Matthew Mintz: “It is harder to admit to that a profitable pharmaceutical industry is necessary in order to see innovative products. In addition, if the FDA (due to its intense recent scrutiny) is going to be overly cautious about every side effect, companies may choose not to develop products which huge potential gain for many because of some minimal side effects to a few.”
Related posts:
- Secrets of the pharmaceutical industry
- Poll: Do gifts from pharmaceutical companies influence how physicians prescribe?
- Soft sell
- Benefit of DTC ads?
- Do drug companies and the pharma industry deserve to be villains?
- Pharma and the quick fix
- Another approach to health care costs: Ban advertising
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 2 comments }
“a profitable pharmaceutical industry is necessary”
Profitable, yes. But gigantic salaries and bonuses and palatial headquarters are excessive. With many pharma execs making far more than the president of the U.S., I’m not impressed by this sorry argument for how squeezed the industry is.
“huge potential gain for many because of some minimal side effects to a few”
You guys need to review the NNT data again. Many meds that are advertised like crazy are not all that great. When you treat 100 to benefit 1, then 99 of us are not all that impressed — especially those of us who have side effects without benefits. The pharma marketing guys are not the only ones using a lot of smoke and mirrors. How many of you docs are explaining NNT to your statin patients? Heck, you’re not even doing a good job of alerting them to potential muscle problems, let alone confessing that the statin may be of negligible benefit to any particular individual who has not already had a heart attack.
Comments on this entry are closed.