Drugs firms 'creating ills for every pill'

[Guest guest]

>http:

//observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5161925-102285,00.html

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>Drugs firms 'creating ills for every pill'

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>Expensive new medicines are oversold when cheaper therapies or

>prevention would work better, say MPs

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>Gaby Hinsliff, political editor

>Sunday April 3, 2005

>Observer

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>The power of Britain's multi-billion-pound drugs industry has turned

>this country into an over-medicalised society that believes in a pill

>for every ill, a Commons inquiry will claim this week.

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>The report will say that the billions of pounds poured into researching

>and promoting new drugs have fuelled an over-emphasis on medicinal cures

>at the expense of cheaper and better therapies, or simple prevention.

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>The MPs heard evidence of 'disease-mongering' drugs firms effectively

>inventing diseases for which they could then sell treatments, with

>relatively normal behaviour - from mild depression to low female sex

>drive - re-labelled as conditions for which drugs were supposedly

>necessary.

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>Lord Warner, the health minister responsible for medicines, admitted to

>the inquiry: 'I have some concerns that sometimes we do, as a society,

>wish to put labels on things which are just part and parcel of the human

>condition.'

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>The report from the Commons health select committee is also expected to

>criticise the secretive process of licensing medicines in Britain,

>following several safety scares in which so-called 'wonder drugs' have

>turned out to have serious side effects.

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>The common anti-depressant Seroxat was recently linked to an increased

>risk of suicide in teenagers, while the widely prescribed arthritis drug

>Vioxx was withdrawn last year over links to fatal heart attacks and

>strokes.

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>Labour's election manifesto is now expected to include a pledge to

>overhaul the drug licensing regime. Expert members of the government's

>medicines regulator will be banned from holding financial interests in

>drug firms to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

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>The seven-month inquiry follows complaints from patients' groups and

>senior doctors that the interests of the industry are distorting health

>care priorities.

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>Prescriptions for Seroxat tripled after it was licensed for mild

>depression, while The Observer revealed earlier this year that it was

>being marketed to doctors as a treatment for ill-defined 'social anxiety

>disorders'.

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>Drug firms are banned from advertising directly to patients in Britain,

>or offering bribes to doctors to prescribe a certain brand. However

>campaigners say the industry has discovered ways of 'guerrilla'

>promotion, including generously funding medical charities - which, the

>inquiry heard, raises the risk of them becoming its 'unwitting foot

>soldiers'.

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>One mental health charity, Depression Alliance, receives almost 80 per

>cent of its funding from drugs companies, while Arthritis Care received

>money from Merck Sharp and Dohme, maker of Vioxx.

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>Paul Flynn, the Labour MP who has campaigned to expose the influence of

>the industry and gave evidence to the committee, said it deserved an

>'absolute hammering' for its practices. 'The whole of society has been

>conditioned to believe that we are dependent on medicines. I have had

>arthritis all my life and I haven't taken anything for it - I believe in

>exercise, swimming and walking.'

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>The inquiry heard of drugs marketed to doctors in papers written for

>medical journals ostensibly by independent experts which are, in fact,

>ghostwritten by the firms, which pay academics to lend their names to

>the reports.

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>Dr Richard Horton, editor of leading journal, the Lancet, disclosed he

>had been effectively offered bribes to publish papers showing drugs in a

>favourable light. He said firms offered to buy 'hundreds of thousands of

>reprints' - which could be worth up to half a million pounds to his

>magazine - if their paper went in.

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>However, a spokesman for the Association of the British Pharmaceutical

>Industry denied fuelling dependence on drugs: 'I don't think we have

>ever suggested that medicines are the only answer to health problems.

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>'It is always down to the doctor to determine whether there is a real

>medical condition. It is right we should be informing prescribers of

>what medicines can be relevant.'

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>When the solution becomes the problem

>Reclassification of the cholesterol-lowering drug simvastatin as an

>over-the-counter medicine for preventing heart disease is a classic

>example of the pharmaceutical industry's worrying influence, experts

>warned yesterday.

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>The editor of The Drug and Therapeutic Bulletin , Dr Ike Iheanacho, said

>long-term trials had not been carried out to test the drug's efficacy or

>risks in those considered to be in moderate danger of having heart

>problems. As people could be sold Zocor Heart-Pro, the drug by its brand

>name, without detailed assessment of their health, there was also a

>danger that those at high risk of having heart attacks were getting

>inadequate treatment.

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>'The absence of any long-term efficacy trails for Zocor Heart-Pro in the

>target group means that people are, in effect, being used as guinea

>pigs,' Iheanacho said.

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>Another example is provided by the anti-depressant Seroxat. In November,

>The Observer revealed that Seroxat's manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)

>was trying to market it as a cure for relatively mild forms of

>depression, despite the fact that the the drug has been linked to

>suicide. 'The thrust was to move sales beyond the $1 billion to the $2bn

>mark by pushing it to people who were not clinically depressed,'

>Professor David Healy told the select committee, while Richard Brook,

>chief executive of Mind, the mental health charity, told the MPs that

>the plan was 'all about developing

>new conditions for that drug'.

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>At the same time, other options are ignored. As The Observer pointed out

>last week, Britain's GPs have largely ignored the advice of the Chief

>Medical Office that many depressed patients should be prescribed

>exercise programmes rather than pills.

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>Robin McKie

>Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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