Do pharmaceutical companies knowingly look-over the huge amount of negative side effects that accompany many prescription medications so that they can get consumers to buy OTHER medications? Those medications of course to fight the side effects.
If you think about it, it’s exponential. Drug A helps symptom A. But side-effect B & C demand Drugs B & C.
I can’t tell you how many times I have seen medication for Eliquis or Stelara and been amazed at the epic amounts of side-effects. There are definitely times when things get out of hand and class action lawsuits arise (see Pradaxa lawsuits for example), but I think that for the most part they try to keep their side effects moderate so you will go out and buy new medications.
What do you think? It’s all about making a few extra bucks and multiplying the opportunities over and over again.
No.
The FDA approves US drugs and all effects (including ones that probably aren’t linked to the drug) must reported during clinical trials (this includes if a trial subject breaks and ankle stepping off a curb, for example. Who knows- maybe the drug causes dizziness?). Sometimes rare side effects aren’t seen until large groups of people are on the meds, once they are prescribed in general use. Reasons to include/exclude patients are laid out in advance, so you can’t just drop patients on the spot, because you don’t like the side effect they are showing.
What you are describing is medical fraud. I spent 15 years on a hospital review board overseeing oncology and psychiatric drug trials, fwiw
Yes and no.
No, in that medicine is complicated. Insanely complicated. We often times don’t fully understand why a drug does what it does, as not all pathways and systems are that well understood and even when they are, they are so complex they are chaotic systems. So often times a “side effect” is really just a drug interacting with either the target system in an unintended way or some other system in an uninteded way. Often times you can’t get the desired effect without using something that produces the unintended effect as well.
No again in that, should a drug company get caught intentionally poisoning a customer, you’d better believe there’d be hell to pay.
Yes, however, in that research is expensive, and there is absolutely no reason to spend money trying to fix side effects unless some other drug can do what yours does without that side effect. If you as a corporation do opt to spend all that money fixing things that aren’t required by the FDA or whomever, you’d better be making money off of it or I’ll see you next stockholders meeting with a pink slip and a parachute…
22 Years in Pharmaceutical development & manufacturing
Absolutely, positively not.
We work very hard to minimize side effects. As mentioned, all adverse events are recorded and part of the submission to the FDA. You’ll notice many near universal side effects- like nausea and dizziness. That’s because psychosomatic effects are so powerful people imagine those even for drugs which are not likely to cause them
If you consider how drug development works, it would be near impossible to engineer side effects in. One develops (or stumbles upon) a substance that does X. X is good (say, it kills bacteria). From there one tests the substance and formulates it (buffers, diluents, preservatives, etc). All the components of the formulation have to be part of the trials, and each has to have an explainable purpose for being there. Most are well studied and understood. In order to engineer in a side effect one would have to either engineer the substance to continue to do X as well as Y (say, cause headaches)- this is extraordinarily difficult and expensive, assuming it could be done at all… OR, one would have to add something to the formulation that does Y. And explain why that addition is needed.
Furthermore, who is to say that the treatment of Y is going to be handled with one of my company’s drugs… Given the expense of developing a drug, I am chasing a diminishing return, going after a subset of my own customers.
And all this assumes that the FDA doesn’t decide that the side effects are disqualifying. Or that my competitor doesn’t develop a competing drug without the side effects.
I know there have been high profile cases of malfeasance, but I can honestly say I have never been at a meeting where anything like this was even suggested. And I have worked for both startups and fortune 50 companies.
It’s a cherished tenet of alt med that pharmaceutical drugs are intended to create illness that requires more drugs to treat, but such a conspiracy does not exist. There are relatively common and unavoidable side effects of certain effective drugs (such as anemia and immune suppression by anticancer meds) which can be countered by other drugs, but keeping side effects to a minimum is good business. It also serves the interests of those affiliated with drug companies (a reminder that researchers and other employees of Pharma get sick too, and do not want to experience serious side effects from the drugs they take).
I looked at that page, and the warnings for side effects of the blood thinner seem to cluster around the fact that the drug is a blood thinner. What do you expect to happen when taking such a medication?
This and other similar perceptions, points up one of the biggest challenges to dealing with health care costs, and health care in general in the US.
Inherent to the profit motive for any business, is that there are lots of “opportunities” or dangers to the company and it’s guiding people to put profit over product function, or over how the company is operated. IN addition, it is inherent to the SALES portion of any company, that making sales personnel income dependent on QUANTITY OF SALES alone, inevitably results in products being presented in ways that make it appear that the only goal of the company IS personal enrichment.
Attempts to deal with costs TO CUSTOMERS in the face of this, are obviously contradictory to the standard structure of any for-profit organization.
Medical companies have the additional challenge, again within a for-profit system, to find NEW solutions to medical problems all the time, for corporate reasons, rather than for the sake of the society they try to serve. Very few companies are allowed to hold on to full ownership of drugs which they discover or create, forever. And of course, if someone does find a way to completely defeat any disease, their medical success will completely defeat their long term financial success. Both of those factors tend to force companies to charge a great deal more for a new drug, in order to profit from their investment in coming up with it. That in turn, encourages sufferers to feel taken advantage of.
I don’t have any great solution to any of this myself, obviously, because there is no way to simultaneously end the pursuit of profit, since that’s how the entire structure of any capitalist country is formulated. No democratic nation of equals under the law, can tolerate declaring SOME to be slaves to everyone else. But on the other hand, making private profits alone, the only measure of how to deal with life, also necessitates declaring human life itself to be subservient to wealth of individuals. And that isn’t tolerable either.
Based on various ads for class action lawsuits, it’s unacceptable that a blood thinner should thin blood.