Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda
The drug business is the most profitable in all of capitalism, journalist Law notes in this scattershot indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, but what do consumers get for the money shoveled into it? A dwindling stream of exorbitantly expensive new drugs, she contends, most of them "me-too" competitors, patent-prolonging reformulations of existing products or marginally effective nostrums for diffuse complaints; vast marketing budgets to cajole consumers into demanding-and doctors into prescribing-unnecessary medications; biased scientific studies and corrupted or intimidated researchers; a regulatory system lobbied and suborned into allowing unsafe and ineffective drugs on the market; and a society that automatically pops a pill for every discontent, real or imagined. Law offers a comprehensive, if disorganized, rehash of a now familiar but still timely portrait of drug companies' perfidy and greed, studded with case studies of firestorms like the Vioxx scandal and the controversy over the possibly deadly side-effects of anti-depressants. She's on shakier ground when she dilates her case into a brief against conventional medicine and in favor of a murky "holistic" regimen of "complementary"-i.e. alternative-therapies that harmonize with "the body's natural intelligence" and exploit the "untapped healing power" of the placebo effect. Law's flirtations with fringe conceits weaken an otherwise serviceable science-based critique of the drug industry.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.