Melody Petersen has a drug problem. Not illicit ones, mind you, but prescription drugs. According to her new book “Our Daily Meds,” the marketing of medicines has led people to swallow pills that do not work, that they do not really want or need, for diseases that they do not have. The “drug companies chain of influence is so complete that there are few people left to look objectively at the effects of their products on the nation’s health or at the consequences of their power for society,” she claims.
I don’t know what Petersen means by “few” but she counts herself among this vanishing breed of the uninfluenced. Which raises a question – one of many – that Petersen fails to answer: If the chain of influence is “so complete” why is the image of drug companies as marketing machines so firmly etched on the American psyche?
Petersen claims slick marketing drives the sale of expensive and needless meds at the expense of cheaper treatments. Yet over the past three years drug spending has slowed and most new prescriptions are written for generic versions of brand medications.
It goes without saying that the pharmaceutical industry has done dumb and illegal things in an effort to increase sales. Yet Petersen is so intent on ascribing absolute power to drug companies to bamboozle doctors and patients that she never acknowledges the benefits of medicines. She complains that the “$2 billion that Iowans spent on prescriptions filled at pharmacies was approaching the $2.7 billion they spent at all the state’s fast-food joints, restaurants and bars.” Better liquor than Lipitor according to her.
Petersen asserts that companies focus on ways to “medicate consumers on a daily basis” at the expense of “cheap medicines that actually cure disease.” She cites Glaxo’s promotion of Zantac, the acid-blocker used to treat ulcers, even as two researchers in Australia were trying to prove that a bacterium, H. pylori, was the underlying cause and therefore could be treated with antibiotics.
What Petersen leaves out is the fact that the bacteria hypothesis was being tested in the late 1980s while Zantac and other drugs like it had been on the market since 1970, well before the infection route was explored. Meanwhile, Zantac was replacing surgery for the treatment of ulcers; a transformation Petersen apparently missed. When it became clear that antibiotics could cure many ulcers, guess who fought for and obtained approval for using such drugs for that purpose? Drug companies of course. And because of aggressive marketing and physician education, today antibiotic therapy is the standard treatment for ulcers.
She quotes Dr. Allen Roses, who helped run drug development at Glaxo, who noted, accurately, that “the vast majority of drugs – more than 90 percent – only work in 30 to 50 percent of the people” as if this were a deliberate act of omission on the part of drug companies. But she fails to quote Roses about his contention that in the future companies will develop personalized medicines that work well for smaller groups of patients based on genetic variations. Most drugs are being rejected by the FDA because they do not work in most people. So why would companies want to persist in that path?
In the same vein, she criticizes companies for “introducing dozens of copycat medicines that were barely distinguishable from one another.” Yet, such “me-too” drugs allow the 50 percent of people for whom one medicine won’t work to get something that does. So which is it? Are drug companies evil for developing medicines that are not targeted in the first place or evil for marketing many variations of the same medicine to address the hit or miss nature of prescribing?
Petersen’s prescription for better health is simple: End the marketing and the need – along with the diseases – will disappear. Childhood depression and suicide? A trumped up myth the screening for which does more harm than good. She quotes a doctor who says: “Kids need to be loved and supported and they’ll turn out OK.”
Except that in recent years, child suicides have increased as prescribing of antidepressants has declined, reversing a decade of fewer deaths. I’m wondering if Petersen and others who share her view will accept much blame for this tragedy as they have assigned to the big bad drug companies. I doubt it. Self-righteousness is a disease for which there is only one cure: ignoring the source.
Our Daily Meds
How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
by Melody Petersen
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux