Pharmaceutical Industry Quotes

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People treat having a kid as somehow retiring from success. Quitting. Have you seen a baby? They’re pretty cute. Loving them is pretty easy. Smiling babies should actually be categorized by the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful antidepressant. Being happy is really the definition of success, isn’t it?
Jim Gaffigan (Dad Is Fat)
Smiling babies should actually be categorized by the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful antidepressant.
Jim Gaffigan (Dad Is Fat)
If you believe that the dollars made by the pharmaceutical industry are plowed back into research that leads to better and better medications, you probably believe in the tooth fairy as well.
Mark Vonnegut (Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir)
It is clear from the evidence presented in this book that the pharmaceutical industry does a biased job of disseminating evidence - to be surprised by this would be absurd - whether it is through advertising, drug reps, ghostwriting, hiding data, bribing people, or running educational programmes for doctors.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for ever, drug companies not surprisingly opt for the latter. Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s. Our
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Big Pharma needs sick people to prosper. Patients, not healthy people, are their customers. If everybody was cured of a particular illness or disease, pharmaceutical companies would lose 100% of their profits on the products they sell for that ailment. What all this means is because modern medicine is so heavily intertwined with the financial profits culture, it’s a sickness industry more than it is a health industry.
James Morcan (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
People treat having a kid as somehow retiring from success. Quitting. Have you seen a baby? They're pretty cute. Loving them is pretty easy. Smiling babies should actually be categorized by the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful antidepressant. Being happy is really the definition of success, isn't it?
Jim Gaffigan (Dad Is Fat)
So, if we're to make any sense of the mess that the pharmaceutical industry - and my profession - has made of the academic literature, then we need an amnesty: we need a full and clear declaration of all the distortions, on missing data, ghostwriting, and all the other activity described in this book, to prevent the ongoing harm that they still cause.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
there is essentially no difference between the vitamin industry and the pharmaceutical and biotech industries (that
Ben Goldacre (Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks)
Sadly, the pharmaceutical industry has hijacked our health care system. Big Pharma runs the studies, they control the research,
Will Bulsiewicz (Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome)
I have to laugh when people ask me if I do alternative, herbal, acupuncture or holistic medicine. 'No,' I reply. 'We do state-of-the-art medicine. In other words, we find the biochemical, nutritional and environmental causes and cures rather than blindly drugging everything. Sure, herbs are gentler, safer and more physiologic than drugs and holistic medicine attempts to incorporate many diverse modalities, etc. But there is no substitute for finding the underlying biochemical causes and cures. This is real medicine. This is where medicine should and would have been decades ago, if it had not been abducted by the pharmaceutical industry.
Sherry A. Rogers (Detoxify or Die)
The factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals... We give it to them. We have chosen, unwittingly, to fund this industry on a massive scale by eating factory-farmed animal products (and water sold as animal products) - and we do so daily.
Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
Everybody had to own and maintain a car. It was the biggest con in the Land of the Free. Well, along with the tobacco and alcohol industries, which also pumped out poison and had the nation in their grip. Pharmaceuticals and firearms would join the party in due course.
Chrissie Hynde (Reckless: My Life as a Pretender)
[I]t seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don’t understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms—its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world—and channeled into infantile fantasies. “Big pharma is evil,” goes the line of reasoning; “therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism.” This is probably not helpful.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)
At this time we should take a brife moment to mention quacks: alternative therapists who sell vitamins and homeopathy sugar pills [the latter of which, by definition, contain no active ingredients], which perform no better than placebo in fair tests, and who use even cruder marketing tricks than the ones described in this book. In these people profit at all from the justified anger that people feel towards the pharmaceutical industry, then it comes at the expense of genuinely constructive activity. Selling ineffective sugar pills is not a meaningful policy response to the regulatory failure we have seen in this book
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids. The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents1 and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines.2,3 NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.4 The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, through what are euphemistically called “user fees.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
[There is no shortage of scientific talent.] But [I am] much less optimistic about the managerial vision [of the pharmaceutical industry] to catalyse these talents to deliver the results we all want.
James Whyte Black
Of the 1,223 new medicines developed between 1975 and 1997, just 13 were for tropical diseases. Only four sprang from the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to cure humans. None were found on purpose.
A.A. Gill (The Best of A.A. Gill)
I am saddened by the fact that the billion-dollar psychotropic pharmaceutical industry is predicated on the idea that people will take a pill to treat symptoms, while the underlying disorder is ignored.
David Perlmutter (Brain Maker: The Power of Gut Microbes to Heal and Protect Your Brain for Life)
What happens to that industry—and to the shrill threats of moralists—when a female conceives only as an act of volition, when she is immune to disease, cares only for the approval of her own sort . . . and has her orientation so changed that she desires intercourse with a whole-heartedness that Cleopatra never dreamed of—but any male who tried to rape her would die so quickly, if she so grokked, that he wouldn’t know what hit him? When women are free of guilt and fear—but invulnerable? Hell, the pharmaceutical industry will be a minor casualty—what other industries, laws, institutions, attitudes, prejudices, and nonsense must give way?
Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
Roche offered a different interpretation: while it might be true that some patients appeared to be abusing Librium and Valium, these were people who were using the drug in a nontherapeutic manner. Some individuals just have addictive personalities and are prone to abuse any substance you make available to them. This attitude was typical in the pharmaceutical industry: it’s not the drugs that are bad; it’s the people who abuse them.
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
But Arthur Sackler is important to this story because he founded modern pharmaceutical advertising and, in the words of John Kallir, showed the industry “that amazing things can be achieved with direct selling and intensive direct advertising.” Years later, Purdue would put those strategies to use marketing its new opiate painkiller OxyContin.
