Curing diseases is not a very profitable activity for drug companies. Managing sick people is. So, do drug companies really want to cure diseases, or do they want us to all be sick for as long as possible?
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Do pharmaceutical companies want to find cures for diseases? It's an important question because I don't think they do. In fact, I think there's compelling evidence that there is almost no desire amongst pharmaceutical companies to now find a cure to almost any known medical problem. And the reason why is quite simple, and it's quite straightforward. Finding a cure to a disease cuts off the future income stream of the pharmaceutical company from managing the condition in question.
So, for example, if you find an effective vaccine that destroys the chance of some illness spreading, what you will actually do is kill your future profits because you'll sell a lot of your vaccine in the short term, and then there will be nobody to spread that disease because they've been cured of it, as a consequence of which the spread of the disease will plummet and you won't sell any more vaccine because it won't be necessary because there will be nobody who needs to be treated for it.
This is the reality of how it is in the pharmaceutical industry. If you do something really well and you actually eliminate a cause of harm created by a medical condition, then by and large, there is no future profit for you.
If, however, you come up with a method to manage a condition, you're in the money from now until time immemorial. And let me give you a simple example of that.
The management of type 2 diabetes is incredibly profitable for the pharmaceutical industry. So, of course, they want nothing done about ultra-processed food. In fact, they will lobby extensively against any measure that might reduce the chance that somebody will eat vast quantities of excess glucose, which will lead to the production of excess insulin in their body, which will then be treated by the injection of more insulin into their bodies as a consequence of the management of type 2 diabetes, as a result of which they will, from there on, be chronically ill, requiring medicine after medicine for the rest of their life, from which the pharmaceutical industry will make a lot of money.
And that's also true, of course, of obesity. Does the pharmaceutical industry want to cure obesity? Is it even a condition that requires a cure? Because we know what the cure is. That is, reduce the amount of sugar input into people's lives through carbohydrates and other means. But that isn't, again, what the pharmaceutical industry wants because they want people to have managed obesity.
Hence, the whole thing about Ozempic and Wegovy. Those drugs are not about solving the problem of obesity, they are simply about managing it. And we're already hearing calls, even though these drugs are only just coming into use, for them to be prescribed for life. And they're not cheap. And they will be used by a lot of people, and they will absorb an enormous amount of the health budget.
So, what is the motive of the pharmaceutical industry? It quite clearly is not to make us better. It is to actually keep us unhealthy. And that is bizarre. We think of all these people walking around in white coats who politicians want to stand next to as people who are doing good work, but by and large, they're actually just there to leave us in our current state of ill health, managed for a very long time, but not necessarily with us being better.
And, in fact, that's an incredibly important point to make. Because whilst life expectancies have overall got longer, with a little bit of a blip at present, well-being as a proportion of total life expectancy has gone down. People are now ill for longer at the end of their lives.
And that is worrying. Because it suggests there's something deeply wrong inside what we are absorbing, because as genetic people we haven't changed significantly, and therefore the agent for change - which means that we are sicker for longer towards the end of our lives - must be an external factor, which is the food we eat, almost certainly.
But medicine is not solving that. It's just containing that. And I believe we have, therefore, got our whole attitude towards the pharmaceutical industry, its motives, and what it needs to do for us completely wrong.
We need to have government to stand up to pharmaceuticals and say, ‘We want cures, we want to find solutions, we want to take this problem out at source, not manage it once it's arisen.' That is what good management would, in fact, look like.
Inside the health service, the answer is obvious. You could go and have a look at a couple of programmes that were broadcast recently on Channel 4 in the UK. The Glucose Goddess - I can't remember her real name, sorry, but I know that that's what she calls herself - did a couple of programmes where she looked at removing glucose from people's diets to treat common conditions that they were suffering from. Acne. Obesity. And things like that. And by simply controlling the amount of sugar that was absorbed by people, their health was dramatically improved.
Those who were suffering diabetes were in fact cured. And that's entirely possible. Type 2 diabetes is a completely curable disease. But not if you believe what the pharmaceutical industry says, because they don't want it to be cured, because that would remove their opportunity for profit.
We need to change our attitude to medicine, in other words. We should not now be looking for conditions to be managed. We should be looking for cures. And that's a totally different issue when it comes to medical management of the human condition.
But it's not good for the profits of pharmaceutical companies, and I don't care because I'm interested in well-being and not profits. and the pharmaceutical companies have their interests the other way around. They want profits and not well-being, which is why we have to question the answers that they come up with.
