, and a whole bunch of other freebies from drug companies. A family friend of mine even received a two-foot model skeleton from one company. But really, the only advertisement a good drug should need is its own efficacy—is it ethical or even necessary to do all this extra sublimal advertising in the form of free giveaways, when a pamphlet documenting the effectiveness of the drug should be the main thing that sways a doctor’s mind?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/other/etc/faqs.html
There’s a table near the end of this page that compares prices of the same drugs in different companies, and I don’t think the data has changed much since the time of publishing it. U.S. healthcare programs that cover drug costs might be able to save a lot of money if the government imposed some of the same regulations on drug pricing that other developed nations have done. If the companies are still able to advertise successfully and cut a profit abroad at these reduced prices, they should be able to do the same here.
Just correcting a typo at the beginning of the last paragraph.I meant to write that the table at the website compares the prices of different drugs in different countries. Most of the drugs are much cheaper in Europe and Canada than they are here.
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