Sam Quinones (Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic)
And it should not come as no shock that Big Food, along with the pharmaceutical industry and its scientists for hire, has promoted confusion in the media and in the mind of the American consumer to contribute to our culture of overconsumption.
Mark Bittman (Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes)
Jesus, you'd think the Black Death was sweeping the globe every three months or so...ebola, SARS, avian flu. You know how many people made money on those scares? Shit, I made my first million on useless antiradiation pills during dirty bomb scares.
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry puts its research money into the search for magic bullets in the form of chemicals because pills mean money. If energy healing could be made into tablet form, drug manufacturers would get interested quickly. Instead, they identify deviations in physiology and behavior that vary from some hypothetical norm as unique disorders or dysfunctions, and then they educate the public about the dangers of these menacing disorders. Of course, the over-simplified symptomology used in defining the dysfunctions prevalent in drug company advertisements has viewers convinced they are afflicted by that particular malady. “Do you worry? Worry is a primary symptom of ‘medical condition’ called anxiety disorder. Stop your worry. Tell your doctor you want Addictazac, the new passion-pink drug.
Bruce H. Lipton (The Biology of Belief: Unleasing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles)
Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies--plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious. Most households had someone with a little understanding of home cures, and when knowledge fell short, or more serious illness took hold, the family physician or village healer would be called in for a consultation, and a treatment would be agreed upon. In those days we took personal responsibility for our health--we took steps to prevent illness and were more aware of our bodies and of changes in them. And when illness struck, we frequently had the personal means to remedy it. More often than not, the treatment could be found in the garden or the larder. In the middle of the twentieth century we began to change our outlook. The advent of modern medicine, together with its many miracles, also led to a much greater dependency on our physicians and to an increasingly stretched healthcare system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has meant that there are indeed "cures" for most symptoms, and we have become accustomed to putting our health in the hands of someone else, and to purchasing products that make us feel good. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that technology was in some way superior to what was natural, and so we willingly gave up control of even minor health problems.
Karen Sullivan (The Complete Illustrated Guide to Natural Home Remedies)
Ovik Mkrtchan Quote: On trends and innovations in medicine. Today, new frontiers are opening up for the pharmacology and pharmaceutical industry, the correct application of which will allow entrepreneurs to reach the only important goal of medicine - maintaining the quality of life and mass health of our fellow citizens.
Ovik Mkrtchyan
EIGHTH AMENDMENT The government shall not “crack down” on drug crime while taking kickbacks from industries and companies perpetuating addiction and abuse. You can’t fight wars on drugs—only on people. The drug war kills people, not drugs. Anytime you hear a politician talk about being tough on drugs but then say nothing about pharmaceutical companies, doctors, or insurance providers needing reform as well, you call them what they are: hacks. And hit them in the fa—we mean, vote against them.
Trae Crowder (The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin' Dixie Outta the Dark)
The effect of the current WMS paradigm on the pharmaceutical industry turned out to be catastrophic (for the patient). The rash of drug recalls that has been beleaguering the pharmaceutical industry in the last twenty years is a direct manifestation of drug design based on an incomplete and often incorrect biological and clinical paradigm. Why has the pharmaceutical industry not been capable of producing new drugs that are safe and without severe side effects, that would represent true “therapeutic breakthroughs,” like we were used to seeing in the middle of the twentieth century? Why are the “blockbuster” drugs of recent decades not the safe, therapeutic “breakthroughs” our parents had come to trust in?
Mones Abu-Asab (Avicenna's Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th-Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care)
There are many people with an agenda out there, and they will ruthlessly torture statistics until they get the answer they want out of them.
Malcolm Kendrick (Doctoring Data)
Should we trust the scientists and the so called experts that created the endless parade of pharmaceutical concoctions that we see advertised on TV? ads that are soon discontinued as they're followed up by an avalanche of commercials from legal firms inviting people who are permanently damaged or worse from last week's big pharma witch's Brew to sue for damages...
Dane Wigington
One might go to the bakery, perhaps," he said. "But did you know the baker has tuberculosis? All the people here run around in a highly infectious state. The baker's daughter has tuberculosis too, it seems to have something to do with the runoff from the cellulose factory, with the steam that the locomotives have spewed out for decades, with the bad diet that people eat. Almost all of them have cankered lung lobes, pneumothorax and pneumoperitoneum are endemic. They have tuberculosis of the lungs, the head, the arms and legs. All of them have tubercular abscesses somewhere on their bodies. The valley is notorious for tuberculosis. You will find every form of it here: skin tuberculosis, brain tuberculosis, intestinal tuberculosis. Many cases of meningitis, which is deadly within hours. The workmen have tuberculosis from the dirt they dig around in, the farmers have it from their dogs and the infected milk. The majority of the people have galloping consumption. Moreover," he said, "the effect of the new drugs, of streptomycin for example, is nil. Did you know the knacker has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That her daughters have been to sanatoria on three occasions? Tuberculosis is by no means on the way out. People claim it is curable. but that's what the pharmaceutical industry says. In fact, tuberculosis is as incurable as it always was. Even people who have been inoculated against it come down with it. Often those who have it the worst are the ones who look so healthy that you wouldn't suspect they were ill at all. Their rosy faces are utterly at variance with their ravaged lungs. You keep running into people who've had to endure a cautery or, at the very least, a transverse lesion. Most of them have had their lives ruined by failed reconstructive surgery." We didn't go to the bakery. Straight home instead.
