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Quotes about Pharmaceutical Industry from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Bruce Psaty and Drummond Rennie said in a JAMA editorial, "Medical research, even if it is conducted by the pharmaceutical industry, is not solely a commercial enterprise designed to maximize personal gain or company profits. The responsible conduct of medical research involves a social duty and a moral responsibility that transcends quarterly business plans or the changing of chief executive officers." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"The message I would like you to take home from this section of the book is that illnesses such as FM, CFS, TMD, or IBS are no longer "invisible" to researchers, whether they work in academia or in the pharmaceutical industry. That industry understands that fatigue and pain—whether localized to the mouth or the gut or widespread—are very common and need attention. They are responding to that need, but the process of identifying a molecule that may work and then being sure it does work with limited side effects is a lengthy one. In the meantime, you have this book and your doctors to help you." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.)

"Plus, there's constant pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to prescribe creams, drugs, and other "remedies." The problem is muddied further by the fact that there isn't a perfect correlation between diet and acne—some people can eat crap all day long and have perfect skin and others eat quite well and still have outbreaks. "Acne sufferers are not a homogenous group," says my friend Richard Fried, M.D., Ph.D., author of Healing Adult Acne. That said, there is overwhelming evidence— both clinical and theoretical—that diet is a huge contributor to acne." - Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S., The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth about What Treatments Work and Why (Get the book.)

"Conclusion making Sense of mind-body medicine -wj- Jre live in a world where scientists have mapped the human genome, where the pharmaceutical industry is a multibillion-dollar business, and where people look to the brain sciences to illuminate everything from schizophrenia to shyness. Reductionist medicine, it would seem, has triumphed. Nevertheless, this book has been all about demonstrating that there is more to say—much more. In March 2007, I conducted an internet search on Amazon.com using several keywords." - Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (Get the book.)

"In 2006, the return on revenues for the pharmaceutical industry was 20 percent, making it the second most profitable industry in America.7 By contrast, the profit margin of the construction industry was 2 percent and the automotive industry 1 percent. As is typically the case, these companies made more profit than they spent on research and development. It's only in the pharmaceutical or the oil industries that a 20 percent profit margin would be considered a slump. Kurt Vonnegut identified an enduring truth when he wrote in Cat's Cradle: "The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) "Carl Elliott, physician, bio-ethicist, and author of Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, wrote in 2003: "The pharmaceutical industry is now the most profitable industry in America, with 18 percent annual profit margins, and its most profitable class of product is the antidepressant drugs."9 Which would mean that antidepressants have been the most profitable product in the most profitable industry in the most profitable country in the world. Psychiatric drugs are the number-one therapeutic category among the world's top two hundred prescription medicines." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) "The New York Times has stated baldly that the pharmaceutical industry "often gets what it asks for from Congress and the executive branch."29 For example, through such lobbying efforts, the length of the patent life of brand-name drugs—that is, the period when the rights to (and profits from) the drugs are exclusively owned by the company that developed them—increased from around eight years in 1980 to about fourteen years in 2000. The extension of those patent lives has been critical to the industry, leading to untold billions of dollars in additional profits.30 Where to begin?" - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"He said he wanted to "end the uncertainty" that had "plagued both consumers and industry" about the use of television ads. The pharmaceutical industry, the ad agencies on Madison Avenue, and the owners of television stations across the country welcomed a new heyday. And Dr. Friedman soon left the agency. In 1998, President Clinton nominated Dr. Jane Henney to be the next commissioner of the FDA, and Dr. Friedman resigned the next year to become a senior vice president at Searle, a subsidiary of Monsanto, which had just introduced a new pain pill called Celebrex." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"With therapies more acceptable to the public, subsidies from wealthy foundations, the support of the developing pharmaceutical industry, and political savvy and legislation in its favor, conventional medicine was able to restrict the use of unorthodox doctors, midwives, herbalists, and others and gain a virtual monopoly on the health-care system. Fortunately, alternative medicine and naturopathic medicine have seen a rebirth in the last 15 to 20 years, and especially in the last 5." - Tori Hudson, N.D., Women's Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine: Alternative Therapies and Integrative Medicine for Total Health and Wellness (Get the book.)

