In an article in the LA Times, Greg Critser discusses the reasons behind the plummeting profits of the pharmaceutical industry. Drug company officials have offered up reasons such as generic competition, overzealous regulators, trial lawyers, bad public relations and the high cost of research.
Neither Safe Nor Effective
Critser proposes a different reason: the pills they offer are neither safe nor effective. He points out that, according to the industry itself, only about half of the new medicines launched since 1990 are significant improvements over older and cheaper products.
At the same time, problems from side effects are on the rise, especially now that one in six Americans take three or more prescription drugs daily, often in untested combinations
The result? Only about half of patients stay on any given regimen.
"Persistence and Compliance"
The industry's response, however, has been to increase efforts to promote "persistence and compliance" -- in other words, ways to keep a patient taking pills, even if the patient doesn't like it.
Few Programs Look at Side Effects
The rise of P&C programs mean that huge amounts of money are spent getting people to ingest pills, and less and less is being spent to discover new ones.
Meanwhile, patients may be encouraged to continue taking a drug that can be harmful, and few P&C programs even bother to look at the reasons patients might stop taking pills, such as side effects, adverse events and special individual sensitivities.
