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

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"The key ingredient was promotion—to the American masses. The pharmaceutical companies now spend twice as much on marketing as most other industries. Executives at AstraZeneca explained in 2000 that companies must spend as much as $ 1 billion to promote a drug if they wanted it to become one of the coveted blockbuster sellers that brought in sales of more than $1 billion a year. About 25 percent of that money—or $250 million—must be spent, they said, even before the new drug is shipped to pharmacies for its first sales." - 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.) "In 2004 the pharmaceutical companies turned nearly sixteen cents of each dollar of revenue into profit, according to Fortune magazine. That compares with the median profit earned by America's five hundred largest public companies that year of a little more than five cents. With their hoards of cash, the companies have readily handed money to patient groups, hospitals, universities, medical schools, physician societies, government agencies, and just about any organization they want on their side." - 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.) "Washington is the axis of the industry's power. The pharmaceutical companies spent more on lobbying between 1998 and 2004 than any other industry. By 2004 the companies employed a legion of lobbyists so large there were more than two for each member of Congress. By using their wealth to buy influence, the drug companies have repeatedly squelched attempts to regulate their prices and promotional practices. The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not control prescription drug prices." - 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.) "In the eleven months leading up to April 2005, seven of the ten biggest advertisers on the CBS Evening News were pharmaceutical companies. There were eight pages of prescription drug ads in the twenty-four-page Parade magazine tucked inside the newspapers of three hundred American cities on Sunday, February 12, 2006, including Mason City, Iowa's Globe Gazette. The ads in newspapers and magazines included lengthy warnings about the medicine's dangers to satisfy federal rules. But the marketers wrote these sections using complicated medical language that the common American could not understand." - 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 epicenter of this selling is of course the United States, home to many of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and the stage on which most of the action in this book takes place. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. already makes up almost 50 percent of the global market in prescription drugs.3 Yet spending in the U.S. continues to rise more rapidly than anywhere else, increasing by almost 100 percent in just six years—not only because of steep increases in the price of drugs, but because doctors are simply prescribing more and more of them." - Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest pharmaceutical companies Are Turning Us All into Patients (Get the book.) "Vmce Parry's insights into how pharmaceutical companies help to shape public perceptions about conditions are invaluable, because the strategies are often hidden from public view. Men and women like him with expertise in advertising, marketing, and public relations working from chic offices in Manhattan, London, Toronto, or Sydney are being paid to fundamentally change the way we think about our bodies, our health, and the conditions we supposedly suffer." - Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest pharmaceutical companies Are Turning Us All into Patients (Get the book.) "Making the condition look more like a legitimate mental illness, Severino explained, opened it up for lucrative research funding from pharmaceutical companies. "As far as I was concerned the decision was not based on anything in the data we looked at." So does PMDD really exist? "That's a good question," she laughed. What happened next would help push an unknown, unofficial and for some, an unreal condition from the back pages of the psychiatrist's manual into glossy magazines and television screens everywhere, thanks to Lilly, the company best known for its blockbuster antidepressant Ptozac." - Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest pharmaceutical companies Are Turning Us All into Patients (Get the book.)

"Paid for by the pharmaceutical companies, these scientists had just one major objective; they had to fulfill the expectations of the big pharma conglomerate to patent genes for new, expensive "breakthrough" treatments that generate vast amounts of wealth. Nowhere do they mention the proven biomedical fact that genes do not control anything. The genes' only function and purpose are to reproduce cells. How genes do that largely depends on you and what you expose yourself to." - Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not A Disease - It's A Survival Mechanism (Get the book.)

"In order to create a market, pharmaceutical companies had to actually invent a phrase for mild depression: kokoro no kaze, which, roughly translated, means one's soul catching cold. After furnishing the catchy phrase, the drug companies followed up with all the usual artillery that had worked so well in the West: public awareness campaigns paid for by the drug companies and an army of 1,350 Paxil representatives who canvassed selected doctors an average of twice a week." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.) "But today, pharmaceutical companies realize that they need to brand drugs as early as they can and build equity in the brand."113 The stakes are so high that drug companies now work with branding agencies to select just the right name ... a name like Zoloft, uplifting and scientific all at the same time. The hard, decisive sounds of the letters X, Z, C, and D are attractive to drug namers. According to James L." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"At first glance, this seemed to contradict the cautions from pharmaceutical companies that antidepressants might take three weeks to work. But those time estimates are based on statistics; I have had plenty of patients over the years who have responded within a few days. Conversely, what about the studies showing that a single bout of exercise can improve mood? For instance, in 2001, Northern Arizona University psychology professor Cheryl Hansen showed that as little as ten minutes of exercise can immediately improve vigor and mood in healthy subjects." - John J. Ratey, MD, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (Get the book.)