"Since 1980, the pharmaceutical industry has consistently ranked as the most profitable in the United States In 2002, worldwide prescription sales were about $400 billion, half of which come from the United States. In 1995, 2.12 billion prescriptions were filled in the United States; by 2002 that number had increased dramatically, almost 50%, to 3.14 billion, which comes to more than ten prescriptions per person! In 2002, about 10 million children took prescription medication for chronic conditions—that is, for three months or longer." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"Nonmalignant pain and fatigue are finally coming into the purview of the pharmaceutical industry. However, drug companies are notoriously secretive about discussing their ideas for treating any disease because of patent issues and their chances of giving leads to another company. It's hard for anyone, including researchers like me, to know what other drugs are already in trials, but the two Web sites listed here may tip you off to new and early studies. Finally, I wanted to discuss an entirely new class of drugs that is under the investigative microscope for treating fatigue and pain." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.) "Therefore the pharmaceutical industry has invested many millions of dollars to develop cytokines—or substances that neutralize the actions of cytokines—for use as drugs. Currently, cytokines or cytokine blockers are used in the treatment of autoimmune and virally related diseases including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and hepatitis. And researchers are working hard to identify other diseases that could be improved by manipulating immune activity." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.) "Specifically, it has proven successful in relieving both widespread FM-type pain as well as the neuropathic, burning pain that occurs in feet and hands due to the effect of diabetes on peripheral nerves, and it does this whether or not depression is present. The pharmaceutical industry realizes that pain is a huge market, and the value of the drugs in this class in relieving FM pain has spurred other companies to work on developing new drugs. You, the consumer, will benefit from this change in attention." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.)

"Unfortunately, because the pharmaceutical industry has created so much marketing hype about a woman's need for estrogen replacement as a fountain-of-youth treatment for menopause, most medical practitioners and healthcare consumers are misinformed and/or confused. The consequence for millions of people is that the very real condition of estrogen dominance is often overlooked or, worse, misdiagnosed and mistreated. For instance, consider the case of a woman I'll call Sylvia. Sylvia, a thirty-six-year-old divorced mother of three, came to my office six months after moving to Florida from Oregon." - C. W. Randolph, M.D., From Belly Fat to Belly FLAT: How Your Hormones Are Adding Inches to Your Waistline and Subtracting Years from Your Life (Get the book.)

"In 2003, the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical industry discussed the possibility of studying the use of fig plants as a treatment for anthrax. were deemed damned, disgusting, dangerous, or diabolic. The sufferers paid for their "sins" by being stigmatized and socially isolated. Even birthmarks were considered a bad omen, and those who had them were considered evil. Physicians and others also read skin not only for indicators of evil but for signs of illness as well." - Joan Liebmann-Smith, Ph. D., and Jacqueline Nardi Egan, Body Signs: From Warning Signs to False Alarms...How to Be Your Own Diagnostic Detective (Get the book.)

"During the same period the pharmaceutical industry was reportedly taxed at a rate of only 16.2% (ref. cited). Most important, the drug companies enjoy seventeen-year government-granted monopolies on their new drugs—that is, patent protection. Once a drug is patented, no one else may sell it, and the drug company is free to charge whatever the traffic will bear.20 Our tax dollars are used to make the pharmaceutical industry more profitable." - T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health (Get the book.)

"Seven percent of authors admitted that their relationship with the pharmaceutical industry influenced their writing of guidelines, but 19 percent thought their co-authors were influenced.89 The blame here, in my view, ultimately lies with the doctors and the universities, not the big drug companies. For all their tawdry manipulations, the drug companies are only doing what corporations are supposed to do in this system—make a profit at virtually any cost. Unlike the doctors, the drug companies have taken no Hippocratic oath and generally make few claims to act in the public's best interest." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"For the pharmaceutical industry this notion created a dream situation of finding a huge segment of the normal population to whom it could sell its pills. No matter that there were no controlled trials to support industry claims. This idea was very popular for many years, before real controlled trials showed that HRT was very bad and had caused the deaths of tens of thousands of women as well as other problems. Hormone replacement therapy involves replacing the body's natural hormones after normal or surgically induced menopause." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.) "This naturally stirred up a firestorm of controversy, with the pharmaceutical industry arguing that NICE was advocating withholding medication from patients with severe Alzheimer's to save money for the British health-care system. In response to the controversy about whether patients with severe Alzheimer's should get medications, a study of 248 patients with severe Alzheimer's disease living in nursing homes was performed. Patients were randomized to take donepezil or placebo for six months." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"Overall, the pharmaceutical industry has created a market for its products in the United States in which ordinary economics no longer apply. Patients do not get the best medicines for their ailments at the best prices. Instead, America's medicine market is one where more competition can mean prices will rise rather than fall. It is also a market in which patients suffer when they get the wrong drug because the industry's powerful promotional forces have distorted the available medical information." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"Development of safe and effective drugs, such as a small-molecule, a-MSH-like, agonist for the melanocortin receptor to increase satiety, or stimulators of the expression of UCP2 or UCP3 to enhance energy expenditure, are certainly goals of the pharmaceutical industry [99]. Specific pharmaceutical treatment of other single-gene obesities will have to await development of drugs targeted further along the pathway of the mutated gene. Lifestyle changes that may promote weight loss and improve metabolic fitness and quality of life should be recommended [100]." - Ann M. Coulston and Carol J. Boushey, Nutrition in the Prevention and Treatment of Disease (Get the book.)

"Drugs contain no life, and are therefore incapable of creating Hie; in fact, they are often harmful. The pharmaceutical industry bombards the public via the media, urging people to "ask your doctor if this drug is right for you." Yet the same advertisements list multiple possible harmful side effects that may be experienced. Meanwhile, there are increasing reports of illness and deaths caused by certain prescription drugs." - Ron Garner, Conscious Health: A Complete Guide to Wellness Through Natural Means (Get the book.) "The medical system is inseparably linked to the pharmaceutical industry and the use of drugs. The contradiction is that, even though drugs will make a healthy person sick, we expect a sick person to become healthy by taking drugs. It doesn't make sense. It is interesting to note that while society as a whole perceives illicit drugs to be dangerous, we have been conditioned to accept the constant and extended use of pharmaceutical drugs as acceptable and supportive to the health of our bodies. The truth is—all drugs are toxic." - Ron Garner, Conscious Health: A Complete Guide to Wellness Through Natural Means (Get the book.) "Homeopathy was widely practiced in the 1800s, with successes greatly exceeding allopathic medicine, which used combative drug therapy. The pharmaceutical industry and the American Medical Association squeezed homeopathy out of the health practice picture in the early 1900s by discrediting it and providing financial support to only those medical colleges that offered instruction based on pharmaceuticals. In the last decade, however, homeopathy has made a comeback, especially among naturopathic physicians." - Ron Garner, Conscious Health: A Complete Guide to Wellness Through Natural Means (Get the book.)

"You can find a full list of the studies investigating the phenomenon of pharmaceutical industry influence on doctors' attitudes and behavior at www.nofreelunch.org.) The Public Library of Science journal Medicine in 2007 published a damning paper called "Following the Script: How Drug Reps Make Friends and Influence Doctors." In it, coauthor Shahram Ahari—a former pharmaceutical sales rep for Eli Lilly—wrote: "It's my job to figure out what a physician's price is." - Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S., The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth about What Treatments Work and Why (Get the book.)

"Needless to say, the pharmaceutical industry is exploiting a previously untapped market of millions of older adults with sexual difficulties as well as, and even more important, millions more younger men who have no or barely significant problems with sexual function but who use ED drugs recreationally in order to last longer during intercourse." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"There is a related problem. The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the scientific process that supposedly underlies their existence. And we, the people, or at least our government, have let them do it! The very clinical trials which are crucial in establishing a new drug's efficacy are designed, carried out, and interpreted not by independent investigators, but by the very drug companies that have an enormous vested interest in the outcomes. The government agency that is supposed to regulate the industry is the FDA. It has not done its job, especially in recent years." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"Drug companies make something we want and need: medicines that promise to protect us from pain and illness, that safeguard our ability to keep our routines at work and at home. The pharmaceutical industry can claim for its products seemingly magical benefits, from making us look better to literally saving our lives. Behind these magical claims lies a complex product whose merits are not easily evaluated by scientists, much less consumers." - Katharine Greider, The Big Fix: How the pharmaceutical industry Rips Off American Consumers (Get the book.) "Over the last couple of decades, the pharmaceutical industry has consolidated dramatically and has garnered a larger and larger share of its profits from a relatively small number of new, high-margin "blockbuster" products. To create the outsized sales figures characteristic of a blockbuster, a drug typically has to be sold at a high price, for "chronic" or long-term use, to a vast number of people. This can rarely be achieved without very intensive promotional efforts." - Katharine Greider, The Big Fix: How the pharmaceutical industry Rips Off American Consumers (Get the book.)

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