Big Pharma spends $30 billion a year on marketing

The unholy alliance between Big Pharma and the medical profession

I've been in the "business" since the late 60s and I can attest to the facts presented in this article. Dr. Barbara Roberts is a cardiac specialist, on the payroll of a cardiac clinic in a hospital setting. She's been the recipient of gifts and trips - and numerous stipends for her lectures (as long as they toe the company line of the drug makers who paid her fees).


Dr. Roberts is blowing the whistle here and quotes a premier bioethicist, “When a gift or a gesture of any size is bestowed, it imposes on the recipient a sense of indebtedness. The obligation to directly reciprocate, whether or not the recipient is directly conscious of it, tends to influence behavior.”  (Daniel Katz - a person whose texts I studied in graduate school at Loyola University of Chicago).


She is the author of The Truth About Statins.


The drug makers spend approximately $100 per year on every man, woman, and child in the United States. There is no doubt those costs are handsomely recovered from the sales of drugs, legal ones that we all consume too many of.


When I was in pharmacy school, we were alarmed when we found people taking 3 or more different drugs. Today, the average is about 10 and people over 65 take an average of 15.