Ratón de biblioteca: PHARMAGEDDON / David Healy

Cambridge University library


This searing indictment, David Healy’s most comprehensive and forceful argument against the pharmaceuticalization of medicine, tackles problems in health care that are leading to a growing number of deaths and disabilities. Healy, who was the first to draw attention to the now well-publicized suicide-inducing side effects of many anti-depressants, attributes our current state of affairs to three key factors:

-product rather than process patents on drugs,

-the classification of certain drugs as prescription-only, and
-industry-controlled drug trials.

These developments have tied the survival of pharmaceutical companies to the development of blockbuster drugs, so that they must overhype benefits and deny real hazards. Healy further explains why these trends have basically ended the possibility of universal health care in the United States and elsewhere around the world. He concludes with suggestions for reform of our currently corrupted evidence-based medical system.

"Pharmaceutical companies have perhaps done more to undermine traditional markets than any other industrial companies. Not coincidentally, from Lilly's 1951 ad to a 2005 book by Hank McKinnell,7 then CEO of Pfizer, they are also the corporations most active in spreading the message that there is no alternative to a free enterprise system. But while in fact many industrial corporations came to the conclusion a century ago that the capitalism of cutthroat competition and free markets didn't work as well as it might-at least not for them-no other branch of industry has been able to pursue this agenda in quite the way pharmaceutical companies have."

Ver:
Chapter 1