It used to be joked that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is. These days, the opportunist is Big Pharma, which raises your insurance premiums and taxes while providing you “low-priced” drugs that you paid for.
How did pharma get a third of the United States to take antidepressants, statins, and purple pills [Nexium]? By selling the diseases of depression, high cholesterol, and gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD!
Supply-driven marketing, also known as “have drug, need disease and patients,” not only turns the nation into pill-popping hypochondriacs, it distracts from pharma’s drought of real drugs for real medical problems.
Of course not all diseases are Wall Street pleasers. To be a true blockbuster disease, a condition must meet certain criteria:
• Really exist but have huge diagnostic wiggle room and no clear-cut test
• Be potentially serious with silent symptoms said to only get worse if untreated
• Be under-recognized, under-reported, and with barriers to treatment
• Explain hitherto vague health problems a patient has had
• Have a catchy name—ED, ADHD, RLS, Low T, or IBS—and instant medical identity
• Need an expensive new drug that has no generic equivalent
Here are some potential blockbuster diseases Pharma hopes you get in 2012.
Adult ADHD
Everyday problems labeled as depression sailed pharma through the last two decades. You weren’t sad, mad, scared, confused, remorseful, grieving, or even exploited. You were depressed, and there was a pill for that.
But depression peaked just like the Atkins diet and the macarena. Luckily there is adult ADHD, which has doubled in women 45 to 65 and tripled in men and women 20 to 44, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Like depression, adult ADHD is a catchall category. “Is It ADHD or Menopause?” asks an article in ADDitude, a magazine devoted exclusively to ADHD. “ADD and Alzheimer’s: Are These Diseases Related?” asks another article in the same magazine.
“I’m Depressed. Could it be ADHD?” says an ad in Psychiatric News, showing a pretty but pouting young woman. “Adults with ADHD were nearly two times more likely to have been divorced,” says another ad, called “Broken Promises,” in the same publication, exhorting doctors to “screen for ADHD.”
Adults with ADHD are often, “less responsible, reliable, resourceful, goal-oriented, and self-confident and they find it difficult to define, set, and pursue meaningful internal goals,” says an article co-written by Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, M.D., who is credited with putting “pediatric bipolar disorder” on the map.
They “show tendencies to being self-absorbed, intolerant, critical, unhelpful, and opportunistic,” and “tend to be inconsiderate of other people’s rights or feelings,” says the article, describing most people’s brother-in-laws.
Adults with ADHD will have trouble keeping a job and get worse without treatment says WebMD, tapping into the second requirement of a blockbuster disease—symptoms that worsen without pills.
“Adults with ADHD may have difficulty following directions, remembering information, concentrating, organizing tasks, or completing work within time limits,” says WebMD, whose original partner was Eli Lilly. “If these difficulties are not managed appropriately, they can cause associated behavioral, emotional, social, vocational, and academic problems.”
How did pharma get 5 million kids and now maybe their parents on ADHD meds? Ads on a 26-by-20-foot screen in Times Square ask, “Can’t focus? Can’t sit still? Could you or your child have ADHD?”
Convincing adults they aren’t sleep deficient or bored but have ADHD is only half the battle. Pharma also has to convince kids who grew up diagnosed as having ADHD not to quit their meds, says Mike Cola of Shire, which makes the ADHD drugs Intuniv, Adderall XR, Vyvanse, and the Daytrana patch.
“We know that we lose a significant number of patients in the late teen years, early 20s as they kind of fall out of the system based on the fact that they no longer go to a pediatrician,” Cola says.
A Shire ad in Northwestern University’s student paper this year takes the issue head-on: “I remember being the kid with ADHD. Truth is, I still have it,” says the headline splashed across a photo of Adam Levine, the lead singer of Maroon 5. “It’s your ADHD. Own it” is the tagline.
Of course, pushing speed on college kids (or anyone for that matter) isn’t too hard. Why else do meth dealers say, “First taste free”? But pharma is so eager to retain its pediatric ADHD market, it has funded for-credit courses for doctors like “Identifying, Diagnosing, and Managing ADHD in College Students,” and “ADHD in College: Seeking and Receiving Care During the Transition From Child to Adult.”
