Big Pharma

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==See also==
 
==See also==
 
*[[Big science]]
 
*[[Big science]]
 +
*[[Shill gambit]]
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==External links==
 
==External links==
 
*[http://www.phrma.org/ PhRMA website]
 
*[http://www.phrma.org/ PhRMA website]

Revision as of 23:51, 8 February 2011

'Tell your doctor...' Tell your Doctor? Shouldn't your doctor tell you what drugs you need? If you tell your doctor, isn't he just a dealer at that point?
—Bill Maher, Victory Begins at Home

Big Pharma is the nickname given to the pharmaceutical industry. The name comes from the acronym used by the industry's lobbying arm -- the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). Critics of the industry often use this nickname when discussing abuses by the industry, including:

  • Trying to suck every penny out of the pockets of the sick, injured, dying, and hypochondriacs;[1]
  • Inventing new maladies so people will buy more drugs;[2]
  • Renaming old maladies so people will think their conditions are more serious, making them more willing to pay higher prices for prescriptions.

Woo merchants such as homeopaths stridently blame most or all opposition on Big Pharma. However, as scientifically-literate critics of both (e.g. Ben Goldacre) point out, "Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer."[3]

Contents

Advertising of prescription drugs

While many countries allow over-the-counter drugs to be advertised, only the United States and New Zealand allow prescription drugs to be advertised on television. Many critics believe Big Pharma has abused this tolerance by pushing drugs that may not be effective or applicable to their conditions on viewers. Furthermore, Big Pharma has invented new maladies and renamed old maladies in an effort to expand the number of prescriptions written.

Big Pharma often enlists the help of advertising executives to coin new names for maladies. These new names are often three to four words long, allowing for them to form a catchy acronym for the condition.[4] Thanks to televised pushing of prescription drugs, the United States -- which makes up five percent of the world's population -- accounts for forty-two percent of the money spent on prescription drugs.[4] As a result of this abuse, the New Zealand government is reconsidering whether it should continue to allow Big Pharma to advertise prescription drugs on television. In the United States, where government now exists almost exclusively to promote corporate interests, no such re-examinations have been forthcoming - in fact, the latest update to the Medicare program for senior medical care ("Medicare Part D") explicitly prevents the government from negotiating prices with Big Pharma for the drugs it buys.

New maladies

Some of the new maladies coined include:

  • Restless Leg Syndrome or RLS. Basically, this is caused by too much stress, not enough sleep and the use of stimulants (caffeine mostly), alcohol, H2-histamine blockers, and certain antidepressants. Back in the day when people only worked one job, RLS wasn't much of a problem. However, because Americans need to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet (a situation that ex-president George W. Bush thought was "uniquely American" and "fantastic"[5]), RLS is much more common today. RepuipTM[6] is the RLS treatment most often advertised on American TV.

New names for old maladies

Because old diseases don't have the emotional punch that three- and four-letter acronyms have, Big Pharma regularly practices newspeak:

  • Erectile Disfunction or ED: It's bad enough when she says "it happens to every man[7] at some time[8]." It's worse when, a few days later, her family and friends start addressing me you as "The Old Softie."
  • Priapism: Not really a new condition, just one that was previously unknown to the general public before "ED" treatments[9] went on the market. Priapism is the term for that certain side effect where the man has a prolonged[10] erection without being aroused. Thank the advertising firm for CialisTM, which was the first to incorporate the "four hour erection[11]" boast warning in their product's commercials.

Conspiracy theories

The groups that push Big Pharma conspiracies tend to fall into two camps which often overlap: alternative medicine cranks, quacks, and other woo-meisters as well as stock conspiracy theorists. The general strain of thought behind the quack version of the Big Pharma conspiracies is that the entirety of medical science (or "Western medicine") is fraudulent and all the studies and experiments are bogus. Any studies showing inefficacy of a treatment are immediately latched onto as "proof" that medical science is bunk by Joseph Mercola and Mike Adams types.[12] Then there are the really cranky cancer conspiracies revolving around the idea that Big Pharma invented the cure for cancer but is covering it up. This is a popular one among raw foodists who believe raw food is "the cure that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about." This opens the door for the woo-meisters to peddle their bullshit, because, you see, they actually care about you while Big Pharma has a profit motive and they don't. Nuh-uh, no profit motive for quackery at all. Just pure all-natural goodness like nature intended, naturally, of course.

The conspiracy theorists generally come from the viewpoint of the relationship between Big Pharma and the government. Usually this involves the use of chemtrails or water fluoridation as mind control substances to prepare us to accept the coming New World Order. Either that or they are being used to intentionally keep us sick so Big Pharma can rake in the dough by causing our illnesses and then selling us the cure.

Due to the law of crank magnetism, these two groups often merge into an unholy alliance of crankery. This is how webshites like Natural News, Rense, and that paragon of crankery, Whale.to are born.

See also

External links

Footnotes

  1. It should be noted that the hypochondriacs would gladly pay every sou they have no matter what Big Pharma does. On a second thought, there are alternatives like surgery that they are willing to pay for.
  2. As opposed to inventing better drugs so more people would become addicts.
  3. http://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/15857117862
  4. 4.0 4.1 CBS News, A Nation of Pill-Takers [1]
  5. "Be Proud, Be Unique, Be American: Work to Death for Minimum Wage" [2]
  6. RequipTM website [3]
  7. Especially since this means she managed to fit "every man" into her schedule...
  8. To make it worse this means some or all of those "every man" are fitted more than once.
  9. AKA "Blue Bombers"
  10. Pun intended
  11. The big secret they are keeping from us is why it's four hours and not three and a half.
  12. Natural News types love these sort of things, like (warning: link contains high levels of bullshit) this one placebo study that apparently proves medical science to be definitively wrong in everything. The other dumb thing about this is, if all these medical studies are bogus and a medical study is done on bogus research, how is this new study any more valid from their point of view?!
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