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[…] if to reinforce the point in today's video, I noticed this in the FT […]
Well said – when you consider that private companies rely on investment from rich people and even pension funds who want stable income streams from their investment over time (or will cash their chips and go elsewhere) the logic of your argument is very clear and damning.
This is what happens when you marketise health care and it reifies the market bias towards financial returns.
The public should have got their heads around this by now but I fear that they have not (despite what the water industry tale tells them). The other side of the coin is the exploitation of human weakness – that people may not want to forego their sugar consumption. It’s like an alcoholic saying that they like going to the pub because social interaction is good for their mental health, and then the market starts to crow about ‘choice’.
Again, its a matter of raising this time and time again until they get it.
Thanks
Repitition is essential
The issue though isnt really the drugs companies its a political one.
Drugs Companies will come up with drugs to treat a range of diseases because they see a commercial opportunity in doing so.
Its the politicians who need to take the public health initiatives to tackle disease and who are I assume to a greater or lesser extent in the pockets both of those that cause disease and who make money from treating it. Worse still I suppose they are not even taking money from them but still incapable of seeing what is happening.
Wasn’t it Goldman Sachs that told one of the drug companies that finding cures what not a good business model?
IMO, Goldman Sachs and their ilk are no better than the Sicilian Mafia.
Might an N. H. S./nationally owned and well state funded drugs organisation with obviously pressing welfare/decent longer life research and product help us?
With such “root” competition for the commercial pharmaceuticals might we expose/diminish the fantasy “twig” competition between finance motivated commercial pharmaceuticals?
Alas, might it be that privatisation, with its attack on the mixed economy, has provided a bonanza time for cartels?
Thank you and well said, Steve.
This is why big pharma, domestic and international, was part of the effort to take down Corbyn.
Was going to post that! One of the great policies fully supported by members (another is electoral reform).
So true and so obvious. But its rarely, if ever discussed – except by you Richard
The corruption must leak back into academic research – via research funded directly by the companies or indirectly by government- captured research councils.
The world is crying out for new antibiotics – but pharma wont do it for the reasons you note – no profit.
I have never understood why there isn’t some kind of non profit public research and development company – maybe under the UN – like WHO which could do whats necessary .
As your commentators say – its a political problem – and clearly , big pharma wouldnt want a public international non profit developing cures.
In the USA, you either pay for your treatment, or die.
400,000 Americans go bankrupt every year because they can not pay their medical bills.
Profit before people.
Thank you and well said, Ian.
The son of one of dad’s friends / former comrades lives in California, lost his job and went bankrupt with medical bills. The parents here had to help.
An acquaintance in US contracted throat cancer two years ago; his wife has an aggressive form of Parkinsons and is now developing dementia. They are in their late 60s.
He realised the financial reality of their situation and downsized from their large large house releasing nearly $1 million.
He has had numerous problems both from chemo side effects and other growths.
That 1 million is now virtually gone; when he needs to visit the ER he panics about how to pay for it.
He has raised nearly $100k on a GoFundMe (he has a small public profile) but that is nearly gone.
Medication costs are eye wateringly higher than here.
Another friend tells me “we are all one serious illness away from bankruptcy”.
I wish people would realise that this is where we are heading…
Agreed
Glucose Goddess – Jessie Inchauspé – http://www.glucosegoddess.com
Annoyingly her “free resource” of a 1-page printable PDF requires you to provide email, first name and country. So free as in beer but not free as in speech.
I bought the book, don’t bother. You can do it yourself by reading labels and cooking from scratch without the need for exotic or trendy items.
If you know the theory, you can
Thanks for that informative lead. I put ‘YouTube Glucose Goddess’ into a Google search and discovered several worthwhile videos including this one with the Glucose Goddess and Steven Bartlett entitled: Glucose Goddess: The 10 Glucose Hacks!
In this video the Glucose Goddess exposes the new weight loss ‘miracle injections’ for exactly what they do and the inherent dangers of using them, like loss of muscle mass. She offers far less toxic alternative strategies for controlling food cravings to lose weight. She also reinforces your claims about the problems caused by addictive junk food, explained in a way that is easily understood and memorable for ordinary people. Her very simplistic format manages to get across facts she has uncovered strong supporting scientific evidence for.
In the video Steven Bartlett quoted a post he had found online that really resonated with me, so I want to highlight it here:
“Sugar in a baby’s brain is called ADHD
Sugar in an adult’s brain is called Dementia and Alzheimers
Sugar in your eyes is called Glaucoma
Sugar in your teeth is called Cavities
Sugar in your skin is called Aging
Sugar in your sleep is called Insomnia
Sugar in your blood is called Diabetes
Sugar on Wall Street is called a Billion Dollar Industry!”
