Writing in the Washington Post, Melody Petersen reviews OUR DAILY MEDS by Shannon Brown link here. Little in the review is new to readers of this blog, but it is still eyeopening to read the history of Big Pharma. The review's begins, "Once upon a time there was an industry called pharma that was interested in doing well and doing good. Run by doctors and chemists, drug companies employed battalions of researchers whose scientific efforts resulted by mid-century in a flood of life-saving drugs, including antibiotics, vaccines, tranquilizers, antihistamines and steroids. As George Merck, president of the company founded by his father, put it in 1950, "We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow. . . ."

The review goes on to trace the development of Big Pharma's business model:

Develop or acquire a patented drug;

Forget further R&D as long as sales increase;

Identify a disease, real or imagined, which it treats but preferably doesn't cure for fear of cutting off a lifetime of sales;

Brand it for that condition;

Advertise the hell out of it, as ads are more important to sales than efficacy or developing new drugs;

Develop close competitor drugs to those which are very successful, like the more-than-10 anti-cholestoral drugs;

Ignore drugs for diseases which the rich world doesn't get.

There is more to the story, but that is enough for starters.

Here we have a hugely important and expensive industry that starts out with IP and then twists it to maximize profit. Business school students would regard that as highly innovative, but for the most part, what innovation there is doesn't benefit the consumer. The best I can say for it is that the ads pay for evening television news check them out.