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Quotes about Drug Sales from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Americans are responsible for almost half of the world's prescription drug sales,47 but the disparity is even greater when it comes to CNS (central nervous system) agents. In 2006, Americans—about 6 percent of the world's population—bought about two-thirds of the world's psychiatric and neurological drugs. In 2006, 66 percent of the global antidepressant market was accounted for by the United States.48 And in 2003 approximately 83 percent of the global market for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder medications was accounted for by the United States, and mainly by U.S. children." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) "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.64 When I was working in homeless shelters, I was shocked that these bubbly and perky drug reps (all women) would brave our gothic, cavernous, and squalid facilities for even two minutes with the psychiatrist who prescribed the drugs." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"Shadowing is a required part of the job of drug sales representatives, and while it involves being intimately involved in the therapy of a patient, former salespeople confirmed that there was no oath or directive protecting any patient confidences. Dr." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.) "Cheerleaders Pump Up Drug Sales"). Reps are sent into the field with a list of talking points to help them answer questions as well as packets of product-favorable articles and other material such as copies of expert consensus guidelines (created by their paid consultants) to leave with doctors. The critical information contained in these articles is often buried in tables without comment, and there are often conclusions that are not supported by the data in the papers, and I cite several examples of this throughout this book." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"A Global Index With drugs, the cost of establishing efficacy (estimated at about $1 billion for an average drug today) will be recovered from the "profits" derived from drug sales for the number of years for which patent protection prevents unfair competition. Neither recourse is usually available for foods or nutrients. Profit margins are low, and patent protection is limited or nonexistent. Thus, the food industry is precluded from funding the kinds of EBM-recommended tests needed to show population-level benefits. G." - Ann M. Coulston and Carol J. Boushey, Nutrition in the Prevention and Treatment of Disease (Get the book.)

"And Bill Steere, who turned Pfizer into the world's largest pharmaceutical company and a marketing powerhouse that others tried to imitate, was one of the industry's many top executives who began their careers as drug sales reps. The industry's own hiring statistics show its shift from research to marketing. Between 1995 and 2000 the number of marketing personnel at the large pharmaceutical companies in America increased by 59 percent to 87,810, according to surveys of the companies by the industry's trade group." - 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.)

"Reporting rates, which adjust for differences in the extent of each drug's utilization, reveal much higher ratios of hostility reports to drug sales for both triazolam and alprazolam than for other benzodiazepines with similar indications. The public health importance of these reactions lies in their severity, with occasionally lethal behavior unleashed, in the context of large population exposures as the popularity of both drugs continues to rise." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"The new drug was now accounting for one-third of all arthritis drug sales in the United States. I read on, but the letter was vague. It mentioned several routine warnings, including a potentially dangerous drug interaction with the blood thinner Coumadin and allergic reactions, and then went on to say that the FDA objected to marketing that "promoted Celebrex for unapproved uses, and made unsubstantiated comparative claims." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"Corey Davis, an analyst with JP Morgan, predicted in the Wall Street Journal that sleep drug sales could hit six billion dollars by 2008. Lunesta, said Davis, "could do for the insomnia market what Prozac did for depression." Meanwhile, the company's chief financial officer told investors, "It's a drug you can take again and again and again. The sky's the limit." Lunesta's TV spots and print advertisements were only the most visible aspect of the company's marketing campaign—and in many ways they represented not the beginning of the drug's launch but its culmination." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "She and her partner were careful not to make the dinner sound like a drug sales pitch to the other physicians they were inviting. "You don't say he's going to talk about Celebrex. You tell them he's talking about postsurgery knee pain." After a dozen or so of these dinners, Howard found she could no longer stand her job. She began to feel she was bribing doctors with gifts and expensive food and misleading them about the drugs she was touting. She'd lasted only nine months as a drug rep. For companies, the payoff for recruiting doctor-speakers can be spectacular." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"CONTROLLING THE DAMAGE Even when studies that do not support the use of a sponsor's product are published in medical journals, there is still a chance that well-funded marketing and public relations efforts will be able to protect drug sales. The Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attacks Trial (ALLHAT) study,* for instance, compared the effectiveness of four drugs in preventing complications from high blood pressure." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"To influence hearts and minds, Big Pharma has assembled an army of about one hundred thousand drug sales representatives, called detailers, whose job it is to push product directly to the MDs.57 The number of detailers has almost tripled in the last ten years, as did the spending on marketing directly to doctors over roughly the same period.58 "Unbeknownst to most doctors," writes the advocacy group the Center for Policy Alternatives, "drug detailers have access to prescriber reports that let them know— right down to the pill—if their sales pitches are successful." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"The regulatory costs of new drug approval are astronomical (over $860 million in 2004 dollars per drug44), thus limiting to a rarified few the right to participate in drug sales. The prior restraint on the right to make therapeutic claims is absolute, ensuring the pharmaceutical companies that their FDA-approved claims will experience no real competition. Benefiting from monopoly protection from governments all over the world, the pharmaceutical industry has amassed great wealth (over $286 billion in U.S." - Jonathan W. Emord, The Rise of Tyranny (Get the book.)