Thomas Bernhard (Frost)
To some, this split personality is a negative trait, demonstrating an identity crisis — it can’t decide what it wants to be and ends up being nothing. But tell that to the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries who have adopted Optima as their banner, utilizing its elegant serenity to label all manner of creams, ointments, and makeup. Good for: The stuff of the establishment. Tranquil beauty. Wellness.
Stephen Coles (The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces)
Cole says that the only truly deadly pandemic is “the pandemic of under treatment.” He says, “The sacred doctor–patient relationship needs to be wrenched away from Anthony Fauci and the government/medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex. Doctors need to return to their oaths. Patients need to demand from medicine their right to be treated. This year has revealed the countless flaws of a medical system that has lost its direction and soul.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Here we will see that pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
People who foster dependence on illicit drugs such as heroin are regarded among the most unscrupulous pariahs of modern civilisation. In contrast, pushers of licit drugs tend to be viewed as altruistically motivated purveyors of social good.
John Braithwaite (Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry)
The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents1 and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines.2,3 NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.4 The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry,
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Throughout the 1980s, the ideological climate shifted from one in which science was valued for its own sake or for the public interest to one in which science was valued for the profits it could generate in the private interest. Major changes in tax and patent laws were enacted, federal funding of research declined sharply, and tax benefits created a steep rise in funding from industry. The pharmaceutical industry was deregulated, and within a decade it had become one of the most profitable businesses in the United States.11
Carol Tavris (Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts)
If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business. Prisons would stand empty. The alcohol and tobacco industries would collapse, along with the junk food, cosmetic surgery, and infotainment businesses, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and the medical profession from top to bottom. Domestic abuse would become extinct, as would addiction, obesity, migraine headaches, road rage, and dandruff.
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)
Take Avastin, the world’s best-selling cancer medicine, with sales of $6 billion in 2010. It is used for the treatment of advanced cancers of the colon, breast, lung, and kidney, among others. An analysis of sixteen trials with more than ten thousand people showed that when Avastin was added to chemotherapy, more people died than when receiving chemotherapy alone.35 Thus, not only did the drug fail to prolong lives of hopeful patients for a few weeks or months, it in fact shortened them. Given the huge amount of money at stake for the pharmaceutical industry (Avastin treatment
Gerd Gigerenzer (Risk Savvy: How To Make Good Decisions)
The pharmaceutical drug industry is a half-trillion dollar per year global industry, with almost 300 billion dollars in the United States alone. The pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders rely on people to be sick, or else their stocks will plummet. There is no money to be made in health.
Joseph P. Kauffman (Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness)
There are lots of planned economies-the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk ourselves as a "free market", but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts--like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publically funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well.
Noam Chomsky (Chomsky On Anarchism)
Somewhere in the secret recesses of Pfizer, or GlaxoSmithKline, or one of the big pharmaceutical companies, I imagine there's a high security dungeon where three hunchbacked witches stir a massive industrial cauldron of crap I don't want to know about, but I must ingest on a daily basis. And the generic versions aren't even brewed by real witches.
Neal Shusterman (Challenger Deep)
Apple and apricot seeds contain a vitamin called B12, which I found to be illegal to sell in pharmacies. Now, this is very interesting. You can buy all kind of vitamins in pharmacies, but not B12. Why in the hell would the pharmaceutical industry make a vitamin that we can eat on our own, through seeds, illegal? I asked this question to employees in the pharmacies and many doctors, and they couldn't answer. They just kept looking at me as if I was trying to get ingredients to make my own synthetic drugs. For most people, what is illegal is really illegal. Most people are too stupid to think for themselves, even when my question is so obvious that they seem to have brain damage not to realize the relevance of such question.
Robin Sacredfire
Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development. Regardless of how those two figures compare to each other, the fact that they are in the same ballpark gives one pause, and this is worth mulling over in various contexts. For example, when a drug company refuses to let a developing country have affordable access to a new AIDS drug it’s because – the company says – it needs the money from sales to fund research and development on other new AIDS drugs for the future. If R&D is a fraction of the company’s outgoings, and it spends a similar amount on promotion, then this moral and practical argument doesn’t hold water quite so well.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
Were they planning to invade Europe and vaccinate the French too? Or are there more illegal immigrants in Britain than anyone has previously dared admit? Now, here's a contrary thought. Is it remotely possible that the drug industry as a whole could want to make people ill? The industry does, after all, have a vested interest in making people ill and keeping them that way - so that it can sell them more drugs. Look at it this way: a healthy population would result in the collapse of the international pharmaceutical industry. Are the ruthless men and women who run this industry determined to keep making vast amounts of money, whatever it takes, or are they determined to damage their profits and, in the end, put themselves out of business by making
Vernon Coleman (Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe And Effective Is Lying. Here's The Proof.)
Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development. Regardless of how those two figures compare to each other, the fact that they are in the same ballpark gives one pause, and this is worth mulling over in various contexts. For example, when a drug company refuses to let a developing country have affordable access to a new AIDS drug it’s because – the company says – it needs the money from sales to fund research and development on other new AIDS drugs for the future. If R&D is a fraction of the company’s outgoings, and it spends a similar amount on promotion, then this moral and practical argument doesn’t hold water quite so well. The scale of this spend is fascinating in itself, when you put it in the context of what we all expect from evidence-based medicine, which is that people will simply use the best treatment for the patient. Because when you pull away from the industry’s carefully fostered belief that this marketing activity is all completely normal, and stop thinking of drugs as being a consumer product like clothes or cosmetics, you suddenly realise that medicines marketing only exists for one reason. In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine.