I thought that was ‘right on the money’ if you can forgive the pun.
Much to agree with
I can also recommend:
Eat Smart: Secrets of the Glucose Goddess (Channel 4)
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/eat-smart-secrets-of-the-glucose-goddess
Thanks
I’m astounded that so many casual proponents of privatisation miss this essential point.
It makes no business sense to cure people when treating them is your income!
Thank you and well said, John.
Some people refuse to think and just swallow corporate BS.
Look up the anti acne drug Accutane (Isotretinoin): to date it has been officially recognised as playing a role in the deaths of 104 young people who just wanted clear skin. Thousands more have suffered life changing side effects including severe depression, anxiety, psychosis, chronic fatigue, digestive problems, sexual dysfunction and stunted growth.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6448cd0a529eda00123b047d/Isotretinoin-final-CHM-report-26April2023.pdf
Isotretinoin is a chemotherapy drug which they just happened to notice cleared up the acne of cancer patients. That is literally the extent of the science behind it. The scientist who invented the drug completely disassociated himself from it upon learning that it was being used to treat acne. He likened it to a nuclear weapon being used to crack a nut.
Stricter guidelines have been issued but astonishingly dermatologists continue to argue that it is safe for *most* people – that is, they recognised that it represents a catastrophic risk to some patients but consider the overall benefits to be worth it. For this reason it has been likened to playing Russian roulette.
A long time ago in another life, someone jokingly said, “Get into dermatology my lad. Patients very rarely get cured, and there are no night calls. You can make a comfortable living!”
That philosophy seems to be taking over in the outsourced NHS and big Pharma, and not forgetting, the racket that is alternative “medicine” and health foods.
You know a dermatologist
Big Pharma is not interested in finding cures. It is interested in fabulous profits. We conflate the provision (sale) of medicines by the pharmaceutical industry with the provision of healthcare. That is utterly wrong.
Drug trials are done by pharmaceutical companies and there are no independent trials. Many companies have been found to “weight” their submissions to regulators, like the FDA and the MHRA, by excluding results which do not support their product. Purdue Pharmaceuticals deliberately lied about the addictive nature of OxyCodone, the opiate largely responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US. The Sackler family which owned Purdue, and is worth billions, withdrew their wealth and put it offshore prior to the prosecutions brought against them. Eli Lilly promoted Prozac despite the adverse effects found in the trials. It has made them trillions of dollars.
Universities teaching medicine – particularly psychiatry – in the US are largely funded by drug companies. “Ghost” signatories – where prominent psychiatrists allow their name to be used on “academic” papers by drug companies despite never reading them – are a daily occurrence.
“Conflict of Interest” statements are worthless. They do not indicate that a psychiatrist, for example, has not been influenced by his funders; they simply state who they receive money from. Signing one does not somehow remove the influence which that money has had.
I can’t really see any other way of fixing this than by legislatively nationalising medical pharma and making the research and production of medicines a, (non-profit, non-revenue centric), public sector function.
Doing that would invert the economic problem, because it would be very much in the state’s and nation’s interest to cure illness instead of maintaining it and it would be very much in the state’s interest and the nation’s interest to invest in curative research and, as a side effect, it would be very much in politicians’ interest to cure and prevent illness.
I also imagine that if one nation did this successfully, then there would rapidly be a large number of emulator nations and that that would remove a global economic scourge.
The argument raised against it, (apart from the mythical efficiency benefits of private enterprises), would be that the state could not afford to buy out the corporations; but they could. Quite apart from the fact that the nation can afford what it is able to do, the state could value them on the basis of what the state is prepared to pay, just as it values property it wants to acquire to provide real estate to create SEZs, near-imaginary high speed railways, etc. And that valuation, if it were based on what the corporations would be worth in a curative environment in which illnesses were eliminated, instead of the present one in which disease is maintained for profit, might not actually be that massively large, because if you removed the profit and dividend expectations associated with the deliberate persistence of the presence of curable diseases, the worth of big medical pharma might be expected to take something of a dive.
After all, why should an industry whose purported raison d’etre is to cure illness be valued and made profitable on the basis that it will work to avoid curing illness so that it can profit from maintaining it?
Perhaps we should all be very vocally campaigning for this. It seems to me to make economic and social sense as a proposition.