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Moderators: Rosie, Stanz, Jean, CAMary, moremuscle, JFR, Dee, xet, Peggy, Matthew, Gabes-Apg, grannyh, Gloria, Mars, starfire, Polly, Joefnh
Prescription and use of drugs has gone up by 37% in the past 17 years
$14.2 billion a year are spent each year on medicines
$6.5 billion are spent each year on medicines from people’s pockets!
But let’s get real here. Why shouldn’t we expect our government to negotiate the best deal it can with the drug companies? Isn’t that its job? To protect Australians’ health and dollars.
And drug companies are hardly going broke:
-in the USA the pharmaceutical industry has provided the best return on investment every year for the last ten years;
- drug companies feature prominently among the ten most profitable companies worldwide;
- drug company executives are among the best paid in the world;
- as for their high R&D costs, yes they are high in comparison with many other industries but both their marketing and advertising expenses (approx. 27% of revenue for the nine major US drug companies) and their profits (approx. 18%) exceed what they pay in R&D (approx. 11%).
No one should shed any tears for the drug companies
In 1969, investigative journalist Barbara Seaman blew the whistle with The Doctor's Case against the Pill. The book prompted a US Senate investigation that saw the pill become the first prescription drug to be accompanied by package insert warnings. Seaman was blacklisted for her trouble.
Magazines, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry threatening to withdraw advertising dollars, refused to run her stories.
Little research is available that compares drugs with non-pharmaceutical responses to women's healthcare needs.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busines ... 5841340381WHO said biotechs were a waste of time and good money? Your columnist admits he's done so on more than one occasion, but we dip our lids to Acrux after its stunning licensing deal that will see its testosterone treatment Axiron marketed globally by big pharma Eli Lilly.
The deal, claimed to be the biggest licensing arrangement entered into by a local biotech, has a headline value of ``up to'' $US335 million ($367m) -- plus royalties believed to be worth about two-thirds of this ($US220m).
So why, then, did only a third of medication studies focus on helping doctors use existing therapies more effectively? The answer lies in the fact that pharmaceutical companies fund nearly half of all medication research, including the lion's share of large clinical trials. For obvious reasons, commercially funded research is primarily geared towards the development of new and marketable medications and technologies. Once these products have won approval for clinical use, companies no longer have incentives to study exactly how and when they should be used.
The basic mistake we're making with our health-care system now is that we regard it as just another business. And it's clearly not just another business. Patients, sick patients and worried patients, are not like ordinary consumers," said Relman. "Doctors ought to be incorruptible … That's the doctor's sacred obligation. They're being corrupted and undermined by this kind of salesmanship."