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
But I was wrong about that. From the moment of my reluctant entrance into the vaccine debate in 2005, I was astonished to realize that the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids. The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents1 and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines.2,3 NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.4 The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, through what are euphemistically called “user fees.”5 When I learned that extraordinary fact, the disastrous health of the American people was no longer a mystery; I wondered what the environment would look like if the EPA received 45 percent of its budget from the coal industry!
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
I intervened to provide early treatment to over 300 positive patients, half of whom were comorbid and high risk.” Of this cohort, none were hospitalized and none died. “Early treatment of COVID-19, plain and simple, saves lives. If the medical profession had been forward thinking and hands-on, and focused on this disease, with an early outpatient multi-drug approach, knowing that COVID-19 is an inflammatory clotting disease, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved in the US.” “Never in the history of medicine,” says Dr. Cole, “has early treatment, of any patient with any disease, been so overtly neglected by the medical profession on such a massive scale.” Cole adds, “To not treat, especially in the midst of a highly transmissible, deadly disease, is to do harm.” Cole says that the only truly deadly pandemic is “the pandemic of under treatment.” He says, “The sacred doctor–patient relationship needs to be wrenched away from Anthony Fauci and the government/medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex. Doctors need to return to their oaths. Patients need to demand from medicine their right to be treated. This year has revealed the countless flaws of a medical system that has lost its direction and soul.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
This new marketplace for drugs proved profitable for all involved. Drug industry revenues topped $1 billion in 1957, the pharmaceutical companies enjoying earnings that made them “the darlings of Wall Street,” one writer observed.19 Now that physicians controlled access to antibiotics and all other prescription drugs, their incomes began to climb rapidly, doubling from 1950 to 1970 (after adjusting for inflation). The AMA’s revenues from drug advertisements in its journals rose from $2.5 million in 1950 to $10 million in 1960, and not surprisingly, these advertisements painted a rosy picture. A 1959 review of drugs in six major medical journals found that 89 percent of the ads provided no information about the drugs’ side effects.20
Robert Whitaker (Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America)
In the USA, the “corporament” exists as the: military (defense/offense) + industrial + academic (schooling – at all levels – as prison) + “corporament” entertainment (Hollywood, media, advertising/consumerism/commercialization, propaganda/psychological warfare) + judicial (defense and prosecutorial lawyers, judges, law enforcement/police, prisons) + financial (banks, accounting firms) + religion + petrochemical/pharmaceutical (drugs, antibiotics, antibacterials, vaccines, pesticides – toxins to kill or put you at “dis-ease” and drugs to “treat” you) + imperial commu-soci-capitofasdemocracism system/society/economy/Western thinking = Military-industrial-academic-“corporament” entertainment-judicial-financial-religion-petrochemical/pharmaceutical complex.
Irucka Ajani Embry (Balancing the Rift: ReCONNECTualizing the Pasenture)
free to pursue new options even if such options imply loss of profits for selected industries. The same is clearly true in pharmaceutical research, in the pursuit of alternatives to the internal-combustion engine, and in many other technological frontiers. I do not think that the development of new technologies should be placed in the control of old technologies; the temptation to suppress the competition is too great. If we Americans live in a free-enterprise society, let us see substantial independent enterprise in all of the technologies upon which our future may depend. If organizations devoted to technological innovation and its boundaries of acceptability are not challenging (and perhaps even offending) at least some powerful groups, they are not accomplishing their purpose.
Carl Sagan (Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science)
In just the last issue of Science Today there had been an article on some new psychotropic agents of the group of so-called benignimizers (the N,N-dimethylpeptocryptomides), which induced states of undirected joy and beatitude. Yes, yes! I could practically see that article now. Hedonidil, Euphoril, Inebrium, Felicitine, Empathan, Ecstasine, Halcyonal and a whole spate of derivatives. Though by replacing an amino group with a hydroxyl, you obtained instead Furiol, Antagonil, Rabiditine, Sadistizine, Dementium, Flagellan, Juggernol and many other polyparanoidal stimulants of the group of so-called phrensobarbs (for these prompted the most vicious behavior, the lashing out at objects animate as well as inanimate—and especially powerful here were the cannibal-cannabinols and manicomimetics).
Stanisław Lem (The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy)
The imprisoned population could not have grown to almost 2.5 million people in this country without our implicit assent. And we don’t even acknowledge the fact that psychiatric institutions are often an important part of the prison-industrial complex, nor do we acknowledge the intersection of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex. But the point I make is that if we had mounted a more powerful resistance in the 1980s and 1990s during the Reagan-Bush era and during the Clinton era, we would not be confronting such a behemoth today. We have had to unlearn a great deal over the course of the last few decades. We have had to try to unlearn racism, and I am speaking not only about white people. People of color have had to unlearn the assumption that racism is individual, that it is primarily a question of individual attitudes that can be dealt with through sensitivity training.
