Ben Goldacre is a young medical doctor in the United Kingdom
who is campaigning to end the abuses practiced by big pharmaceutical companies
so patients will get better-quality health care.
His book, Bad Pharma, is shocking.
I can't help but speculate that the abuses also apply to livestock and poultry medicines these same companies have developed, promote and market. Because human lives are not at stake, the abuses may, indeed, be even more egregious.
The book is a detailed, if somewhat repetitive, catalogue of
the many ways that pharmaceutical companies have cheated to cut their costs,
increase their sales and make more billions of dollars.
They cheat on the trials they conduct, they cheat by failing
to report the results of trials when they don’t like the results, they cheat by
paying ghost writers to prepare research papers favourable to their sales
campaigns, then pay some researcher to put his name on the paper so it can be
published by a respectable scientific journal.
They hide evidence of the terrible side effects of some of
their drugs.
They spend billions on sales representatives who visit
doctors, trying to persuade them to prescribe their pills. They offer petty
bribes, such as pens and office gizmos; they pay bigger bribes such as free
trips to conventions; they hire doctors to make favourable speeches at those
conventions.
There is enough dissembling (misleading people without
telling any lies) in this industry to garner billions in undeserved profits,
all at considerable risk to the health and welfare of people.
Goldacre is angry, but he’s doing something about it.
This is a book that every medical doctor, including your
doctors, ought to read. It is definitely a book that every health minister in
Canada ought to read, re-read and thoroughly digest; it would save billions and
many lives if they did something to correct the abuses.
I wish there were a similarly bold and investigative veterinarian to blow whistles on behalf of Canadian farmers.
