Ben Goldacre has been pushing to fix this.
See his campaign site: http://www.alltrials.net/
His blog/news site: http://www.badscience.net/
His Ted talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_kno...
See his campaign site: http://www.alltrials.net/
His blog/news site: http://www.badscience.net/
His Ted talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_kno...
For those who think that drug companies need high prices for recouping R&D costs, their marketing budgets are far greater than R&D budgets, so this isn't really true. In the UK they aren't allowed to market to end-users, so the advertising costs are generally much lower here.
And how exactly do you compete when your competitors can clone your product with ease?
And the NHS spends < 10% of drugs, most of which are already available as generics, so there is not a lot of scope for cost reduction.
I'm not saying that aren't improvements that can be made, but people need to wake up and realise that there are no simple answers.
Also, their costs would be much lower because we'd be paying for the clinical trials and there wouldn't be marketing costs.
Glad to have that cleared up.
It hasn't been a free market since we created the FDA (and I'm not looking to get rid of it), and with patents and advertising law, etc, it's never going to be free.
So why don't we change the accounting? Instead of making drugs companies advertise and exploit to be able to pay the regulatory costs, and R&D, etc, why not recognize that they create drugs for us and this is our hurdle - not theirs.
We want the product, so we shouldn't dump costs on the drug companies and pretend we've dealt with them.
So we should pay for the regulatory testing. 100%.
But that leaves an inventive to push expensive and unneeded or dangerous drugs through the system because they don't pay and yet get rewarded. So we need to make these our drugs - by paying for the R&D up front, so that there's no need to game our own system.
Now there's no need for secrecy so there's no need for patents to reward letting it go, and everything gets simpler again.
When you strip the patents, the marketing, and the legal games, our drugs would get a lot cheaper and more reliable.
We'd still be paying for all, maybe even more, tests, but at least we wouldn't have to trust someone whose motive clearly (and reasonably in this system) is to rush to market.
It'll certainly reduce some gaming of the current system, but I can't see how this will materially improve the situation as a whole.
Medication compliance (people taking meds correctly) is a severe problem. The UK spends about £9bn on medication, and about half of that is wasted by non-compliance.
It's not the severity of the illness; many organ transplants fail because of med non-compliance. It's not the lack of cost of the meds; figures are similar in the US.
Getting patients to take meds correctly is a problem waiting for a solution, and there's money to be made from it.
If we really cared about rewarding invention we'd pay inventors. But instead all we do is give them a letter of marque and tell them to steal it from others.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, pass a law to confiscate it.
Companies engaging in illegal, anti-competitive behaviour such as "pay to delay"[1] need to have some realistic punishment applied.
[1] (http://www.npr.org/2013/03/25/175043758/supreme-court-hears-...)
He's writing a book about an industry that everyone loves to hate. Few people question a book when it agrees with their preconceived views.
I've seen some critical reviews that are just nonsense. I don't want to spend time wading through nonsense, but I realise that maybe he's made mistakes, so I'd welcome curated suggestions.
This is a good critique of only one aspect of Goldacre's book, but it's a good one.
However, since was written by a former pharma exec, I'm sure people will dismiss it without reading it.
I read the article and the various replies from Goldacre and the author, including Goldacre's post of the passage in question. I find Goldacre far more persuasive.
LaMattina claims that Goldacre is cherry-picking data, and gives his presumably best example. But this example isn't "data"; it's Goldacre explaining the conclusions of a govenmental report about an incident where 6 experimental subjects nearly died. In writing about science for the general public, you need to give examples. This seems like a fine example for people to understand why a culture that promotes publishing everything could save lives.
His core argument is extremely simple: If you conduct any sort of medical research, you have a moral duty to publish all anonymised data associated with that research, promptly and in full. There is absolutely no reason why that should not also be a legal duty.
I'd like to see specific examples of issues that Goldacre gets wrong, as I see his work recommended by a lot of astute doctors and medical researchers, and I'd especially appreciate you making the effort, for the community here, to link to the "critical reviews of Goldacre's work" that have public-visible links that you most recommend. I'm willing to hear you out, but please give those of us reading along in this discussion more to follow up on.