Big pharma

[everydayupsanddowns]

My feeling is that yes Pharma is a business.

A pharma company’s responsibility, ultimately, in economic terms will be to its shareholders - and to its long-term survival and growth.

So it makes sense for them to find novel and good options, to develop them, and then to make them available to the market - to people that the intervention can be shown to help.

And so it makes sense for a company to find interventions that can be demonstrated to be effective in clinical trials.

Of course some behaviours of pharma companies do show a ‘profit before people’ motive - eg the horrendous price rises on unchanged Humalog insulin. Just ask anyone in the US.

But for me, unfortunately some of the nuance in the situation then gets exploited to create a cartoon villain out of the fact that pharmaceutical companies are a business.

To my mind the fact that there is a commercial aspect to research and discovery of treatments, doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole thing is inevitably a huge conspiracy in which all the regulators, researchers, and healthcare professionals are complicit.

 

[trophywench]

To my mind the fact that there is a commercial aspect to research and discovery of treatments, doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole thing is inevitably a huge conspiracy in which all the regulators, researchers, and healthcare professionals are complicit.

Yes - and spose I may as well mention now that I've always felt very sorry for the dogs BB&M experimented on.

I suppose I must have had pretty high ketones by the time I took myself to the doctors judging by the way I felt by then - B awful - and the pretty constant heart palpitations were damn well frightening to me (along with the insatiable thirst, constant need to pee, ditto weight loss and falling asleep .......) - so how the hell did those poor dogs feel? And yet, because of their suffering 50 years previously - I not only survived but thrived. So - I've just had to learn to harden myself to not thinking about it very much and so I don't.

 

[Eddy Edson]

My feeling is that yes Pharma is a business.

A pharma company’s responsibility, ultimately, in economic terms will be to its shareholders - and to its long-term survival and growth.

So it makes sense for them to find novel and good options, to develop them, and then to make them available to the market - to people that the intervention can be shown to help.

And so it makes sense for a company to find interventions that can be demonstrated to be effective in clinical trials.

Of course some behaviours of pharma companies do show a ‘profit before people’ motive - eg the horrendous price rises on unchanged Humalog insulin. Just ask anyone in the US.

But for me, unfortunately some of the nuance in the situation then gets exploited to create a cartoon villain out of the fact that pharmaceutical companies are a business.

To my mind the fact that there is a commercial aspect to research and discovery of treatments, doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole thing is inevitably a huge conspiracy in which all the regulators, researchers, and healthcare professionals are complicit.

Some people do bad things therefore everything that happens that I do not like is due to bad people.

-- Aristotle's Logic, early draft.