Quotes about Drug Industry from the world's top natural health / natural living authors
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 "Ire a t m e n t s
One of the drug industry's most charming commercials features a healthy and glamorous-looking sixty-something actress who confides to viewers that she has gotten shorter and that her doctor told her she might have bone fractures. Then she smiles and cheerfully advises women to see their doctors if they have gotten shorter. She also says that osteoporosis may be making women's bones brittle. The words Actonel (risedronate) float across the screen, and a male voice fires off the typical list of possible side effects, caveats, and contraindications."- J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the drug industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.) "In response to efforts to regulate the content of TV ads for drugs, Billy Tauzin, president of the Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the lobbying organization for the drug companies, was quoted by the New York Times (May 17, 2005) as having said, "We don't make ice cream or handbags or automobiles, we make products that save lives" ("Drug Industry Is Said to Work on Ad Code"). The argument drug manufacturers make for the high cost of their products, which has become an old saw by now, is that the money supports research and development of new life-saving meds." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the drug industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.) |
 "In the drug industry generally, marketing dominates science. The drug companies consistently spend almost double on marketing what they do on research.54 As omnipresent as drug ads on TV have become, expenditures on advertising make up only a very small portion of the marketing budget. Up to 90 percent of the marketing budgets go directly to manipulating the source—directly toward influencing the doctors themselves—in the form of drug samples, lecture fees, and "educational" grants."- Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) |
 "The modern drug industry, as we know it today, was created out of herbal medicine. (The word "drug" itself actually comes from the old German word "droge," which was used to describe the process of "drying" herbs in preparation for use.) The apparent motive behind the development of pharmaceuticals was to create purer, more potent, and more effective "medicines." Unfortunately, as we now know, the net result was, in many cases, just the opposite—less effective medicines with a whole range of deadly side effects. Pharmaceuticals, however, do offer one major advantage over herbs."- Jon Barron, Lessons from The Miracle Doctors: A Step-by-Step Guide to Optimum Health and Relief from Catastrophic Illness (Get the book.) |
| "And they are always, hands down, the best-dressed people in the hospital," writes Carl Elliott, longtime observer of the drug industry.63 A common practice is to recruit future drug salespeople from the cheerleading ranks of major colleges. "Pharma Babes," they're called by doctors behind closed doors. T. Lynn Williamson, a "cheering advisor" at the University of Kentucky, says he regularly gets calls from recruiters looking to hire women from his ranks as drug sales representatives. "They watch to see who's graduating. They don't ask what the major is," Wlliamson says." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) |
 "But laws can be changed and we must encourage our politicians to stand up to the powerful drug industry just as we exhort our doctors to do the same.
Given that the pharmaceutical industry is supposedly a prime example of the success of global capitalism, driven by a competitive market for drugs, why do we not see more price competition? Some aggressive competition occurs in the closed-door negotiations between industry and such large purchasers of drugs as health maintenance and other organizations."- Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.) "At stake is the credibility of specialists, who must stand up for their patients and not answer to the powerful empire of the drug industry. Why do drugs cost four dollars a day for the individual consumer? Why doesn't our government get to negotiate lower prices through Medicare as is done through the Veterans Administration, for example? The simple answer is that landmark legislation—the Medicare Bill Part D—was passed by Congress in 2003 to prevent this and to ensure that millions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on drugs." - Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.) |
 "Thimerosal was tacked onto the claim, one of her attorneys said, after news accounts in 1999 of the Centers for Disease Control's request that the drug industry stop selling vaccines containing the preservative.
Perhaps one in 500,000 children who receives the MMR vaccination suffers a severe brain inflammation that can lead to lifelong mental disability—presumably including autism. The vaccine court has awarded several dozen such children over the past two decades."- Gary Null and Amy McDonald, The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing (Get the book.) "Peter Braughman, a neurologist, points out that nearly twenty years ago psychiatrist Matthew Dumont suggested that the profession "give up its coquettish claims to psychotherapy and openly declare itself an arm of the drug industry." He says it need not fear an indignant response from a federal government that defines private profit as its reason for being. Ritalin and Prozac are two cases in point. "In 1995," Dr." - Gary Null and Amy McDonald, The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing (Get the book.) "Sherry Rogers of Sarasota, Florida, so eloquently sums up: "The drug industry clearly owns medicine. That is the bottom line. With the HMOs, medicine has clearly become a business. Every disease has become a drug deficiency. Aspirin has become a Motrin deficiency. Cardiac arrhythmia has become a calcium channel blocker deficiency. Hypertension has become a high blood pressure pill deficiency and depression has become a Prozac deficiency. All of the thought has been removed from medicine. It becomes a no-brainer." - Gary Null and Amy McDonald, The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing (Get the book.) "Many practitioners, myself included, reserve our severest criticism for the drug industry, using the case of Ritalin as a prime example. In 2005, more than 31 million prescriptions were filled for stimulant ADHD medications in the United States, including about 10 million for Ritalin. Fueled by the magic bullet notion that popping a pill can solve a problem, sales of Ritalin and related drugs have soared more than 500 percent since ADHD became an official diagnostic category in 1980. Ritalin does provide temporary answers?" - Gary Null and Amy McDonald, The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing (Get the book.) |
| "FDA's Counsel Accused of Being Too Close To drug industry, - Brent Hoadley, Ph.D., Too Profitable to Cure (Get the book.) |
 "If Salzman had described all of his group's ties to the drug industry, he would have needed three hours rather than three minutes.
