Merck owns a vitamin subsidiary, I believe. But, I think it would difficult to substantiate a claim that 75% of alternative treatments are owned by pharmaceutical companies.
Hence the request for a cite.
I’ve done cancer research as a post-doc and I’ll make fun of the alt-med claims, but factual claims need to be evaluated, I think.
I’m surprised the name Rick Simpson (a major proponent of cannabis/Milagro oil) hasn’t popped up in this thread yet.
A quick google search found me this:
Many herbal products made by Big Pharma
The Pharma giant Wyeth makes Centrum and other supplements, and Bayer HealthCare of aspirin fame makes the One A Day line. Unilever, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and other big pharmaceutical firms also make or sell supplements.
…and…
Time to tame the dietary supplement industry
Supplement promoters sell themselves as an alternative to big pharma, but giant pharmaceutical firms actually own the bulk of the industry. Pfizer owns Centrum, Bayer owns One a Day, and Procter & Gamble owns supplement maker New Chapter.
Your first cite merely states that the chemical plants that produce pharmaceuticals for pharmaceutical companies also produce vitamins for supplement companies, but they are not the same companies; the supplement companies that they talk about (Nature’s Bounty, Vitamin World, Puritan’s Pride and Sundown) are not affiliated with pharmaceutical companies in any ways that I can find. This cite does not support the statement that: “Many herbal products made by Big Pharma”, merely the statement “The same chemists that synthesize vitamins in high quantities also synthesize pharmaceuticals in high quantities”.
Your second cite talks about vitamins, which I might disagree with the over reliance on, but I don’t think Centrum is considered alternative treatments to support the claim that “75% of the alternative treatments you find in a pharmacy are made by the big pharmacy companies.”
I don’t see any evidence that alternative medicine companies are owned by Pharmaceutical companies at all, no less 75%. Maybe the P&G link to New Chapter is the worst, but P&G isn’t really a pharmaceutical drug developer in any meaningful sense; they sold their prescription drug business years ago. They are a consumer goods producer that makes pet food and Q tips, so snake oil is what they do.
Yeah, I’m having trouble finding a cite. I’ll look again later when I’m free. It was a news story sometime around 2009-2011. It’s not the pharmaceutical companies themselves, but subsidiaries they created specifically for the purpose of marketing stuff like herbal and homeopathic remedies. I’m quite sure this wasn’t just in my imagination, and yet I’m having a hard time finding the stories.
Well, a subsidiary of my own company does produce a line of vitamin and mineral supplements. But the group company includes a whole bunch of subsidiaries covering a very wide range of products and operations (such as weapons manufacturing and oil drilling). 
It’s good for us employees because we sometimes get surplus products from those subsidiaries, such as vitamin pills that are nearing their expiration date. They certainly help to invigorate me. Why, I’ve grown two extra penises since I started taking them.
Wow, four penises!
There’s probably a job in Japanese porn waiting to be “filled”.
Because they have a blockbuster drug for autism and want a bigger market before they release it.
Duh.
And only two hands.
It’s exhausting.
The argument in the OP is long on assertion, short on substantiation, to put it mildly. Der’s post was at least is within the same metropolitan area as reality, though it could use some cites.
A 2010 article in the Economist characterized vaccines as a “Neglected corner” of the drug business, with “little investment and abysmal profit margins”, to the chagrin of public health experts. The problem was insurers and governments were treating it like a commodity business.
But things have turned around. Vaccine sales rose from $9 billion in 2005 to $22 billion in 2009. Part of that was driven by nonprofit pressure and funding AFAIK. At any rate, the big boys have pumped up their investment in the area. sub req I think A smarter jab
A 2003 economics tract asks “Why Are Drugs More Profitable Than Vaccines?” Why Are Drugs More Profitable Than Vaccines? | NBER
A 2005 health policy paper asks “Why Are Pharmaceutical Companies Gradually Abandoning Vaccines?” http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/3/622.full
This 2013 paper suggest that an HIV vaccine would only earn half as much revenue as an HIV drug. So while it’s a good thing that Big Pharm isn’t a monopoly the fact remains that the incentives and R&D are going to be biased towards treatment rather than prevention. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any vaccine research. It means there will be less than optimal efforts in that direction, in the absence of governmental funding. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/file/pdfs/centers-programs/centers/cid/publications/faculty/wp/252_Kremer.pdf
So sorry, markets aren’t magically perfect. But this problem -which was a real one- has begun to be reversed over the past several years.
Wait, Obama’s hiding the cure for crabs? OMG, it all makes sense!
Think outside the box good man!
You’ve feet don’t you?!
They really don’t; the only time militaries want to start using their shiny new weapons ASAP is if the country is already at war. Wendell Wagner is closer to it, but weapons manufacturers don’t really have to do much if any convincing of countries that they need to stockpile weapons; its the nature of countries to decide that they want to do just that entirely on their own. Consider the greatest orgy in spending on armaments in history: from 1946-1989 NATO and the Warsaw Pact spent trillions of dollars building nuclear arsenals large enough to obliterate each other hundreds of times over. Trillions more were spent on conventional weapons and the development of all sorts of new conventional weapons technology to be ready to fight a conventional war when the Warsaw Pact came streaming over the inter-German border (it was Soviet doctrine to immediately go onto the offensive regardless of how or why the war was started on the quite logical basis that its better to have your enemies cities suffer from being the battleground than your own) in an attempt to maintain the facade that a full scale war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact could be contained from going nuclear. All of this money was spent on a war that thankfully never happened.
I’m honestly a bit stumped at how the OP came to the conclusion that these 3 profit the most from ongoing wars. Arms manufacturers is a no-brainer, I can see where oil companies can be erroneously thrown in there with enough chanting of ‘no blood for oil’, but how is big pharma making a killing off of the killing?
Anti-infectives are another area where the market has failed, and show a corresponding lack of progress in modern pharma. There’s no simple business case that can support the identification of new targets in bacterial metabolism, subsequent drug development and clinical trialling, and then have the drug locked in a box that says DO NOT USE on it.
Progress must be being made here, though, with some creative pharmacoeconomic thinking - antibiotics are quite tractable targets relative to some of the more challenging therapeutic areas. The science will deliver if the right incentives are there.
It’s true that big pharma corporations have made forays into the “nutritional supplement” business (attractive because of nearly nonexistent regulation and thus enhanced profit potential, leading to an annual revenue in the range of $32 billion as of 2012) but that 75% ownership claim sounds bogus to me.
There are both major non-pharma corporate players and a slew of smaller operatives involved in the supplement industry, all portraying themselves as the little guy battling Big Pharma with nothing but the support of their loyal customers (not mentioned is the key support of powerful lawmakers like Sen. Orrin Hatch and the (thankfully retiring) Sen. Tom Harkin.
I still insist that the supplement industry is holding back real cures so they can keep selling us junk like colon cleanses. And you can’t prove me wrong.
The only evidence that I see if pharmaceutical companies in the supplement business at all is limited to vitamin supplements (One a Day and Centrum). While I think the data is pretty sketchy on the need for vitamin supplements for most people, such supplements are still roundly recommended by physician’s groups, so I don’t think it is fair to lump this in with companies selling bee pollen and wallaby gland extract, which is made by companies like Nature’s Way which I don’t think are affiliated with any pharamceutical companies.
If I die from something that my girlfriend his the cure for I’ll be pissed.
People don’t die from blue balls, silly.
Regards,
Shodan