"This class of medications is one of the biggest-growing sectors in drug sales. Antipsychotic usage has shown a 10 to 20 percent rate of increase per year over the last few years and today sales of these drugs total about $12 billion a year. Traditionally such medications were reserved for psychosis, defined as an inability to distinguish what's real from what's imagined. Hearing voices and thinking that aliens are visiting your bedroom at night are examples of psychosis." - Mark Hyman MD, The UltraMind Solution: Fix Your Broken Brain by Healing Your Body First (Get the book.)

"Yes, but this is reality on planet psycho-pharma when the drug companies, in conjunction with the wizards of psychiatry, have tens of billions of dollars in drug sales on the line. Yes, apparently, the not walking or talking infants, whose brains quite literally still are developing, allegedly can be diagnosed with some mental illness requiring a psychiatric mind-altering drug as "treatment." Wouldn't one love to be a fly on the wall during that diagnosing session!" - Kelly Patricia O'Meara, Psyched Out: How Psychiatry Sells Mental Illness and Pushes Pills That Kill (Get the book.)

"Drug delivery people know the evidence shows that novel delivery expands drug sales time and again. In erectile dysfunction, for example, delivery skills have contributed to long-lasting 'weekender' versions and a stream of other improvements (sniffable, rub-on-able, inhalable, and so on) in the pipeline. When Viagra was first launched, the market figures stated confidently that as many as one in ten men couldn't get erect. Now, questionnaires, funded by the makers of all this largesse, put the figure at one in six, and rising." - Jacky Law, Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda (Get the book.)

"That meets the needs of those who want to increase drug sales, but it deceives more than it reveals truth. Trick Seven: Hire a For-Profit Company to Conduct Research Historically, much of the medical research was conducted and paid for by the federal government or by universities. Eventually drug companies began funding research at federal facilities and university laboratories. This made sense." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.) "There is even a formula that generally applies to drug advertising: Each dollar spent on advertising increases drug sales by $4. So when AstraZeneca spent $ 108 million in one year advertising its purple heartburn pill Prilosec, it increased profits by about $432 million.19 (As Prilosec was going off patent, promotional spending for its substitute "little purple pill" skyrocketed from these already lofty levels—which is another story. See Box #4-2, Would Your Physician Prescribe Nexium?) Why It Matters What does it matter if drug companies actively promote their drugs?" - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"IMS was the original pharmaceutical marketing firm; its main product is a huge database of information on prescription drug sales, which it purchased from individual pharmacies and then used to tailor advertising and marketing campaigns for drug makers. The patient information was anonymous, but the data gave marketers a good idea of which prescription drugs were selling, what geographical areas were slow to adopt new ones and which were fast, whether prescriptions were being refilled, and so forth. But there was no data about individual physicians and their prescribing behavior." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

"And there have been plenty of other lawsuits, too, but so wealthy are the pharmaceutical companies that they can afford to settle for millions out-of-court on the condition the claimants remain silent, and are therefore not hindering the generation of billions more in drug sales. Among the many problems with the psychiatric drugs children are being flooded with, parents and professionals are told the substances are either safe or come with only mild risks, risks that pale next to the horrible future they head off. Only later do we discover they are not so benign." - Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey, The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes "Patients" of Normal Children (Get the book.)

