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+--- Thread: Article What the “Big Pharma” accusation gets right (and wrong) about the drug industry (/thread-14166.html)
What the “Big Pharma” accusation gets right (and wrong) about the drug industry - C C - May 30, 2023
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-health-and-nutrition/what-big-pharma-accusation-gets-right-and-wrong-about-drug-industry
EXCERPTS: Grievances against the pharmaceutical industry are common in new media spaces. Influencers on Instagram tell us to shun drugs and embrace the “natural.” Diatribes are shared on Facebook against the profit-seeking motives of Big Pharma. Podcasts, websites, and videos try to convince us that the prescription drug business simply cannot be trusted. Joe Mercola, an osteopath who has set himself up as the one-stop shop alternative to medicine, recently declared on his site that “the drug industry has become the #1 cause of death and disability worldwide, hands down.”
This bag of grievances carries a heavy and myriad load of claims, some more believable than others. And it is precisely those more believable claims that help the conspiratorial pill go down.
[...] To those who oppose the pharmaceutical industry, the answer is to embrace nature. ... This embrace of nature, comforting though it may be, is naïve. The chemicals plants produce, often to protect themselves against predators, are not necessarily safe for us... And while the drug industry can be chastised for sometimes manipulating how clinical trials are run and reported, the world of natural remedies fares even worse...
[...] In 2013, Dr. Goldacre and many others announced the AllTrials campaign, whose aim was to ensure all clinical trials would be registered publicly and all results reported. The campaign, whose petition has been signed by over 95,000 people, is not trying to end the pharmaceutical industry, but rather to flood its arena with transparency.
Why? Because pharmaceuticals have benefitted the world [..] Some of these drugs may be overprescribed, some of their benefits may have been exaggerated, and the pricing on many of these pharmaceuticals is egregious. But we can’t deny the utility of pharmaceuticals because we don’t like the system that births them.
[...] The AllTrials campaign has made progress. The tenth largest pharmaceutical company in the world, GlaxoSmithKline, joined the campaign at its inception and pledged to register and release the results from all of its trials, going back to the company’s founding in 2000...
[...] In Bad Pharma, Dr. Goldacre makes further proposals. The very patients who participate in clinical trials testing new drugs should be told, in no uncertain terms, if the company behind the trial can hide the results if they don’t like them.
[...] As for the #1 cause of death worldwide, which Joe Mercola blames on pharma, it was actually cardiovascular disease pre-pandemic, followed by cancer. In the United States, COVID-19—the virus, not the vaccine—was the third leading cause of death in both 2020 and 2021. You may have heard that it’s medical error instead, but that is a myth based on bad approximations.
None of these numbers will sway those enthralled by the Big Pharma conspiracy theory. To them, these numbers have been manipulated, if not outright fabricated, by corrupt agencies puppeteered by the all-powerful drug industry. Their malignant distrust leads to conspiracy ideation, which backs them into a corner. If industry, government and academia are all irreparably corrupt, where do we go in the face of disease? Their answer is to turn a blind eye to the flaws of the alternative medicine and dietary supplement industry and jump in feet first... (MORE - missing details)