Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It would dramatically boost drug sales while eliminating the need to spend so much money bribing and influencing doctors.
When it comes right down to it, what the drug companies really want is a pharmaceutical vending machine. Insert your life savings (or a credit card with a huge credit limit), press the button for your "disease" or condition, and it dispenses drugs along with FDA black box warnings that are ignored by everyone. |
Andreas Moritz
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 AIDS research is going to generate the biggest profits from drug sales in the world. There is a whole list of drug studies on children either still running or recently concluded. The research is sponsored by government agencies such as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and huge pharmaceutical companies such as Glaxo, Pfizer, Squibb and Genentech. |
Melody Petersen
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 And Bill Steere, who turned Pfizer into the world's largest pharmaceutical company and a marketing powerhouse that others tried to imitate, was one of the industry's many top executives who began their careers as drug sales reps.
The industry's own hiring statistics show its shift from research to marketing. Between 1995 and 2000 the number of marketing personnel at the large pharmaceutical companies in America increased by 59 percent to 87,810, according to surveys of the companies by the industry's trade group. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The answer, of course, is because that would hurt drug sales. So instead, they report, "Depression Causes Osteoporosis" and somewhere in the story they repeat the quote from the researchers claiming that taking antidepressant drugs might actually reverse osteoporosis!
Why are there so many idiots in medicine and the media today?
Sometimes, I'm just so astonished at the lack of intelligent thought in medicine and the media that I wonder if I've somehow been teleported to Planet of the Idiots where stupid people run everything. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Without it, drug sales would plummet and the number of Americans killed by drug-related heart attacks, strokes, traffic accidents and suicides would fall sharply. That's why Big Pharma has to keep the media racket going. It also helps get them lots of positive media coverage, given that their huge advertising budgets pay the overhead for major TV stations, newspapers, magazines and, of course, medical journals.
The U.S. remains the only advanced nation in the world short-sighted enough to allow drug companies to advertise directly to the public. |
Charles Barber
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 Americans are responsible for almost half of the world's prescription drug sales,47 but the disparity is even greater when it comes to CNS (central nervous system) agents. In 2006, Americans—about 6 percent of the world's population—bought about two-thirds of the world's psychiatric and neurological drugs. In 2006, 66 percent of the global antidepressant market was accounted for by the United States.48 And in 2003 approximately 83 percent of the global market for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder medications was accounted for by the United States, and mainly by U.S. children. |
| To influence hearts and minds, Big Pharma has assembled an army of about one hundred thousand drug sales representatives, called detailers, whose job it is to push product directly to the MDs.57 The number of detailers has almost tripled in the last ten years, as did the spending on marketing directly to doctors over roughly the same period.58 "Unbeknownst to most doctors," writes the advocacy group the Center for Policy Alternatives, "drug detailers have access to prescriber reports that let them know— right down to the pill—if their sales pitches are successful. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
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 This translates into years of profitable drug sales and sustained revenues for the nharmaceutical industrv. Ka-chine!
Trick or Treat
The Drug Approval Process
Clearly, there are drugs that have provided great relief and benefit for the afflicted. I have no quarrel with those that provide strong efficacy and good quality control at a reasonable price. My issue is with those companies in the health care industry whose shareholders demand higher and higher profits regardless of how they are attained. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 She and her partner were careful not to make the dinner sound like a drug sales pitch to the other physicians they were inviting. "You don't say he's going to talk about Celebrex. You tell them he's talking about postsurgery knee pain."
After a dozen or so of these dinners, Howard found she could no longer stand her job. She began to feel she was bribing doctors with gifts and expensive food and misleading them about the drugs she was touting. She'd lasted only nine months as a drug rep.
For companies, the payoff for recruiting doctor-speakers can be spectacular. |
| Corey Davis, an analyst with JP Morgan, predicted in the Wall Street Journal that sleep drug sales could hit six billion dollars by 2008. Lunesta, said Davis, "could do for the insomnia market what Prozac did for depression." Meanwhile, the company's chief financial officer told investors, "It's a drug you can take again and again and again. The sky's the limit."
Lunesta's TV spots and print advertisements were only the most visible aspect of the company's marketing campaign—and in many ways they represented not the beginning of the drug's launch but its culmination. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If a so-called "disease" can be swallowed by the gullible mainstream media, and believed by brainwashed doctors and consumers, then drug sales will automatically follow.