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
It’s a demonic feedback loop. Let me see if I can get this straight. Pharmaceutical companies sell mountains of drugs to factory farms, which depend on them to maintain their abnormally intensive systems. The animals develop antibiotic resistance that spreads to humans. Humans need stronger drugs. In the meantime, the animal industries flood the government with cash in exchange for subsidies. The government, invested in keeping the generous animal food lobbies flush, runs federal programs pushing people to eat increasing amounts of animal-based foods. People oblige. People get sick, requiring medication for the rest of their lives, along with expensive medical procedures. The drugs and procedures falsely assure them that they can continue to eat the food that made them sick in the first place. People continue to support the animal agriculture industry by buying their products, which pay for studies to further convince the public that animal products are an essential part of a healthy diet. People continue to support the pharmaceutical companies because they are tethered to their prescription drugs. This allows drug companies to pay for the “education” of our doctors who prescribe more drugs to us. Then pharmaceutical companies sell mountains of drugs to factory farms…
Eunice Wong (What the Health)
Here is another example that demonstrates the tightly linked interests that both cause and treat cancer. In 1978, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), one of the largest companies in the world, specializing in agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals, developed the cancer drug tamoxifen. In 1985, along with the American Cancer Society, ICI founded the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month with the aim of promoting mammography as the most effective tool against breast cancer. In 1990 Imperial Chemical Industries was accused of dumping DDT and PCBs, known carcinogens, into the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbors. Zeneca, producer of tamoxifen, demerged from ICI in 1993, and later merged with Astra AB in 1999 to form AstraZeneca. Astra AB had developed the herbicide acetochlor, classified by the EPA as a probable carcinogen. In 1997 Zeneca purchased Salick Health Care, a chain of for-profit outpatient cancer clinics. Subsequently AstraZeneca launched a major publicity campaign encouraging women to assess their risk factors for breast cancer, downplaying the dangers of tamoxifen in order to create a market for its prophylactic, or chemopreventative, use and, more recently, for the breast cancer drug Arimidex (anastrozole), approved in 2002 and used as an alternative to tamoxifen (Arimidex went off patent in 2010).
S. Lochlann Jain (Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us)
Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease.
Anonymous
The 1950s witnessed especially rapid expansion of electronic and electrical firms, of tobacco, soft drink, and food-processing companies, and of the chemical, plastics, and pharmaceutical industries. IBM blossomed as a leader in the computer business, soon to become a guiding star of the American economy.
James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
Developments during the war unleashed a fantastically growing pharmaceuticals industry and hastened research that culminated in the arrival of the first digital computer in 1946 and the transistor in 1947.7
James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
The choice to favor LDL-cholesterol over HDL-cholesterol was also probably fueled by the megabillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry, which heavily favored LDL-cholesterol as a target for therapy.
Nina Teicholz (The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet)
The funding of research projects, laboratories, and entire academic centers by the food and pharmaceutical industries is now a fact of life in modern medical research, which is why many journals require that their authors declare potential conflicts of interest. But it raises important questions, just the same.
Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
they catch initials -- STD, PMS, OCD, HIV, etc., as if MTV teamed up with KFC and licensed the Latin alphabet to the pharmaceutical industry so OTCs could replace MDs. If Romeo and Juliet were alive today, they’d be put on antidepressants, sent for counseling, and bundled off to separate boarding schools to meet socially acceptable partners with money-back guarantees.
Paula Young Lee (How to Be a Homeless Frenchman)
due to the fact that drug companies have limited interest in sponsoring clinical trials in this area, due to a limited potential for profit. There is little to no money to be made from essential oils within the pharmaceutical industry, as they are natural products derived from natural sources, and therefore, are not patentable. Patents on drug design and manufacture are the number one source of revenue in the pharmaceutical industry.
Amy Joyson (Essential Oils: The Complete Guide: Essential Oils For Beginners, Aromatherapy And Essential Oil Recipes)
According to International Diabetes Foundation, diabetes had long moved from being “a rich man’s disease”. With diabetes now affecting all the segments of Indian population, India stands on the verge of becoming “the diabetes capital of the world” with around 61 million people affected by the disease and expecting to cross 100 million people by 2030. Given the scale of diabetes epidemic, the NPPA justified its price control orders. On hearing the above, all hell broke loose in the Indian Pharma. The Indian pharma industry reacted very aggressively to this decision. Both Indian and multinationals raised concerns that “India’s investment image” had gone to the dogs and that the industry would have to shut down if the same trend continues. The Indian pharma lobbies also filed in the Delhi and Bombay High Courts, and prayed for a stay order which they were not granted, as many Supreme Court judgments had earlier justified price controls on medicines in public interest Modi’s Government rescues India’s Investment Image Given the relentless Industry demands, the Modi government decided to clip the wings of NPPA which was supposedly an expert body of regulators and withdrew their powers to pass such orders in the future. The decision of Modi government to withdraw the powers of the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) to set price caps on drugs raises serious questions on the state’s commitment to the welfare of the poor. As a result, over 108 essential drugs will now lie outside the ambit of NPPA and its internal guidelines on regulation and control of drugs would cease to apply to them. According to the government, the reasoning for withdrawal of powers of NPPA and clipping of its wings was because “it lacked legality”. Interestingly, the Modi government has found that NPPA was not legally competent to pass price control orders after over 17 years of its creation and immediately after it passed orders that would restrain pharma companies from making super normal profits.
Imran Hussain (The Chaos Republic: Reflections on the Indian State)
Designers need to recognize that, though their goal is to influence consumers, the effect upon individuals and society must be considered. They must decide whether to use their creative energies and the power of symbol to present something that benefits society or to use it in a way that is false but personally advantageous. Today the pharmaceutical industry is a multibillion dollar business driven by the consumer's misplaced fear, ignorance, desire and hope. Take the example of antidepressants being administered to teens to treat behavior problems rooted in patterns that could be changed instead with structure, discipline, motivation and diet. Pharmaceutical drugs can certainly be a useful and effective treatment, but the industry sometimes creates a false need for the sake of profit. Symbolic
Maggie Macnab (Decoding Design: Understanding and Using Symbols in Visual Communication)
Healthcare marketing is a powerful tool that is about more than profits: It can deliver the information that will add years to people’s lives. To gain market share and grow the brand is extremely important to any business, of course. But any business is all about people. As an industry, we need to grasp the opportunity to serve patients more intimately and immediately.
Scott Weintraub (RESULTS: The Future Of Pharmaceutical And Healthcare Marketing)
We are in a noble and inspiring business. The essence of our industry is to help people get better, manage their conditions, and extend their lives. What an awesome reason to get up every day and go to work!
