Tea at Trianon: A Doctor’s Impassioned Critique of Big Pharma

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, March 24, 2022

A Doctor’s Impassioned Critique of Big Pharma

From Undark:

According to John Abramson, a health care policy lecturer at Harvard Medical School, the sap of this poisoned tree is so-called Big Pharma, the coalition of drug companies that have structured American health care into a money-generating machine. In “Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It,” Abramson sets out to answer the “paradox of American health care,” building his case using the testimony of patients and former drug executives.
In the book, Abramson reveals how doctors are regularly duped into prescribing expensive drugs with extreme side effects while major pharmaceutical companies rake in record profits. Yet recent research suggests that 46 million Americans can’t afford health care. According to a 2020 survey, two-thirds of consumers live in fear of medical bills.

The book is a crash course in the profit-driven systems built by Big Pharma that dominate the U.S. health care industry and how they can cause undue suffering, starting with several recent pharmaceutical scandals that have cost the lives of thousands of Americans while enriching major corporations.

Abramson, who has also worked as a family physician for years, has served as a legal expert in about 15 civil trials involving drugmakers, in which he highlighted the drug industry’s flawed research and shrewd marketing tactics. The first few chapters are sprinkled with dramatic courtroom sequences, demonstrating his long-standing reputation, as writer William Heisel described him in 2009, as an “outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry.”

“As an expert in litigation, I have had access to manufacturers’ scientific data as well as their business and marketing plans,” Abramson writes. “These are the pieces of the puzzle that, when put together, show how drug companies convince doctors to prescribe their expensive new drugs even when they offer little or no added value (and sometimes harm) compared to less expensive alternatives.”

In one illuminating scene, Abramson explained to a jury how Pfizer persuaded doctors to overprescribe the epilepsy drug Neurontin (gabapentin) off-label for bipolar disorder. In the late 1990s, Pfizer sponsored numerous swanky dinners and held meetings where the pharmaceutical company presented misleading data showing remarkable improvement. But they withheld data “which had shown the drug was significantly worse than placebo,” Abramson writes.

Pfizer later pleaded guilty to illegally marketing their drug, but the company’s profits from Neurontin only increased. This example — far from an anomaly in the biotechnology sector — demonstrates how deeply corporate interests have infected nearly every aspect of the American medical system, and why it will be so difficult to fix. (Read more.)