Getting people to believe there's something wrong with them, of course, is amazingly easy. Why? Because everybody's life is in turmoil at one time or another. There's not a person alive who doesn't feel pressure, or anxiety, or challenges, or failures sooner or later. Drug companies want you to believe those feelings are diseases when, in reality, they're just part of life. |
Mike Adams
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 This is accomplished through the Big Pharma / FDA conspiracy that:
Violates free-market economics by attempting to ban cost-effective online pharmacies, prescription drug sales from Canada, drug tourism to Mexico, etc.
Creates obstacles for the introduction of generic drugs that would compete with brand-name drug sales. For example, the FDA now supports charging generic drug companies to conduct safety reviews on chemicals that have already been approved by the FDA and are currently sold under brand names. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Since then, drug sales have skyrocketed, drug company profits have ballooned, and fictitious disease diagnoses have proliferated at an alarming rate.
Diseases such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder are completely fictitious, invented by a panel of psychiatrists with a simple vote. Conditions like "high cholesterol" aren't diseases at all (they're simply descriptions of blood chemistry), and artificially lowering high cholesterol with statin drugs has been scientifically found to offer absolutely no net health benefit whatsoever. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Drugs make money for Big Pharma, and vitamins compete with drug sales. Once you understand the economics and the motives of the parties involved here, the junk science con becomes quite obvious: Pushers of pharmaceuticals will always use dirty tricks to discredit nutritional supplements because it is in their financial interests to do so.
My own financial interests, by the way, are squeaky clean. I sell no supplements, I earn no money from supplement companies, and in fact I am not even paid by NewsTarget for my work on these articles. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 Shadowing is a required part of the job of drug sales representatives, and while it involves being intimately involved in the therapy of a patient, former salespeople confirmed that there was no oath or directive protecting any patient confidences. Dr. |
| Cheerleaders Pump Up Drug Sales").
Reps are sent into the field with a list of talking points to help them answer questions as well as packets of product-favorable articles and other material such as copies of expert consensus guidelines (created by their paid consultants) to leave with doctors. The critical information contained in these articles is often buried in tables without comment, and there are often conclusions that are not supported by the data in the papers, and I cite several examples of this throughout this book. |
Ann M. Coulston and Carol J. Boushey
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 A Global Index
With drugs, the cost of establishing efficacy (estimated at about $1 billion for an average drug today) will be recovered from the "profits" derived from drug sales for the number of years for which patent protection prevents unfair competition. Neither recourse is usually available for foods or nutrients. Profit margins are low, and patent protection is limited or nonexistent. Thus, the food industry is precluded from funding the kinds of EBM-recommended tests needed to show population-level benefits.
G. |
Charles Barber
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| Lynn Williamson, a "cheering advisor" at the University of Kentucky, says he regularly gets calls from recruiters looking to hire women from his ranks as drug sales representatives. "They watch to see who's graduating. They don't ask what the major is," Wlliamson says.64 When I was working in homeless shelters, I was shocked that these bubbly and perky drug reps (all women) would brave our gothic, cavernous, and squalid facilities for even two minutes with the psychiatrist who prescribed the drugs. |
Byron J. Richards, CCN
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 This is because vitamins are frequently used instead of drugs by many people in an attempt to naturally improve themselves - thus vitamins are a direct competitor to drug sales. Even worse, if a person feels better or gets better then they do not need drugs. The pharmaceutical companies are constantly trying to regulate supplements to control this competition and suppress health options other than their own, as well as trashing individual freedom of choice in the process.
Medical doctors are generally a useless source of help when it comes to employing nutrition to better a health condition. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The entire effort is more about promoting a political agenda (boosting drug sales) than genuine health. The study was dishonestly constructed, unscrupulously reported, and ignorantly parroted by health and science reporters (who apparently understand neither health nor science) across the globe. Almost nobody bothered to point out the remarkable reduction in bone fractures demonstrated by the test subjects who actually consumed their calcium.
It's no surprise, of course. There are days when I wonder whether there's a single iota of honesty or intelligence left in the popular press. |
Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D.
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 Drug Sales Calls Wear on Doctors." Chicago Tribune, May 8, 2005.