"She and her partner were careful not to make the dinner sound like a drug sales pitch to the other physicians they were inviting. "You don't say he's going to talk about Celebrex. You tell them he's talking about postsurgery knee pain." After a dozen or so of these dinners, Howard found she could no longer stand her job. She began to feel she was bribing doctors with gifts and expensive food and misleading them about the drugs she was touting. She'd lasted only nine months as a drug rep. For companies, the payoff for recruiting doctor-speakers can be spectacular." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Corey Davis, an analyst with JP Morgan, predicted in the Wall Street Journal that sleep drug sales could hit six billion dollars by 2008. Lunesta, said Davis, "could do for the insomnia market what Prozac did for depression." Meanwhile, the company's chief financial officer told investors, "It's a drug you can take again and again and again. The sky's the limit." Lunesta's TV spots and print advertisements were only the most visible aspect of the company's marketing campaign—and in many ways they represented not the beginning of the drug's launch but its culmination." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"Creates obstacles for the introduction of generic drugs that would compete with brand-name drug sales. For example, the FDA now supports charging generic drug companies to conduct safety reviews on chemicals that have already been approved by the FDA and are currently sold under brand names. Attempts to modify intellectual property laws for its own gain, such as promoting proposals that would extend patent protection on drugs by several more years, thereby guaranteeing years of additional profits (at the expense of consumers) before competing generic drugs can be introduced." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.) "This is the approach that generates profits: Disease "mongering": convincing someone they have a new, fictitious disease as an excuse to justify more prescription drug sales. Disease "screening": recruitment of new patients into a disease diagnosis. Disease "management": ongoing treatment of patients without curing them. It is this approach of disease mongering + screening + disease management that maximizes profits for drug companies. The bigger the profits, the more lucrative the executive salaries." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.) "Often, when such evidence is finally made public by whistle blowers, the FDA drags its feet, allowing the drug sales to continue while claiming it needs another six months (or longer) to "investigate." The Laws of the Pharmaceutical Industry: The main principles governing the pharmaceutical "business with disease." (Excerpted, with permission, from the Dr. Rath Health Foundation) It is not in the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry to prevent common diseases—the maintenance and expansion of disease is a precondition for the financial growth of this industry. 1." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.)

"On the other side are pharmaceutical companies which have supported thousands of studies by university professors and other medical researchers with research grants—and have cut off funding to professors who have published papers with a negative view that might hurt drug sales. These are by no means the only ways to control what people come to believe. But, generally, when America gets fooled, there is money involved. The antidepressant and antipsychotic story is still being played out. Huge amounts are still being spent to convince all of us these drugs work. We are still in a kind of battle." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"While pharmaceutical marketing techniques and billion-dollar budgets have driven drug sales up at the expense of safety, bad drugs have killed hundreds of thousands of patients. The drug regulation agencies in both North America and the UK are controlled by the drug companies, and many of their licensing boards have been packed with 'experts' with a variety of company allegiances. In both Britain and North America, it has been shown that government leans heavily towards the pharmaceutical, chemical and bio-tech companies. The pharmaceutical industry is today completely out of control." - Martin J. Walker, HRT Licensed to Kill and Maim: The Unheard Voices of Women Damaged by Hormone Replacement Therapy (Get the book.)

"Yes, at Eli Lilly drug sales are big business. Deaths are an expected cost of doing business. How valuable is any one life? CHAPTER The new childhood drug culture Our children are rapidly being taught that their minds cannot work properly without medication. Under the most feeble disease diagnosis imaginable, known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), it is now commonly assumed that the brains of millions of American children have a neurological disorder that requires medication." - Byron J. Richards, Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America (Get the book.)

"Having his name attached to a published study could clearly increase drug sales. He discussed one of the ghostwriting experiences he had in his book Let Them Eat Prozac: Usually, ghostwritten articles arrive with a covering letter authorizing me to alter the piece in whatever way I see fit. One such letter arrived linked to a meeting aimed at promoting Wyeth's SSRI Effexor. This Laguna Beach meeting came complete with honoraria, expensive travel and accommodation provision, and the opportunity to have one's article ghosted, in this case by CMED, a medical writing agency based in Toronto." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"The influence of money promoting drug sales by doctors. By Kassirer, Jerome R How Drug Lobbyists Influence Doctors. Boston Globe February 13, 2006 9. This article explains the new FDA Critical Path program to get drugs approved faster. Mathews, Anna Wilde and Hensley, Scott. Bush Budget May Benefit Drug Pipeline FDA Initiative to Develop New Treatments May Get Some Funding, but Hurdles Loom. 2/6/2006. 10. This article explains the new drug labels that will go into affect in June of 2006. Associated Press. FDA unveils new drug labels US News and World Report 1/20/06 11." - Byron J. Richards, Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA's Betrayal of America (Get the book.)

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