Scott Weintraub (RESULTS: The Future Of Pharmaceutical And Healthcare Marketing)
What they need, above all, is to sincerely connect with a source of useful and relevant information. These moments represent incredible opportunities for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry to help and be of service.
Scott Weintraub (RESULTS: The Future Of Pharmaceutical And Healthcare Marketing)
Combining liquid ingestion with a bland diet is useful in this context. Eczema - Aloe vera gel is a well-tolerated alternative to  antibiotics and cortisone products. Exhaustion - Aloe vera can mobilize reserves in the body and is also used in conjunction with burnout-syndrome. Naturally, a change of lifestyle must
Peter Simons (Aloe Vera: Six thousand years of medicinal history can’t be wrong. What the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want you to know, yet was common knowledge during Cleopatra’s time.)
Joint pain - Aloe vera contains polysaccharides and amino sugars; these sugars have  preventative and mitigating properties on joint functions. They support synovial fluid renewal. Aloe vera can be used topically (gel applied directly on the joints) or internally (ingestion of gel). Liver Maladies - Over a five-to-six-week period, drinking three to five glasses of water mixed with aloe vera gel aids the liver in its detoxification process. This cure is helpful  when you’ve gone through a period of excessive alcohol consumption. Neurodermatitis - The cooling effect combined with the substances within aloe vera has been a popular treatment for patients suffering
Peter Simons (Aloe Vera: Six thousand years of medicinal history can’t be wrong. What the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want you to know, yet was common knowledge during Cleopatra’s time.)
thereby further effectuating the body’s defense mechanisms i.e. the  antiparasitic, antiviral, antibacterial and antifungal properties are underlined. For this reason, aloe vera should always be a part of a bowel cleanse.
Peter Simons (Aloe Vera: Six thousand years of medicinal history can’t be wrong. What the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want you to know, yet was common knowledge during Cleopatra’s time.)
Skeptics might argue that pharmaceutical companies will fight anything that casts their products in a dubious light - especially if it results in people using lower doses across the board - but the truth is that, for many drug companies, reliable information on the placebo effect can't come soon enough. To pass muster, a drug must outperform placebo. But a 2001 study of antidepressant drug trials showed that while drug efficacy is rising, placebo rates are rising faster. It's almost ironic; the factors behind this are many and varied, but a significant contributor is our society's knowledge of - and belief in - the power of medicines. The pharmaceutical industry's palpable success means that unless something radical happens, it could soon be, like the Red Queen, running to stand still.
Michael Brooks (13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time)
Stand back far enough, and the absurdity of this enterprise makes you wonder about the sanity of our species. But consider: When millers mill wheat, they scrupulously sheer off the most nutritious parts of the seed—the coat of bran and the embryo, or germ, that it protects—and sell that off, retaining the least nourishing part to feed us. In effect, they’re throwing away the best 25 percent of the seed: The vitamins and antioxidants, most of the minerals, and the healthy oils all go to factory farms to feed animals, or to the pharmaceutical industry, which recovers some of the vitamins from the germ and then sells them back to us—to help remedy nutritional deficiencies created at least in part by white flour. A terrific business model, perhaps, but terrible biology. Surely
Michael Pollan (Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation)
Politics, like insurance, security, pharmaceutical and religious institutions all work the same. They sell the idea of a threat along with the antidote. Marketing 101.
Tarryn Tomlinson
Washington-based industry lobby group, reported that in 1999 American biotech companies spent more than half of the sector's revenues, $11 billion in total, on research. No other industrial group spends anything near that proportion of total revenues on research, not even the major pharmaceutical companies, which are usually named as the world's biggest R&D spenders.
George Wolff (The Biotech Investor's Bible)
Pharmaceutical companies became very interested in using siRNAs as potential new drugs. Theoretically, siRNA molecules could be used to knock down expression of any protein that was believed to be harmful in a disease. In the same year that Fire and Mello were awarded their Nobel Prize, the giant pharmaceutical company Merck paid over one billion US dollars for a siRNA company in California called Sirna Therapeutics. Other large pharmaceutical companies have also invested heavily. But in 2010 a bit of a chill breeze began to drift through the pharmaceutical industry. Roche, the giant Swiss company, announced that it was stopping its siRNA programmes, despite having spent more than $500 million on them over three years. Its neighbouring Swiss corporation, Novartis, pulled out of a collaboration with a siRNA company called Alnylam in Massachusetts. There are still plenty of other companies who have stayed in this particular game, but it would probably be fair to say there’s a bit more nervousness around this technology than in the past. One of the major problems with using this kind of approach therapeutically may sound rather mundane. Nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, are just difficult to turn into good drugs. Most good existing drugs – ibuprofen, Viagra, anti-histamines – have certain characteristics in common. You can swallow them, they get across your gut wall, they get distributed around your body, they don’t get destroyed too quickly by your liver, they get taken up by cells, and they work their effects on the molecules in or on the cells. Those all sound like really simple things, but they’re often the most difficult things to get right when developing a new drug. Companies will spend tens of millions of dollars – at least – getting this bit right, and it is still a surprisingly hit-and-miss process. It’s so much worse when trying to create drugs around nucleic acids. This is partly because of their size. An average siRNA molecule is over 50 times larger than a drug like ibuprofen. When creating drugs (especially ones to be taken orally rather than injected) the general rule is, the smaller the better. The larger a drug is, the greater the problems with getting high enough doses into patients, and keeping them in the body for long enough. This may be why a company like Roche has decided it can spend its money more effectively elsewhere. This doesn’t mean that siRNA won’t ever work in the treatment of illnesses, it’s just quite high risk as a business venture.
