Quotes About Drug companies

Modern medicine is not scientific, it is full of prejudice, illogic and susceptible to advertising. Doctors are not taught to reason, they are programmed to believe in whatever their medical schools teach them and the leading doctors tell them. Over the past 20 years the drug companies, with their enormous wealth, have taken medicine over and now control its research, what is taught and the information released to the public.

My priorities are a fair trade policy in this country, increasing the minimum wage, going after the drug companies for the way that they charge and their whole pricing structure that have put absolutely amazing drugs out of reach for so many Americans.

From drug companies to health insurers to Wall Street banks, big corporations are spending millions to buy influence in Washington and drown out the voices of regular people.

Disease mongering cannot occur in a vacuum—it requires that the drug companies engage the active collaboration of the doctors who write the prescriptions, the patients who ask for them, the researchers who invent the new mental disorders, the consumer groups that advocate for more treatment, and the media and Internet that spread the word.

New Hampshire state government is a big customer for prescription drug companies. Just as businesses do, we should take advantage of the bargaining power we have as a big customer.

Most experts agree that treatment with medication and psychotherapy combined is best, but very little research is being conducted on combined treatment because in the U.S. drug companies fund research, and they're not interested in supporting that conclusion. So psychotherapy for depression became the exception, and a scrip from your GP became the norm.

Why do psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies?" His answer: "Our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.

A far better way to slow medical costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid's bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to get lower prices and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy-outcomes system. And because Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private health insurers, we should make Medicare available to everyone.

Drug companies say they need to charge ever-higher prices to cover their research costs, but they spend far less on research and development than they do on marketing and administration, and afterwards they actually keep more in profits.

We have taken on the health insurance industry, we have taken on the drug companies, instituting programs to lower the cost of prescription drugs.

T]he DSM alone does not establish standards. Physicians, other mental health workers, drug companies, advocacy groups, school systems, the courts, the Internet, and cable TV all get to vote on how the written word will actually be used and misused.

Doctors quickly discovered that access to institutionalized populations could springboard them to lucrative contracts with drug companies and great wealth. The financial incentives became so enticing that some physicians gave up their private practices to conduct large-scale clinical trials full time. 10

After twenty years researching this at the highest level, Irving has come to believe that the notion depression is caused by a chemical imbalance is just "an accident of history," produced by scientists initially misreading what they were seeing, and then drug companies selling that misperception to the world to cash in.

This is called "publication bias."7 Of all the studies drug companies carry out, 40 percent are never released to the public, and lots more are only released selectively, with any negative findings left on the cutting room floor.

The term doesn't really make any sense, she said: we don't know what a "chemically balanced" brain would look like. People are told that drugs like antidepressants restore a natural balance to your brain, she said, but it's not true—they create an artificial state. The whole idea of mental distress being caused simply by a chemical imbalance is "a myth," she has come to believe, sold to us by the drug companies.

He learned right away that the drug companies had—for years—been selectively publishing research, and to a greater degree than he expected. For example, in one trial for Prozac, the drug was given to 245 patients, but the drug company published the results for only twenty-seven of them. Those twenty-seven patients9 were the ones the drug seemed to work for.

Most of all, immunize yourself from the drug companies efforts to convince you that you desperately need their advertised products. If you really needed the product, it is unlikely that drug companies would be spending money on advertising. Remember, there aren't many ads for insulin on TV.

A young psychiatrist, himself newly recovered from porn-induced sexual dysfunction,[182] pointed out that the internet porn phenomenon is only 10 or 15 years old, and way ahead of the research. He notes: Medical research works at a snail's pace. With luck we'll be addressing this in 20 or 30 years ... when half the male population is incapacitated. Drug companies can't sell any medications by someone quitting porn. We

We don't argue if drug companies create drugs that can cure humans and charge lots of money for them, even though we all have these diseases. It will be pretty hard to make a different argument for genes.

Here in Maine, we've expanded Medicaid, put protections in place for seniors and people with pre-existing conditions, cracked down on big drug companies and protected reproductive rights.

In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry.

One reason (though not the main one) is that American health care "providers"—doctors, nurses, hospitals, drug companies—make more money for what they do than their counterparts overseas do.

Why have we settled for a medical system that allows cancer to be recast as a chronic and tolerable disease rather than one we should try to prevent? Why do so many scientists at the nation's drug companies and universities turn their backs on the possibility of prevention?

If Congress continues to sit on its hands, and the drug companies continue to stash cash in their stockings, Americans will be forever bound in the Jacob Marley-like chains of high prices.