2 Blumenthal, D. "Doctors and Drug Companies." N. Engl. J. Med. 2004;351:1885-1890.
3 Ibid.
4 ACCME annual report data 2003. Chicago: Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education,
2003.
5 Kravitz, R. L., et al. "Influence of Patients' Requests for Direct-to-Consumer Advertised
Antidepressants: A Randomized Controlled Trial." JAMA 2005;293:1995-2002.
6 Spurgeon, D. "Doctors Feel Pressurised by Direct to Consumer Advertising." BAf/1999;391:1321.
7 Relman, A. "Your Doctor's Drug Problem." New York Times, Nov. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 They pretend that all this economic activity in the world of medicine -- the drug sales, hospital visits, surgical procedures and medical bills -- adds up to economic abundance because it makes the Gross National Product look larger. Each year, as drug companies rake in profits while disease clinics and medical offices sprout up all over the country, economists pretend it's all a grand sign of an economic boom. Gee, if we could all get rich by being diseased, America would be the wealthiest nation in the world!
With all this pretending going on, you might wonder where it's all heading. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Greater brand-name drug sales (which, of course, is what the FDA is ultimately after).
The whole problem with corruption and fraud at the FDA today is largely due to the fact that the agency is largely funded by brand-name drug makers through drug application fees. Thus, drug companies are the FDA's "customers." But the FDA is supposed to be regulating these companies, not serving them like royal guests at a five-star hotel. And this idea of accepting even more money from more drug companies would only compromise the integrity of the agency even further. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If people figure out they can already cure cancer, then anti-cancer drug sales might plummet!)
It is astonishing that conventional medicine fails to recognize the true nature of cancer. To say that there's no cure for cancer is to deny the healing potential of the human body. It is, in a sense, to deny one's very own human nature.
It's not surprising to hear this, though, since conventional medicine is often about separation from nature, or even separation from self. If you think about the way conventional medicine looks at the body, it's all about separation and isolation. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It's time to put the power of drug safety into the hands of people who actually care about safety, not those who benefit from drug sales. And it's time to end the oppressive, Dark Ages reign of the U.S. Fraud and Drug Administration which is not only complicit in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of Americans, but which seems determined to continue its campaign of power and corruption, no matter what the cost in the American lives.
Dr. Sidney Wolfe (PublicCitizen.org) was right all along. I say we team Dr. Wolfe with Dr. Graham and let them run the FDA. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 While the tests were certainly building drug sales, some of the scientists were becoming more and more uncertain that this strategy of focusing on testing and drugs was the best way for individuals or communities to prevent fractures. A landmark
1997 report from the British Columbia Office of Health Technology Assessment based in Vancouver examined the entire body of evidence for bone density testing to try to find out what the scientific data was showing. |
| What is crystal clear, however, is that these ads boost drug sales.
Industry executives argue that the most powerful case for direct-to-consumer advertising is evidence of underdiagnosis and undertreatment among those people with serious health problems, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, depression and, presumably, PMDD.18 In a special issue of the British Medical Journal devoted to the topic of medicalization, and titled "Too Much Medicine?, |
| One of the most important messages that the Shire chief imparted to potential investors at the merchant bankers' meeting in New York was that a whole new "adult market" was about to open up, assuring healthy growth in drug sales for many years to come.23 In a slide titled "Adult ADHD," Shire showed estimates that there were 8 million potential adult patients in the U.S., of which only a tiny fraction were currently being treated. |
Greg Critser
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 IMS was the original pharmaceutical marketing firm; its main product is a huge database of information on prescription drug sales, which it purchased from individual pharmacies and then used to tailor advertising and marketing campaigns for drug makers. The patient information was anonymous, but the data gave marketers a good idea of which prescription drugs were selling, what geographical areas were slow to adopt new ones and which were fast, whether prescriptions were being refilled, and so forth. But there was no data about individual physicians and their prescribing behavior. |
Kelly Patricia O'Meara
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 Yes, but this is reality on planet psycho-pharma when the drug companies, in conjunction with the wizards of psychiatry, have tens of billions of dollars in drug sales on the line. Yes, apparently, the not walking or talking infants, whose brains quite literally still are developing, allegedly can be diagnosed with some mental illness requiring a psychiatric mind-altering drug as "treatment." Wouldn't one love to be a fly on the wall during that diagnosing session! |
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