Dr. Tim Coles, New Dawn
Waking Times

The pharmaceutical industry is worth $1 trillion, half of which comes from US-based sales. The alternative health industry, by comparison, is worth just $59bn. Big Pharma bribes doctors, dominates advertising, and drives the anti-natural health narrative.

The biggest, multibillion-dollar companies are Pfizer (US), Novartis (Switzerland), Roche (Switzerland), Johnson & Johnson (J&J US), Merck & Co. (US), Sanofi (France), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK UK), AbbVie (US), Takeda (Japan), and AstraZeneca (UK-Sweden). The bulk of their profits come from prescription drugs. Big Pharma kills people in two ways: 1) pricing life-saving drugs out of the market and 2) aggressively marketing potentially dangerous products.

It often is cheaper for Big Pharma to break the law and pay fines than follow regulations that hinder profits. Every year at least one major drug company is fined for one or more of the following: bribery, drug safety, false claims, fraud, foreign corruption, off-label and unproven promotion, price-fixing, and violating consumer protection. Since 2000 in the US alone Pfizer has been fined by federal authorities 47 times totalling $4.4bn; Merck 42 times for $3bn; J&J 28 times for $3.4bn; Abbott 25 times for $2.3bn; Novartis 22 times for $1.2bn; and GSK 13 times for $3.9bn.

Profits are boosted by what Elaine Hollingsworth calls “the sickness industry.” Despite living longer, obesity, depression, dementia, increased cancer and other morbidities mean that Westerners are now less healthy than just a few generations ago. Big Pharma pathologises minor ailments and makes people dependent on drugs instead of encouraging the use of natural alternatives. The crisis of the industry’s influence over the medical profession, from reporting trial results to influencing doctors, prompted the British Medical Journal (BMJ) to launch a “Commercial Influence in Health Initiative” to expose Big Pharma’s deadly influence.

Marketing fake medicine dates back at least to 19th century America when ‘patent medicine shows’ – which promoted products that were neither patented nor medicines – promised cures for fatigue, baldness, and scrofula. Million-dollar enterprises included Ayer’s Hair Vigor and Scovill’s Sarsaparilla. Dr Larry Dossey writes that in the 1900s, medical companies sought “to inflate a common, everyday condition to the level of pathology.” This was the beginning of what the science writer Julie Deardoff calls “fictionosis.”

To prove how easy it is to invent new illnesses, doctors Ray Moynihan and David Henry claimed to have discovered a new, potentially fatal, laziness disease: “motivational deficiency disorder.” Data was supposedly supplied by one Dr Leth Argos; a pun on lethargy. Their fake research was published in the BMJ.

The term “disease mongering” was coined by Lynn Payer who identified ten methods used by Big Pharma to convince us that we are sick: abnormalising normal conditions; portraying potential consumers as sufferers; identifying common conditions to maximise target audiences; defining conditions as diseases; working with medical professionals to gain credibility; selecting issues; using selective statistics; using endpoint references; implying that technology is risk-free; and devaluing real ailments for which no cures exist.

In the 1960s, Dr Keith Connors was paid by the drug company CIBA to trial Ritalin. Connors set a precedent for trialling Big Pharma-sponsored drug studies on children via university-affiliated clinics. Connors watched this model get out of control to the point where he called misdiagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) “a national disaster.” Journalist Alan Schwarz revealed that although only 5 per cent of US children actually have ADHD, 15 per cent are diagnosed with it. This is largely due to Big Pharma pushing its products on doctors and families. Thirty per cent of all boys in the American South (i.e., the poor states) are misdiagnosed. Schwarz claims that Big Pharma paid “all the top researchers” to publish studies claiming that ADHD drugs are safe. Big Pharma then took the false data from their subsidised studies and constructed advertisements targeted at worried parents. The advert for Adderall XR, for instance, claimed that the drug boosts the child’s grades to match their intelligence. Schwarz says that “[e]very ADHD drug – Adderall XR, Concerta, Vyvanse, Metadate, you name it – has received a formal reprimand from the [US Food and Drug Administration] for false and misleading advertising.” Yet, many remain on the market.

Medical ghostwriters do not disclose their paymasters and are paid by companies to influence both policymakers and doctors. Elsie Langdon-Neuner estimates that over 10 per cent of journal publications are ghostwritten. Ghostwriting becomes apparent thanks only to whistleblowers and court orders. Researchers Healy and Cattell discovered 85 academic papers written by drug companies with the author’s name still to be determined. Fifty-five were written by Pfizer, and 30 were either funded by Pfizer or based on Pfizer’s data. Just two articles declared a conflict of interest, and every single one reported positive results. In 1999, Merck introduced the painkiller Vioxx. By 2004 it was withdrawn after being linked to cardiovascular disorders. Merck had previously hired ghostwriters despite having internal knowledge that the drug may increase the risk of thrombus formations.

Big Pharma has even paid for the publication of fake peer-reviewed journals that report positive results of drug trials without disclosing funding. Elsevier’s Australia office published six such journals between 2000-05: Australasian Journal of General Practice, Australasian Journal of Neurology, Australasian Journal of Cardiology, Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy, Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine, and Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine.

Lobbying: “They Sell Lies”

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The Sickness Industry: How Big Pharma Invents Crises & Normalises Dependency