After the advisory committee announced its conclusions, president-elect Carolyn Robinowitz of the American Psychiatric Association weighed in with the media. She decried the proposed black-box warning for young adults, and declared, "Black-box warnings give the impression to prospective patients that these are dangerous medications that can cause death."23 But that's what all the research and the hearings were about."- Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.) |
 "Meanwhile, say critics, the drug industry is designing biased clinical trials, recruiting compliant academics to run them, controlling the analysis and write-up of the results, and then using freebies to help peddle its slanted results to gullible doctors. The industry has also engaged in the says. "I was at a seminar with Bob Goodman, founder of No Free Lunch. He gave a talk about pharmaceutical company influence. There was stony silence at the end of his presentation. No applause."- Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) |
 "Parke-Davis and the rest of the drug industry also used the prescription data to pay bonuses to sales representatives who succeeded in getting doctors to write more prescriptions. At some companies, the average bonus paid to each salesperson was more than his or her salary. The lure of bonuses of tens of thousands of dollars pushed the industry's sales forces to do whatever it took to win over physicians. The companies might have been training their salespeople in what they could legally do under the law, but they gave them great financial incentives to break it."- 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.) |
 "BEGIN BOX]
Meet Your Local "Penetration Enhancers"
For decades, the drug industry has used a group of ingredients known as "Penetration Enhancers" to decrease the resistance of the skin and increase drug absorption up to a hundredfold (26 ). In spite of possible hazards, the personal care industry still makes extensive use of penetration enhancers, as we've discussed in chapters 8 and 9. Penetration enhancers fall into four major categories: Gentle Detergents; Harsh Detergents; Hydroxy Acids; and the unrelated but much more hazardous Nanoparticle Ingredients.
1. Gentle Detergents."- Samuel S. Epstein, Randall Fitzgerald, Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Endanger Your Health . . . And What You Can Do about It (Get the book.) "ACS, because of its relationships with the cancer drug industry, as well as with the petrochemical and other polluting industries . As a previous director of the NCI, Dr. Samuel Broder, admitted, the NCI has become "what amounts to a governmental pharmaceutical company" (6 ). That mindset has contributed over the last four decades to the NCI's tendency to trumpet most every new "miracle" or "magic bullet" cancer drug as the latest evidence that the "tide is turning" in the cancer war. To make matters worse, the U.S." - Samuel S. Epstein, Randall Fitzgerald, Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Endanger Your Health . . . And What You Can Do about It (Get the book.) |
| "Watching their salaries stall, the doctors were easily seduced by the welcoming arms of the drug industry, where the money still flowed. They found they could significantly boost their bank accounts and upgrade their lifestyles by winning favor with a pharmaceutical sales representative and joining a company's payroll as a speaker, consultant, researcher, or adviser or by serving in all these functions at the same time.