"Almost two-thirds of the doctors who frame the formal guidelines of clinical best practice have received funds to conduct research, and more than a third have worked for pharmaceutical companies as employees or as consultants. 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." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"Pain management has become a subspecialty in medicine and is recognized as an area needing further drug discovery by the pharmaceutical companies. And all of these treatments for pain will undoubtedly have a positive impact on face and jaw pain, too. Treatments for fatigue and brain fog lag behind, but, as I have indicated, a pharmacopeia does exist. One major problem of taking medicines for any medical problem is that their use often comes with side effects that limit the duration of time they remain useful." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.)

"For this reason, pharmaceutical companies instruct their paid researchers A placebo is a term that describes the administration of a sugar pill or dummy procedure in order to test whether a drug or procedure is more effective than the power of belief. In an article in the Guardian (Thursday, June 20, 2002) Jerome Burne reported that "new research suggests that placebos work surprisingly well, in fact, rather better than some conventional drugs." to publish only the most favorable findings from these various experiments." - Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not A Disease - It's A Survival Mechanism (Get the book.) "As already mentioned, it is not in the best interest of the medical industry, including the pharmaceutical companies, to find a real cure for cancer or for any other chronic illnesses, for this would make the treatment of disease symptoms obsolete. Removing the cause(s) of an illness almost never requires a separate approach that deals with the symptoms of the illness, for these would disappear on their own once the underlying causes are addressed." - Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not A Disease - It's A Survival Mechanism (Get the book.)

"Or as the pharmaceutical companies would no doubt prefer to put it: reentry by selective serotonin reuptake inhibition. This has been the reentry path most favored and cherished by our Julie. This has certainly been the mode of reentry favored by the American public, and like Percy's other modes of reentry, reentry by antidepressants has both a history of success and a history of failure." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"Even though diosgenin from plants is used by pharmaceutical companies to synthesize various hormones, there is very little scientific information on diosgenin-containing plants and their relationship to human metabolism. A number of herbs contain diosgenin or sarsasapogenin: • Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) • Blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) • Fenugreek (Trigonella foenumgraecum) • Sarsaparilla (Smilax officinalis) • Wild yam (Dioscorea spp) • Yucca (Yucca spp) Special Herbal and Supplemental Considerations for Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome." - Tori Hudson, N.D., Women's Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine: Alternative Therapies and Integrative Medicine for Total Health and Wellness (Get the book.) "Estradiol cream and gel are also now manufactured by pharmaceutical companies. Less-friendly conventional HRT uses hormones that are composed of estrogens and progestins that are not identical to a woman's own estrogen or progesterone. Conjugated equine estrogens are derived from the utine of pregnant mares. Esterified estrogens are in part estrone sulfate and in part equilin sulfates. (See Appendix C for a chart on current conventional hormone options.) Androgens. The normal postmenopausal ovary produces testosterone as well as andro-stenedione and small amounts of estrogen." - Tori Hudson, N.D., Women's Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine: Alternative Therapies and Integrative Medicine for Total Health and Wellness (Get the book.)

"However, pharmaceutical companies are now able to "engineer" the drugs they develop so they can hit the target receptors while triggering fewer side effects. 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." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.) "I will work with pharmaceutical companies to develop a drug to right the imbalance, either by blocking the action of the sleep-disturbing cytokines or by increasing the release of the sleep-producing cytokines. But, obviously, all this will take time. I also gave some thought to the fact that nearly every study on immune function had looked within blood. That left out a whole range of other possibilities. One of the first studies I ever did showed that patients with fatiguing illness—produced by CFS or MS—also had cognitive problems." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.)

