No they havent. The tobacco industry signed a consent decree agreeing to it.
Okay, guys, I gotta step up and defend Humira.
I have rheumatoid arthritis. I was one of the guinea pigs for Humira when they did their first human studies. I’ve been on it ever since.
It is an absolute miracle drug as far as I am concerned. I am, for all intents and purposes, in remission from the RA and my body is recovering from the damage it caused to my joints. To give an example - I had to stop bowling when I came down with RA. I’m now back bowling in two leagues.
Humira does NOT cause cancer. It is a TNF inhibitor and it does depress the immune system, so one can be at a greater risk for cancer. I have to be very careful about exposure to sunlight because I’m at a higher risk for skin cancer, etc.
Now, having said all that and sung its praises…I agree totally that drug manufacturers should stop advertising their products on TV. The ads are annoying as hell and I think they make doctors’ jobs harder in the long run. But the cost of the ads is not what runs up the cost of the drugs. It’s the fact that it is tremendously expensive to develop a new drug and bring it to market. Most new drugs never make it to market, so the cost of development has to be recovered in the ones that do. And patent protection in the USA is only 20 years, most of which is eaten up by the clinical trials, etc., leaving them only a few years to recover billions of dollars in costs. If we extended patents out to, say, 30 years, the cost of new meds would plummet drastically.
You would think that EMR would make things easier, but you’d be wrong. EMR is far from universal; not all systems are compatible, and not all physicians use it. Some people see a specialist without going through their primary care doc, and it doesn’t occur to them to let the primary care doc know about this. The VA uses EMR exclusively, but doesn’t share data with outside physicians unless the patient brings a copy. Dentists and doctors don’t talk. In a perfect world, they would, but the world ain’t perfect.
And then you have people who don’t know what they take or why they take it. They’ll tell you they take two little green pills at breakfast and at dinner, one white one at lunchtime, and two yellow pills at bedtime. They have no idea what each pill is, and half the time, they’ve been taking them for so long that they have no idea if they still need them. It’s frustrating.
I want one of those prescription drugs that allow me to wander around really scenic locations in slow motion.
If none of that is available, I’ll take any of the ones that prevent me from having to tote around some large symbolic object.
Adaliumab, and the “liumab” part is assigned nomenclature; they had no say in the naming except for the “ada” part.
li = immune system
u = human Ig
mab = monoclonal antibody
It helped me quit also after having smoked like a forest fire for over 40 years. I took it for six weeks. It didn’t make me suicidal or anything, but I do distinctly remember wanting to kill my brother-in-law. But that was normal for me.
You believe that if we extended a monopoly for ten extra years, the monopolist would look around at the complete lack of competition, and decide to lower the price of the drug?
It seems much more likely that the executives in the boardroom would say something like, “Hey, instead of having five years after it hits the market to charge $4,000 a month for this drug, we now have 15 years to charge $4,000 a month.”
Without going into it too much, a biologic doesn’t follow the old “the first pill cost 300 million, and the next 300 million pills cost a cent” adage for which pharma is famous. In addition to the R&D cost which every drug most pay a biologic has enormous production costs associated with it that a Viagra or Lipitor just does not.
I have arthritis and take one of these meds. It’s interesting that several of the newer arthritis medicines have ties (were originally developed to treat, or whatever) to cancer medicine. The one I take, Enbrel is one of those. Some years ago I tried another one called Methotrexate, which is on-label a chemotherapy drug. I trusted my doc and took it without checking the side effects. It took me a few months to realize that the severe coughing fits I was having that tasted like blood were related to that drug. When I started to wonder if there was a connection, I googled it. Ayup, one of the less likely to happen side effects: lesions in the lungs. Stopped that sucker that day and now it’s listed as a drug I’m allergic to.
It’s not technically an allergy but I don’t want anybody giving that to me ever again. (My lungs did eventually heal with a little scarring.)