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You Don't Have to be Afraid of Cancer Anymore Bill Sardi See book keywords and concepts

PhRMA claims the 5-year survival rate for cancer has increased from 50.0% in 1979 to 62.7% in 1995, a 25% relative increase in survival. [PhRMA website, April 22, 2004] But is this due to chemotherapy? A group of doctors at the Northern Sydney Cancer Centre in Sydney, Australia, sought to determine the effectiveness of cancer chemotherapy. The evaluators did not tabulate whether chemotherapy improved numbers like white blood cell count, or hormone levels, or antibodies, or even if they shrank tumors.

Update on Senate bill S.1082 and implications for the health freedom of consumers Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Meanwhile, the chairman of phrma, the pharmaceutical industry's own trade group, is Amgen chief Kevin Sharer... Action item: Please keep up the pressure to protect dietary supplements, functional foods, and free access to your natural health options. Click here to get information on contacting your senators. Here's a sample letter you can use to send to your senator. (Customize it into your own words for maximum impact.) The People's Amendment: S.

The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman Peter Rost See book keywords and concepts

Others invited included Alan Holmer, President and CEO of phrma, the industry organization for pharmaceutical companies, and Marcia Angell, who had written the book The Truth About the Drug Companies, as well as Chistopher Viehbacher, President of the U.S. division of GlaxoSmithKline. It didn't take long until both phrma and GlaxoSmithKline had declined to participate. Equipped with poor arguments, this was a no win situation for them. No one could locate Dr. Angell. So that left me alone.

The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie Craig Pepin-Donat See book keywords and concepts

PhRMA's position on free samples is that it "gets patients started on therapy right away or helps physicians optimize dosing on the choice of drug before committing to a particular course of treatment." Drug company sales representatives are trained to peddle drugs to physicians. They undergo extensive training, which gives them the technical ability to convey the positive effects of the drugs they represent. Their compensation is based on their ability to increase prescriptions in their territory and their loyalty to the company and its product line is directly related to their income.

Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies Greg Critser See book keywords and concepts

No one has been more integral to the industry's political success than Alan Holmer, the head of phrma from 1996 to 2004. Like Gerry Mossinghoff before him, Holmer is a classic Reagan-ite, one best known for his role in negotiating the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement. In the capital, he was considered a player, and a skilled one at that. Charming, courtly, low-key — on his wall hangs Lincoln's admonition that "persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted" — Holmer came to the trade organization in 1996, near the eclipse of the noisy but brief Gingrich revolution.

Big Pharma scare tactics: How the pharmaceutical industry influences American consumers Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

Lloyd Grove, a columnist for the New York Daily News, says that the pharmaceutical lobby in the United States, a group called phrma, actually commissioned the writing of a fiction novel designed to scare Americans into avoiding prescription drugs from Canada. The book was supposed to tell a story of terrorists who altered prescription drugs from Canada in order to kill Americans who were buying them over the internet or crossing the border to buy them at lower prices. Bizarre, huh?

Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda Jacky Law See book keywords and concepts

In the US, where pharma can operate in a far more favourable environment, the current of opinion is anti-Europe, according to Miles White, chairman of phrma and CEO of Abbott Laboratories. Consumers, he says, are 'downright angry - and understandably so -about the disparity in prices between the US and other developed countries.

Too Profitable to Cure Brent Hoadley, Ph.D. See book keywords and concepts

You, the juror, can choose to believe the professional media advertisements claiming that pharmaceuticals are untiring in their efforts to find cures for your chronic disease. Or, you can choose to read on. The pharmaceutical industry can be likened to the serial killer who moves, undetected, about the country, finding victims who satisfy his profile. Another analogy might be that the pharmaceutical corporations behave like the pedophile who quietly takes up residence in your respectable neighborhood. He mows his lawn, he goes to church on Sunday...

Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies Greg Critser See book keywords and concepts

Brief, but enduring: the Gingrichian conservatives left Holmer with one lasting earful — phrma and its members would have to change their old practice of giving money to both political parties if it were to count on the GOP's aid in the future. It was a message that party hacks and hon-chos alike would hammer home to pharma executives again and again.

Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda Jacky Law See book keywords and concepts

According to US industry association, phrma, the first beta-blocker, ICI's Inderal, had nine years of uncontested market presence in the 1960s and 1970s. Lilly, in contrast, had only three years to get Prozac established in the 1980s before other similar drugs moved in. And in the late 1990s, the first Cox-2 inhibitors, Vioxx and Celebrex, were launched within months of each other. Sales forces, already colossal by any other industry's standards, had to rev up somewhat to meet these challenges.

Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies Greg Critser See book keywords and concepts

The organization itself formally changed its name to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, phrma, in 1994.) The PMA believed that the industry was in a crisis, suffering from increasing costs, slipping sales, foreign competition, and government over-regulation. It was a crisis so severe as to provoke pharma CEOs to wonder out loud "whether there will even be a U.S. pharmaceuticals industry in twenty years." Then again, just about every major industry wondered something like that in the early 1980s, when it was widely believed that Japan was doing to U.S.

The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman Peter Rost See book keywords and concepts

It didn't take long until both phrma and GlaxoSmithKline had declined to participate. Equipped with poor arguments, this was a no win situation for them. No one could locate Dr. Angell. So that left me alone. Kicked Out of CNBC's Waiting Room While preparation for the DC press conference took place, I was getting more attention from the press. For the first time in my life, television stations started calling. The first call was from Bianna Golodryga, producer for CNBC. She said that Maria Bartiromo wanted to interview me for about ten minutes the following day.

Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies Greg Critser See book keywords and concepts

To wit, the new CEO of the trade organization phrma (the new Alan Holmer) is none other than Billy Tauzin, only a year or so ago the head of the Senate Commerce Committee and the main architect of the no-negotiating clause in the new Medicare Prescription Drug law. What can be done to make pharma itself better and safer? At the dawn of the modern pharma era, there was one crucial player who never quite got onto the proverbial playing field: the independent clinical pharmacologist. Clinical pharmacologists study how drugs work in a medical, rather than experimental, setting.

The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers Katharine Greider See book keywords and concepts

This is the tag line for the recent full-page ads appearing in national magazines as part of PhRMA's campaign to gussy up its increasingly negative image. The ads feature handsome, smiling people in lab coats—just some of the "50,000 researchers at America's pharmaceutical companies [who are] dedicating their lives to making all our lives better." Readers are directed to a web site, www.newmedicines.org, where they can learn about products these scientists are working to develop.

Speaking to reporters early in 2002, PhRMA's Richard I. Smith vowed to oppose the reopening of Hatch-Waxman, based on what he called "a handful of anecdotes" about delays in generics firms' ability to market their products. Then, out of the blue and only weeks before the November 2002 midterm election, President George W. Bush, on whom the industry had relied for support, proposed new FDA rules limiting drug companies to one thirty-month stay against a generic competitor over a particular drug.

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It Marcia Angell, M.D. See book keywords and concepts

Eve using PhRMA's own figures for total R&D costs for the decadt of the 1990s, it can be calculated that the cost per drug came to around $100 million after taxes. That is a lot, but it's a far cry from the much-vaunted $802 million. The Imaginary Number So where did the $802 million figure come from? And why has it been uncritically accepted? The number was the finding of a group of economists, headed by Joseph DiMasi of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, and it was announced with much fanfare at a press conference in Philadelphia on November 30, 2001.

The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers Katharine Greider See book keywords and concepts

The bottom line is that direct-to-consumer advertising is good for patients and good for public health," says a phrma spokesman. Sometimes public-health goals do overlap with marketing goals: More people recognizing the signs of clinical depression might boost antidepressant sales and bring relief to many. But skeptics of the drug industry's ads-equal-education equation point out that plenty of important public-health messages go begging for want of profit potential. For example, several pharmaceutical companies have introduced discount programs for low-income seniors.

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It Marcia Angell, M.D. See book keywords and concepts

That would be the maximum, since it is likely that PhRMA's total R&D figure is inflated by activities that many would regard as promotional, and the industry receives generous tax credits as well as deductions. If you take the next year, when the industry claimed it spent $30 billion and only sixty-six drugs entered the market, the pretax cost per drug would be higher— $455 million—and the after-tax cost $300 million.4 As you can see, any attempt to determine the cost per drug is highly dependent on the number of drugs—a subject I'll come back to later.

The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers Katharine Greider See book keywords and concepts

In a statement to reporters this year, PhRMA's Smith warned that efforts to reform Hatch-Waxman "would seriously erode the incentive and protection for innovation that enables new drug development, and would be a devastating blow to America's patients." It's as if without the advantage of the thirty-month stay, drug-makers wouldn't be motivated to come up with new products. "And I guarantee you," Smith went on, "if you aren't already today, at some point in your lives every one in this room will be a patient in need of medical care. The question is: Will a medicine be there for you?

