Tim,
Simple the drugs sold by big pharma do a lot of medical good.
A lot of people mistakenly believe that Big Pharma creates silver bullets that go straight to the source of the problem hit the straight between the eyes, and everybody is happy.
That's not what happens. This is an analogy how drugs work:
There is a room full of hostages and captors. Rather than a silver bullet, you take a hand granade, open the door, throw it in, close the door. Than you let the smoke clear, go in, and count if you killed more of the hostage takers than hostages.
When you hear claims: Drug A will cut the heart attack by 50%, it is not really what it sounds like. Suppose you have 1000 people giving a drug another 1000 given a placebo. Suppose 2 people on placebo get heart attack, only 1 person on the drug, for let;s say study period of 3 years.
Ok, the drug saved 1 person from heart attack, but you had to give the drug to 1000 people. Of those, 1 got the heart attack anyway, 998 were given the drug for no reason and 1 person was helped.
Now go back to how the drugs work. You threw a hand grenade into bodies of 998 people needlessly, and they will all suffer from some side effects. There is no free launch, and there are no silver bullets.
Viagra, BTW, was originally supposed to treat some heart condition. Rather than helping the heart condition, the test subjects started getting erections.
So Pfizer rushed their "silver bullet" to market. Well, Viagra is very much of a hand granade with many additional effects and side effects than erections. People started to drop dead after using Viagra because of cardio vascular complications.
Then, we have rising liver problems and liver failures. People are prescribed drugs for some real (or fictional) ailments, then they have some unusual "new" problem, which is a side effect of the first drug, and they get a second drug to supress the symptoms of the first side effect etc. In the end, after years of this crazyness, liver just can't handle it...
I suppose most snake oil treatments wouldn't harm you in obvious quick ways because the charlatans want customers not bodies, but "its a natural substance, it can't kill or harm you" is silly. Plenty of natural substances are toxic. Plenty of artificial substances are not.
Ok, I can concede the first part (some natural substances are toxic) but I am not quite ready to admit the second one (artivicial substances are not). My first choice would be not to take the risk, and avoid them as much as I reasonably can.
But consider relationship of Big Pharma to artificial substances. It is their lifeline, because that is the only thing they can patent. So Big Pharma is in business in always searching and creating new artificial substances, or modifying natural substances enough so that they can patent them.
(and I think most charlatans sold other substances, with snake oil just becoming a generic term for medically useless substances sold as part of a fraud)
Did you miss the news on Zetia - a useless drug that has been for sale, earning revenue in billions for years. Some of those billions were earned after the study showing it to be useless, and before the publication of the study. (google for ENHANCE and Zetia for more info).
Zetia falls under fraud category, and it is certainly not alone among drugs for sale today
The results of the study showing it useless were known 21 months ago. Schering-Plough and Merck sat on the result - probably hoping to kill it, not to allow the results to be published. This is a common practice, BTW with Big Pharma. Cherry pick subjects for the study, cherry pick results, cherry pick which results to publish. So what you see is not reality, but a great distortion, bordering on fraud.
But Big Pharma, and people running it are no fools. They make billions selling barely useful, many times harmful substances. The fools are insurance companies and governments paying the bills. But the greatest fools are people actually taking the drugs where an alternative of not taking drugs exists.
Joe |