"Pfizer is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world largely because of the success of Lipitor, its best-selling drug. The fact that Lipitor is scheduled to go off patent in 2010 led the company to look for new cholesterol-lowering drugs with unique mechanisms of action. Torce-trapib, slated to be Pfizer's next drug, works by raising HDL, the "good cholesterol," and thus has a mechanism of action that is complementary to that of Lipitor, which lowers LDL, the "bad cholesterol." Pfizer expected Torcetrapib to be its next best-selling medication." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"Chapter 3 The Toothless Watchdog Growls DURING THE TIME that most of the men, women, and children in this book were having their lives ruined and sometimes destroyed by antidepressant drugs, what position was being taken by the pharmaceutical companies, organized psychiatry, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and legions of so-called medication experts? Despite mountains of evidence, they were avidly denying that antidepressants can cause mayhem, murder, and suicide." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"All the pharmaceutical companies are looking for the big blockbuster solution that will control the hunger gland. The last "miracle pill" released on the market, Phen-Phen, ended up killing people, but the drug companies haven't given up, because the American public would much rather take pills that kill hunger than address the emotional source of the compulsion to overeat. Phen-Phen wasn't the first weight-loss medication to endanger health. Dexedrine, an amphetamine, was commonly used for weight loss but has largely been discredited." - Roger Gould, Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever (Get the book.)

"At the same time, pharmaceutical companies are funding research to mark and measure all these factors, and to map the genes affected by them, so they can figure out how to mimic their actions. BDNF and its neurotrophic brethren are much farther upstream in the neurochemical cascade than serotonin, closer to the source. Ultimately, the genes have to turn on the flow. The shift from the neurotransmitter hypothesis to the connectivity theory is a move from outside to inside the nerve cell." - John J. Ratey, MD, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (Get the book.)

"Today From the time medical students enter med school to the time they retire, their lives (and continuing education) are influenced by pharmaceutical companies. The companies buy them lunch when they're starving residents putting in ninety-hour weeks and can barely afford cafeteria fare. They give them gifts. (Take a look at the prescription pad your doctor uses or the paperweight on his desk. That's just the tip of the iceberg.) They sponsor and fund the research they read and the journals that publish it." - 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.)

"That's what the pharmaceutical companies need to create drugs. They dream of an anti-Alzheimer's pill that regenerates neurons to keep memory intact. "There has to be some kind of chemical stuff in the [hippocampus] that is sensing exercise and saying, OK, let's start cranking out new cells," says Columbia University neurologist Scott Small, who recently used a novel MRI technique to track neurogenesis in live human subjects. "If we can identify those molecular pathways, we might be able to think of clever ways to induce neurogenesis biochemically." - John J. Ratey, MD, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (Get the book.)

"Love, "the pharmaceutical companies started placing ads in the medical journals showing wheelchairs, x-rays of crooked spines, and pathetic-looking women with dowager's humps. They funded medical meetings and lectures about osteoporosis." The next step was to "educate" the public. In 1985, only 23 percent of women had heard of osteoporosis. But, according to US News and World Report, that changed quickly as the result of the efforts of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations firm hired by Wyeth-Ayerst." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "From 1991 to 1999, pharmaceutical companies in the United States did not develop more than their share of new drugs on a per capita basis compared with western Europe or Japan. Furthermore, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, of the 569 new drugs approved in the United States between 1995 and 2000, only 13 percent actually contain new active ingredients that offer a significant improvement over already available drugs and therapies. Another reason why Americans believe they get better health care than any other nation may be that it appears as though we do." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"The coming years will bear greater witness to the corporate sponsored creation of disease.8 While the business report might describe FSD as the classic example of the "corporate sponsored creation of disease," back at the Paris debate that wasn't the way the doctors and researchers saw it. Even though there was no formal process for choosing a winner, Leonore Tiefer and her debating partner lost their debate, with the audience, via a show of hands, largely rejecting the notion that FSD was being constructed by drug company marketing." - Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest pharmaceutical companies Are Turning Us All into Patients (Get the book.)

"More than a decade ago, we became convinced that natural bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) was a safer and more effective option for treating the symptoms of hormone imbalance than synthetic hormones manufactured and marketed by large pharmaceutical companies. In fact, our first book, From Hormone Hell to Hormone Well, focused on the benefits of BHRT versus synthetic hormone therapies. Like synthetic hormone replacement pills, birth control pills also contain synthetic estrogen and progestin. Depending on dosage, they can be very potent and linger in the body for a long time." - 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.)

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