But some frankly doubt PhRMA's figures, derived from confidential reports by member companies. Indeed, the subject of who spends what on R&D, like the question of who pays what for drugs, must remain murky: Although pharma execs hold up R&D spending as a justification for just about everything they do, they hold the details of this spending very close to the chest. Examinations by various advocacy groups of drugmak-ers' financial reports have yielded much lower estimates of their R&D budgets.

Indeed, in response to heightened public scrutiny of its marketing practices, the industry itself has issued voluntary guidelines discouraging purely social or recreational perks for doctors. PhRMA's code, launched in July 2002, explicitly discourages companies from giving gifts—such as gasoline, take-out food, flowers, and concert tickets—that clearly have nothing to do with patient care. Neither is it permissible under the code to pay for attendees' travel and honoraria to educational meetings (although paying speakers' and consultants' expenses and fees is deemed legitimate).

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It Marcia Angell, M.D. See book keywords and concepts

According to phrma, total revenues for its members that year (excluding some overseas sales) were $179 billion, so that would mean they spent about $9 billion for administration and nearly $54 billion for marketing. What is included in "administration"? First, of course, are the rewards executives give to themselves. Top officers of major drug companies make from a few million to tens of millions of dollars in salaries, bonuses, and other compensation, plus at least that much again in stock options.

Whatever the cost of bringing each new drug to market, total R&D expenditures of the pharmaceutical industry— according to phrma, now over $30 billion for all its members in the United States and abroad—are indeed large. But they should be compared with reported expenditures on marketing and administration, which are more than twice as much as R & D expenditures. Furthermore, the most important financial fact about the major drug companies is that, despite their expenses, they are enormously profitable. In 2002, when the ten U.S.

Durbin (D-Ill.), "PhRMA [the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America], this lobby, has a death grip on Congress."3 That is a serious charge, but the facts bear it out. Big pharma simply would not have permitted a Medicare drug benefit that included price negotiations. Congress was willing to make a useless transfer of billions of extra dollars from taxpayers to the drug companies and pharmacy benefit managers rather than cross big pharma. The industry is cozy with both Republicans and Democrats and with both the White House and Congress.

The president of phrma, Alan F. Holmer, welcomed the study as confirmation that "drug development is staggeringly expensive."7 The media seemed to accept it pretty much at face value. Under the heading "Research Cost for New Drugs Said to Soar," for instance, The New York Times reported the next day, "A new round in the national debate over prescription drugs opened today with a study from researchers at Tufts University estimating that the average cost of developing a new drug has more than doubled since 1987, to $802 million."8 The rest of the media carried similar stories.

Prescription For Disaster: Dangers In Your Medicine Cabinet Thomas J. Moore See book keywords and concepts

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, phrma, recently estimated an even higher annual total—1.3 million hospitalizations per year and 63,000 deaths.19 The industry figure appeared in a position paper on drug safety that assailed as exaggerated another estimate of up to 2 million annual hospitalizations. In truth, the scanty, fragmentary data are not complete enough to tell which estimate is correct. I selected a very conservative total to avoid a distracting debate on estimating techniques.

A position paper on drug safety from phrma provides an example. "Because drugs are powerful substances, they cannot bejnade completely safe for all users under all circumstances," it notes.26 This argument is, "We just have to accept a few injuries to get the benefits." Can you imagine the aiiline industry arguing that having 1 million people seriously injured in airplane crashes every year was just part of the game because air travel can't be "made completely safe fot all users under all circumstances"? Next, the industry blames the patients.

PhRMA, the industry association, sensing the probusiness leanings of the first Republican majority in Congress in decades, had launched an ambitious plan to rewrite the laws that govern drug safety and testing. Drug testing and research is a major industry expense, second only to marketing and advertising.1 Reducing drug testing, and therefore industry costs, was a seemingly sure route to increased profits.

We do not believe that was what Congress had in mind," declared phrma. The AMA and its physician organization allies agreed: "Our physician organizations vigorously oppose the creation of any entity or mechanism that implies regulation."25 Any group that truly wanted a conscientious program to inform consumers would not object to the results being checked. And given the long history of failure, any voluntary program without the FDA systematically evaluating the progress was likely to be still another disappointment.

Notes phrma, "There is more attention paid to tare problems with drugs than to their much more prevalent benefits." In short, we wouldn't have to be so worried about drug safety if we would just stop thinking about it. This is like suggesting that those concerned about auto accident deaths would be less worried if they just spent more time thinking about the millions of people who reach their destination safely every day. Have the pharmaceutical industry and doctors through their vigilance already taken deaths and serious injuries to some irreducible minimum?

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