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| Hippocratic Oath has been shoved under the mat? |
I-Lawsuit noted recently “Medical
professionals like doctors and pharmacists prescribe to the Hippocratic
Oath before starting their practice.
The oath is
believed to have been written by ancient Greek Philsopher Hippocrates
and dates back to 5th Century BC. When translated notable parts include
to, “keep patients from harm and injustice”, and to practice medicine
in both “purity and holiness”.
But are they keeping that Oath?
Undoubtedly
there are more doctors who care about the quality of patient care over
personal profit, but what about the professionals who are willing to
take bribes to endorse a product?
In-between doctors and pharmaceutical companies are the little-known championers of the pharmaceutical industry- the drug reps.
According
to Glassdoor the average Pharma sales rep made more than $80,000 last
year while the average biotech rep pulled in $152,000 dollars a year- 6
times more than the average American citizen.
Pharma
representatives rarely have any formal education in science with the
majority holding a BA in the liberal arts or business.
A
former rep for Eli Lily revealed that he was the only member of his
team with a background in science, and that the majority of his
coworkers were “former cheerleaders and ex-models”.
Base
salaries begin at $60,000 for new reps and $150,000 for a seasoned
biotech representative- but perks don’t stop there. Johnson &
Johnson’s reps celebrated on internet forumswhen they were given a
chance to partake in a new fleet of Audi A3’s, with a MSRP of over
$27,000.
With commission ranging from 10-15%, a company
car, free gas and bank account the job is undeniably sexy, but pharma
reps aren’t the only ones who are benefitting from Big Pharma’s
generosity.
Doctors who endorse their products
routinely receive gifts as well. Medical giant Medtronic shocked the
media when it was discovered they had bribed a team of 13 doctors $210
million over the course of 15 years to post favorable studies of the
off-label use of their INFUSE bone graft.
Many patients
who received the bone grafts became paralyzed or died from
complications stemming from the uncontrollable bone growth.
Consequently
large drug companies have grown "wealthy beyond imagination" through
blockbuster drugs that depended on government-funded research—and by
committing fraud.
Elisabeth Warren, a Democratic
Senator recently noted that over the past 10 years, some of the US's
wealthiest drug companies—those that capitalize on government research
to generate billions of dollars in revenues through the sale of
blockbuster drugs—have found another way to boost profits".
Warren
said, in a prepared text of her speech at an event sponsored by the
health care advocacy group Families USA. "They've been caught defrauding
Medicare and Medicaid, withholding critical safety information about
their drugs, marketing their drugs for uses that aren't approved, and
giving doctors kickbacks for writing prescriptions for their drugs."
Democrats
have largely laid off the pharmaceutical industry since the legislative
debate over the Affordable Care Act, when drugmakers agreed to support
the bill as long as it didn't include certain policies. And Warren—whose
home state is home to several large drug companies—praised the
industry's scientific advances.
But, said Warren, drug companies paid roughly $13 billion in settlements with the federal government
between 2007 and 2012. "That doesn't happen without serious wrongdoing."
After 1978 Bayer (a German Company) and other pharmaceutical companies produced Factor VIII and IX.
The
product was designed for hemophiliacs, people who suffer from a genetic
disorder whose blood can not clot to stave bleeding. As a result, even a
minor cut could cause them to bleed out and lose dangerous levels of
blood. Factor VII is harvested from the blood plasma of
non-hemophiliacs, but to purportedly to cut costs Bayer harvested blood
from pools of “high risk” individuals.
This included:
prison populations, intravenous drug users and blood from clinics with a
large amount of homosexual donors. Federal law also forbids the use of
blood from an individual with a history of viral hepatitis- but Bayer
and other companies failed to enact strict prerequisites for blood
farming. As a result, thousands of hemophiliacs died from the HIV-
tainted blood plasma.
Senator Warren said, "it seems
that the biggest drug companies are increasingly playing by a different
set of rules than everyone else," Warren said. "The government has
kicked thousands of small and medium-sized physician practices out of
the Medicare program for fraud, but not one of these major drug
companies has ever been kicked out. The government convicts hundreds of
people of health care fraud every year, but not one of these major drug
company cases has even gone to trial."
Warren in a bill
proposed to the Senate wants pharmaceutical companies to fund more of
the basic research conducted by the National Institutes of Health. Many
blockbuster drugs do stem, at least in part, from NIH research.
Under
Warren's proposal, "the biggest and most successful drug companies"
would have to contribute to the NIH's budget whenever they settle
criminal accusations with the federal government. In addition to the
fines that companies already pay, they would have to contribute 1
percent of their annual profits to the NIH for five years.
"It's
like a swear jar: Whenever a huge drug company that is generating
enormous profits as a result of federal research investments gets caught
breaking the law—and wants off the hook—it has to put some money in the
jar to help fund the next generation of medical research," Warren said.
If
such a policy had been in place over the past five years, NIH would
have seen a budget bump of about $6 billion—or 20 percent—per year, she
said.
In the meantime, however, in the US, the boundaries between the drug companies, FDA, and doctors have became
increasingly blurred. FDA officials sometimes move to jobs in the
pharmaceutical industry, which means they may not want to burn their
bridges with industry.
The same FDA officials who approve the drugs are
responsible for monitoring them after they are on the market, which
gives them an obvious disincentive to say that the drugs they earlier
certified as safe were now unsafe.
Finally, the FDA gets input from
outside advisory panels made up of doctors who are experts in their
fields. Most of these doctors receive payments as consultants, research
grants and support for travel to conferences from drug companies.
In
some cases, the doctors are working as paid consultants to the same
companies whose drugs are coming up for approval by their advisory
committees.
The US is the only country in the world where you can turn on the TV and
have an announcer tell you to go ‘ask your doctor’ for a drug.
Doctors
often will give medications to patients even if they don’t think they
need it. For example, one study showed that 54% of the time doctors will
prescribe a specific brand and type of medication if patients ask for
it.
Drugs on the average cost twice as much in the US
than in Canada or Europe . US Dr's also prescribe more drugs to their
"patients" than any other nation in the world
The argument drug manufacturers make for the high cost of their
products is that the money supports
research and development of new life-saving medicine. And they also say
that expensive advertising is needed not to sell drugs, but to educate
doctors and patients. Indeed, a whopping 80% of their budgets is used
for marketing and advertising, certainly not education.
Some things definitely are broken and need fixing in the US Pharmaceutical and Medical Industry.
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