Nessa Carey (The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance)
Pharmacies are mostly about pimping out man-made shit. Right? Right? Synthetics. There’s the stuff that saves lives, the marvels of Western medicine, beautiful benchmarks of man’s achievement and progress—penicillin and insulin and vaccines and whatnot—but more than that really there are a lot of drugs sold just to make a buck.
A.D. Aliwat (In Limbo)
Earlier in this book under the ‘Antidepressant drug dependence’ heading, I mentioned the long-standing strategy of referring to drug withdrawal problems with antidepressants being incorrectly referred to as ‘discontinuation syndrome’. I wrote that the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry have for decades engaged in systematic public misinformation and deception, designed to wrongly enhance the public image of these substances, their prescribers and manufacturers.
Terry Lynch (The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence)
Bin Laden became the first person in history to have his satellite phone targeted for attack by cruise missiles. Simultaneously, the United States destroyed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in Bin Laden’s honor. The emergence of Bin Laden as the enemy-in-chief of the United States reflects a momentous change in the nature of warfare. A single individual, albeit one with hundreds of millions of dollars, can now be depicted as a plausible threat to the greatest military power of the Industrial era.
James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
Define their industry similarly and focus on being the best within it Look at their industries through the lens of generally accepted strategic groups (such as luxury automobiles, economy cars, and family vehicles), and strive to stand out in the strategic group they play in Focus on the same buyer group, be it the purchaser (as in the office equipment industry), the user (as in the clothing industry), or the influencer (as in the pharmaceutical industry) Define the scope of the products and services offered by their industry similarly Accept their industry’s functional or emotional orientation Focus on the same point in time—and often on current competitive threats—in formulating strategy
W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
Today’s technology is heavily contaminating the environment with many behavior-disturbing, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that include dioxin, phthalates, agricultural pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), industrial solvents, pharmaceuticals, and heavy metals. Exposure to these EDCs that have estrogenic, antiestrogenic, and antiandrogenic properties has been shown to perturb the same stress pathways that provoke a disease response. (Vaiserman 2014)
Bruce H. Lipton (The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles)
In his report, Dr. Pūras warned that power and decision-making in mental health are concentrated in the hands of ‘biomedical gatekeepers’, particularly those representing biological psychiatry. Dr. Puras told the United Nations that these gatekeepers, supported by the pharmaceutical industry, maintain this power by adhering to two outdated concepts: that people experiencing mental distress and diagnosed with ‘mental disorders’ are dangerous, and that biomedical interventions are medically necessary in many cases. According to Dr. Puras, ‘these concepts perpetuate stigma and discrimination, as well as the practices of coercion that remain widely accepted in mental health systems today
Terry Lynch (The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence)
The corporate controlled government is pursuing policies that will increase the profits of the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries at the expense of the health and safety of the mass population.
Steven Magee
In this new world of information at our fingertips, it takes a concerted effort to keep the public misinformed regarding important matters that concern them. There are several ways in which this can be done. One way is to consistently feed the public with misinformation and untruths as if these are truths, presented with sufficient authority and certainty to persuade even the most reflective of people. This is the method that has been adopted by the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry in relation to mental health for over half a century. This strategy has been remarkably successful at systematically misinforming the public about the true nature of emotional and mental health problems and their alleviation.
Terry Lynch (The Systematic Corruption of Global Mental Health: Prescribed Drug Dependence)
It is no longer fight or flight, it is now - fight, flight, or create. War and running away are left in the corner, creativity sprouts wings and flys with away with love.
Benjamin Aubrey Myers
What design principles can nature’s thriving networks teach us for creating thriving economies? In two words: diversity and distribution. If large-scale actors dominate an economic network by squeezing out the number and diversity of small and medium players, the result will be a highly unequal and brittle economy. This certainly sounds familiar, given the current scale of corporate concentration across many industrial sectors, from agribusiness, pharmaceuticals and the media to the banks that are deemed too big to fail.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
Like all best supporting actors, the state may also step centre stage, taking entrepreneurial risks where the market and commons can’t or won’t reach. The extraordinary success of tech companies such as Apple is sometimes held up as evidence of the market’s dynamism. But Mariana Mazzucato, an expert in the economics of government-led innovation, points out that the basic research behind every innovation that makes a smart phone ‘smart’—GPS, microchips, touchscreens and the Internet itself—was funded by the US government. The state, not the market, turns out to have been the innovating, risk-taking partner, not ‘crowding out’ but ‘dynamising in’ private enterprise—and this trend holds across other high-tech industries too, such as pharmaceuticals and biotech.42 In the words of Ha-Joon Chang, ‘If we remain blinded by the free market ideology that tells us only winner-picking by the private sector can succeed, we will end up ignoring a huge range of possibilities for economic development through public leadership or public-private joint efforts.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
Our pursuit of instant gratifications and instant progress has been leading us down the path of mental deterioration and we seem to be completely unaware of it. And if this continues, then soon serenity will become the most expensive commodity in the market - which will be sold to everyone by the pharmaceutical industry in the form of pills and treatments.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gospel of Technology)
Basic rule of the pharmaceutical industry: you don’t cure the patients. You give them a watered-down version of it so the symptoms are bearable and they keep coming back for more, forever.
Regine Abel (Blind Fate (Veredian Chronicles, #2))
In 2018, the Danish government, under pressure from pharma, fired Peter Gøtzsche from Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen. His findings about the HPV vaccine threatened the pharmaceutical industry’s earnings.