To make sure no one thinks ADHD is a made-up disease, WebMD shows color-enhanced PET scans of the brains of a normal person and an ADHD sufferer (flanked by an ad for Vyvanse). But it is doubtful the scans are really different, says psychiatrist Phillip Sinaikin, M.D., author of Psychiatryland. And even if they are, it still proves nothing.
“The crux of the matter is that there is simply no definitive understanding of how neuronal activity is related to subjective consciousness, the age-old unsolved body-mind relationship,” Sinaikin told AlterNet.
“We have not advanced beyond phrenology and this article in WebMD is simply the worst kind of manipulation by the drug industry to sell their overpriced products, in this case a desperate effort by Shire to maintain a market share when Adderall goes generic.”
Rheumatoid Arthritis
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a serious and dangerous disease. But so are pharma’s immune-suppressing biologic drugs like Remicade, Enbrel, and Humira, which are pushed for treating it. While RA attacks the body’s tissues, leading to inflammation of the joints, surrounding tissues, and organs, immune suppressors can invite cancers, lethal infections, and activate TB.
In 2008, the FDA announced that 45 people on Humira, Enbrel, Remicade, and Cimzia died from fungal diseases. The FDA also investigated Humira’s links to lymphoma, leukemia, and melanoma in children.
This year, the FDA warned that the drugs can cause “a rare cancer of white blood cells” in young people, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) warned of “potentially fatal Legionella and Listeria infections” from the use of these drugs.
This year, the FDA warned that the drugs can cause “a rare cancer of white blood cells” in young people.
Immune suppressing drugs are also hazardous to the pocketbook. One injection of Remicade costs up to $2,500; one month of Enbrel costs $1,500; and a year on Humira costs up to $20,000.
Previously, RA was diagnosed from the presence of rheumatoid factor in the blood and inflammation. Thanks to pharma’s supply-driven marketing, stiffness and pain are all that are required for the diagnosis today. (Athletes and people born before 1970—the line forms to the left!)
In addition to diagnostic wiggle room and a catchy name, RA has other blockbuster-disease requirements. It will “only get worse” if untreated, says WebMD, and it is often “misdiagnosed” and under-reported, says Abbott’s Heather Mason because “people often don’t know what they have for a while.”
It’s so serious a disease, it costs over $20,000 a year to treat but so subtle you may not know you have it? RA sounds like a blockbuster.
Fibromyalgia
Another under-reported disease is fibromyalgia, characterized by widespread, unexplained bodily pain. Fibromyalgia is “almost a textbook definition of an unmet medical need,” says Ian Read of Pfizer, which makes the first drug to be approved for fibromyalgia, the seizure pill Lyrica.
Pfizer gave nonprofit groups $2.1 million in 2008 to “educate” doctors about fibromyalgia and financed PSAs (pharma service announcements) depicting sufferers describing their symptoms without mentioning a drug. Lyrica now makes $3 billion a year.
Still, Lyrica has to fight Cymbalta, the first antidepressant to be approved for fibromyalgia. Eli Lilly prepositioned Cymbalta for the physical “pain” of depression in a campaign called “Depression Hurts” before the fibromyalgia approval. Treatment of a fibromyalgia patient with either Lyrica or Cymbalta hovers around $10,000, medical journals say.
Pharma and Wall Street may be happy with fibromyalgia drugs, but patients are not. On Askapatient.com, the drug-rating website, patients on Cymbalta report chills, jaw problems, electrical “pings” in their brains, and eye problems. This year, four patients reported the urge to kill themselves, a frequently reported side effect of Cymbalta.
Lyrica users on Askapatient.com report memory loss, confusion, extreme weight gain, hair loss, impaired driving, disorientation, twitching, and worse. Some patients take both drugs.
From: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/health/seven-diseases-big-pharma-hopes-you-get-in-2012-186762.html
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