The doctors most in demand could boost their incomes by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Dr." - 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.) |
 "By the time I entered private practice, the drug industry was already playing a significant role in "educating" doctors about new drugs. I had been in practice two years when I attended grand rounds at the local hospital, which was a lecture on pain control given by a faculty member from one of the Boston medical schools. I knew that his talk was drug company-supported, but given his academic position, I didn't think this would influence the content of his presentation."- John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "With tens of billions of dollars a year on the line for the drug industry, what was a mere $250,000? Perhaps the storm clouds were being actively seeded. Drug COfTlparties, government, doctors, patients, insurers. Health care costs keep rising, with no end in sight, and despite the myths about the excellence of our medical care, we are not realizing commensurate improvements in our health. The American health care system keeps edging ever closer to the breaking point." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "The letter, written in April 1999, was delivered at a time when pressure for a bill to provide prescription drug benefits to senior citizens was beginning to mount. The drug industry was jockeying for a bill that would enhance its bottom line by providing Medicare funds to purchase its drugs, while at the same time blocking the federal government from using purchasing power to negotiate lower prices (as Medicare has done so successfully with payments to doctors and hospitals)." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) |
| "This is a book about a great transformation in the prescription drug industry over the last twenty-five years. Once the most successful pharmaceutical companies were those with the brightest scientists searching for cures. Now the most profitable and powerful drugmakers are those with the most creative and aggressive marketers. The drug companies have become marketing machines, selling antidepressants like Paxil, pain pills like Celebrex, and heart medications like Lipitor with the same methods that Coca-Cola uses to sell Sprite and Procter 8c Gamble uses to sell Tide." - 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.) "The testing requirements of the 1938 law added a new urgency to the drug industry's search for academic scientists it could hire. As the companies invested even more money in research and laboratories, the American pharmaceutical industry was transformed from a group of chemical manufacturers that had disdained science to an industry that saw science as crucial to its survival. By the 1940s some fifty-eight thousand scientists, up from only a few thousand in the 1920s, worked in the industry's research laboratories." - 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.) |
| "The savvy Wall Street Journal commented that this is "a move likely to please the drug industry."29 Unfortunately, that pleasure will come at the expense of human lives.
More recently, a study commissioned by the FDA itself came out with similar conclusions to mine in March 2007.30 It lamented the culture of conflict, avoidance, and waste inside the FDA when it comes to tracking adverse drug reactions.
Few of the FDA's critics squarely face the stark reality that the FDA culture has become more concerned about protecting the drug companies than protecting the public." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.) "The answer lies partly in the greater power of the drug industry and its medical lackeys in America, and, in particular, the lavish spending of Upjohn in the maintenance of its self-avowed partnership with the American Psychiatric Association. In response to my criticism, in a letter published in The New York Times,5 the medical director of the American Psychiatric Association6 responded with a letter of his own defending the APA's actions in accepting a gift of 1.5 million dollars from Upjohn." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.) |
 "An example of a synthetic vitamin which is perpetrated as the real thing is ascorbic acid. The drug industry calls it vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is not vitamin C, but rather a fraction, the outside layer of the biologically utilizable vitamin C complex, as shown in Figure 16.1. i- ASCORBIC ACID -1
ASCORBICEN BIOFLAVINOID COMPLEXES
TYROSINAS E
P FACTORS K FACTORS J FACTORS
1- ASCORBIC ACID -1
Figure 16.1 Complete vitamin C complex
Likewise, alphatocopherol, which is sold as Vitamin E, is only part of the Vitamin E complex. As Richard Murray points out:
..."- Ron Garner, Conscious Health: A Complete Guide to Wellness Through Natural Means (Get the book.) |
 "This shift has not happened because of drug industry financial interests. "Medical doctors are caught between an intellectual rock and a corporate hard place; they are pawns in the huge medical industrial complex," he laments (Biology of Belief,?. 108).
Lipton says that the placebo effect, which involves healing due to sheer belief, is brushed off as a fluke in medical school, glossed over quickly so students can get to the real "tools" of modern medicine.
"This is a giant mistake," he explains. "- Susan E. Schenck, The Live Food Factor: The Comprehensive Guide to the Ultimate Diet for Body, Mind, Spirit & Planet (Get the book.) |
 "Because it can't be patented and sold for a profit this all-natural healing capacity has a negative effect on the modern drug industry but a very positive effect on everyone else.
Unfortunately for the drug industry the rate of positive responses to placebos have improved over the years as a result of better test design and the use of so-called active placebos which provide a detectable response unrelated to the problem. The better the placebo response the more difficult it is for new drugs to demonstrate effectiveness."- Alan E. Smith, UnBreak Your Health: The Complete Guide to Complementary & Alternative Therapies (Get the book.) |
 "Those responsible for ensuring passage of the prescription drug bill received lucrative jobs in the drug industry shortly after the bill became law. In addition to the $2.5 million annual salary landed by former Congressman Billy Tauzin from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, other key players were rewarded by the industry. CBS's Kroft reported:
John McManus, the staff director of the Ways and Means subcommittee on Health. Within a few months, he left Congress and started his own lobbying firm. Among his new clients were PhRMA, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Merck."- Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.) "Without exception, each one has explained to Congress and the media that FDA is beholden to the drug industry, that FDA views the industry as its client, and that FDA does the industry's bidding by approving drugs as safe when the evidence reveals them to be unsafe (even to point of condoning death and serious injury)." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.) |
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