Kent Heckenlively (Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science)
These are good people, they have great ideas. How come for the last 45 years wages have been stagnant for the middle class, how come we have the highest rate of childhood poverty, how come 45 million people still have student debt,how com 3 people own more wealth than the bottom half of america? And here is the answer. Nothing will change unless we have the guts to take on wall street, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry. If we don't have the guts to take them on we'll continue to have plans, we'll continue to have talks but the rich will get richer and everybody else will be struggling.
-BERNIE SANDERS 2020 CNN DEMOCRATIC DEBATE
Indeed, the chemical imbalance story encourages us to think of ourselves as governed by the chemicals in our brains, with this chemical control seemingly disconnected from the many life events, that, at least according to past understandings of human nature, could be understood to dramatically alter one’s moods. We are mechanistic machines, and if our mood molecules are out of balance, with this imbalance presented to us as a “disease,” then it makes perfect sense to think that a solution must lie in a pill that fixes that imbalance. But is the claim true? Did scientific investigations find that this is indeed so? Every society would do itself a favor if it publicly sought to answer that question. In this book, Terry Lynch has done just that. And in so doing, he has told, step by step, how psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry constructed and sold a false story to the public. By the end of this book, readers will be asking a new question: How could this falsehood have endured for so long? As Terry Lynch writes, there was never good scientific reason to believe that antidepressants fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain. The hypothesis that this might be so arose from an understanding of how an antidepressant acted on the brain. Once researchers discovered that an antidepressant increased the activity of serotonin in the brain, they hypothesized that perhaps people suffering from depression had too little serotonin. However, researchers then investigated whether this was so, and discovered that it was not. Even by the early 1980s, researchers were saying that it didn’t appear that a deficit in serotonin activity was a cause of depression.
Terry Lynch (Depression Delusion Volume One: The Myth of the Brain Chemical Imbalance (Depression Delusion Book Series 1))
This is where conspiracy theories come in handy. It’s not just that vaccines cause autism; it’s that the medical and pharmaceutical industries are getting rich by destroying everyone’s families. It’s not just that pro-choicers have a different view on the biological status of a fetus; it’s that they’re soldiers sent by Satan to destroy good Christian families. It’s not just that climate change is a hoax; it’s that it’s a hoax created by the Chinese government to slow the U.S. economy and take over the world.37
Mark Manson (Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope)
In addition to a successful 35-year career in the pharmaceutical industry, Carolyn Smith-Barrett is passionate about giving back as a mentor and coach. She enjoys mentoring other professionals who are seeking to develop leadership skills and advance their careers and has also mentored veterans looking to transition into civilian life.
Carolyn Smith-Barrett
One Stanford op-ed in particular was picked up by the national press and inspired a website, Stop the Brain Drain, which protested the flow of talent to Wall Street. The Stanford students wrote, The financial industry’s influence over higher education is deep and multifaceted, including student choice over majors and career tracks, career development resources, faculty and course offerings, and student culture and political activism. In 2010, even after the economic crisis, the financial services industry drew a full 20 percent of Harvard graduates and over 15 percent of Stanford and MIT graduates. This represented the highest portion of any industry except consulting, and about three times more than previous generations. As the financial industry’s profits have increasingly come from complex financial products, like the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that ignited the 2008 financial meltdown, its demand has steadily grown for graduates with technical degrees. In 2006, the securities and commodity exchange sector employed a larger portion of scientists and engineers than semiconductor manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. The result has been a major reallocation of top talent into financial sector jobs, many of which are “socially useless,” as the chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority put it. This over-allocation reduces the supply of productive entrepreneurs and researchers and damages entrepreneurial capitalism, according to a recent Kauffman Foundation report. Many of these finance jobs contribute to volatile and counter-productive financial speculation. Indeed, Wall Street’s activities are largely dominated by speculative security trading and arbitrage instead of investment in new businesses. In 2010, 63 percent of Goldman Sachs’ revenue came from trading, compared to only 13 percent from corporate finance. Why are graduates flocking to Wall Street? Beyond the simple allure of high salaries, investment banks and hedge funds have designed an aggressive, sophisticated, and well-funded recruitment system, which often takes advantage of [a] student’s job insecurity. Moreover, elite university culture somehow still upholds finance as a “prestigious” and “savvy” career track.6
Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
The US dietary guidelines were the first ever to inform the general public about what should not be eaten. Specifically, we were told to avoid fat, especially saturated fat, and to replace dietary saturated fats with carbohydrates and polyunsaturated ‘vegetable’ (actually seed) oils. Failure to do so, we were warned, would cause us all to die of heart attacks, because cholesterol, we were told, causes coronary heart disease. Instead, the advice drove us down the road to obesity and the much more severe form of arterial disease caused by T2DM. Some have described this monumental error as the greatest scam in the history of modern medicine. The fallout has produced some very big ‘winners’, specifically those pharmaceutical companies that have benefited from the sale of the largely ineffective statin drugs, and the processed-food industry, dominated by 10 companies that produce the ‘displacing foods of modern commerce
Tim Noakes (Lore of Nutrition: Challenging conventional dietary beliefs)
Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of planned economies―the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk about ourselves as a "free market," but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts―like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publicly-funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well. And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the big economic successes―you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph of free-market democracy—they don't even have the most remote relation to free-market democracy: formally speaking they're fascist, they're state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates. That's precisely fascism, it's not the free market. Now, that kind of planned economy "works," in a way―it produces at least. Other kinds of command economies don't work, or work differently: for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety-net for people. But all of these systems have been very anti-democratic―like, in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers involved in any decision-making process.
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
In other words, that harmless Aleve or Advil is the pharmaceutical industry’s gateway drug,
Steven R. Gundry (The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain)