Business Research

More than 90 percent of new drugs fail to make it into the public's hands. That 90 percent is also proven too toxic to even get past actual patient testing. Distinguished medical professionals find out if new medicines are toxic through various testings of which include human testing. Most of these test subjects include medical students as well as prisoners. Medical experiments have been conducted in prisoners for years. Not all of these tests however were properly practiced. Attached to these experiments are either great rewards for the medical community or unlawful controversy. The World Medical Association in 1961 failed to propose that prisoners should not be used as the subject of experiments. This was mostly because the experiments performed were unlawful and

When studies were shown not to support the film’s argument, they were occasionally argued to be irrelevant due to interested manufacturers funding (and possibly manipulating) the data within the studies for monetary gains. An example is when Dr. Mercola that the 90 studies that find aspartame to be harmless by Ralph G. Walton and the like, 90 percent of them are funded by corporate interest and that any independent studies find the exact opposite, insinuating fowl play in the

Additionally human medical research studies often targeted those who came to public teaching institutions desperately seeking free medical treatment and who generally looked up to doctors and experimenters as experts in the field who were there to help them. While this motivation may seem logical, it is often faulty as many human medical research studies throughout history demonstrate that the motivation of medical researches is often not the care of those currently suffering from a particular condition but the future returns on the cures or medical treatments that may be discovered during the study (McKie). As with many such unethical studies, the participants often do not give consent and are not informed of known dangers to the procedure, medications or lack of treatment. The use of individuals who are poor, uneducated, and lack medical insurance in combination with prestigious university research institutions and the white coated, well-educated researchers motivated by discoveries of cures on the scientific frontier results in abuses of individuals.

They deceived them for 40 years by making them think they were receiving treatments for “bad blood” when in fact they were withholding treatment. However, in present day, researchers must comply with guidelines and undergo a review panel to be approved. Participants must be informed of the study and its risks as well as the right to decline participation at any given time. The subjects must also be competent and be able to understand what is happening in the experiment as well as its

Washington, H. A. (2011). Flacking for Big Pharma: Drugmakers Don't Just Compromise Doctors; They Also Undermine the Top Medical Journals and Skew the Findings of Medical Research. (cover story). American Scholar, 80(3), 22. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

The first, and maybe most important, mistake made by these researchers was the fact that they did not tell their research subjects what was actually happening. They were promised treatment, but instead were not treated at all. Public health services even went to extreme lengths to make sure the subjects

Drug companies claim most of their profits are reinvested to develop new drugs, yet the industry has refused to show government auditors its books (Clemente, 2004). In addition, pharmaceutical companies do not acknowledge the financial contribution of the government which funds research with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Cancer Institute, and other public agencies. "The Federal Government, mainly through the NIH, funds about 36% of all U.S. medical research. . . Of the 21 most important drugs introduced between 1965 and 1992, 15 were developed using knowledge and techniques from federally funded research" (Barlett & Steele, 2004). Pfizer 's profits of $9.1 billion for 2002 were 28 percent, twice which of General Electric, nine times more than Wal-Mart and 31 times more than General Motors (Barlett & Steele, 2004). "Drugmakers ' net profit margins averaged 19 percent last year vs. 7.5 percent for all the companies in the S&P 500. The seven largest U.S. drugmakers made $31.2 billion last year" (Gibbs, 2003). This supports the findings of a recent online survey conducted by Weiss Ratings, Inc.: "forty-two percent of consumers polled blame pharmaceutical companies ' excessive profits for high prescription drug costs" ("Drug," 2004).

The purpose of this paper is to address the state of prescription drugs within today’s society, as it relates to areas of development, approval, cost, and competition. There will be look at the benefits, such as continued research may lead to the development of new breakthrough prescription drugs. On the opposite end, there is an in-depth look at the controversies that surround the prescription drug industry. These include the many, often severe side effects that accompany many of these drugs, and how they are allowed to make it past FDA approval, as well as, a look at the rising cost of prescription drugs. Tied with the increasing cost, is a comparative look at the similarities and differences of brand name drugs versus their

(Adams M. , 2013). ?Before a drug is introduced, regulators demand controlled clinical trials (on carefully selected homogeneous samples); but, once a drug is widely in service, they fail to engage in systematic monitoring of what happens in everyday clinical practice, with ?real? patients.? (May, 2004).

The author believes that biomedical research is the way of better understanding medicine and without randomized clinical trials the field of medicine will have insufficient information. He argues that randomized clinical trials are the most scientifically sound and ethically correct means of evaluating new therapies. The belief of a physician being unethical when running randomized clinical trials is rejected by this article because previous trials on patients can have a better outcome on future patients. This article stresses that randomized clinical trials must be carefully designed that has an intended purpose of gathering data to improve the wellbeing of patients. If the patient is to endure a clinical trial he/she must be properly informed of the risks of the trial and the health of the patient should be high priority. Overall this article explains the importance of randomized clinical trials and debunks the idea of randomized clinical trials as being unethical. This article uses a utilitarian point of view and gives reasons why these trials can be in the best interests for both the patient and society.

According to The United States of America – An Overmedicated Society, “…a drug company can simply ‘put on the shelf’ a drug study that does not show that the drug they studied was effective.” There isn’t any ban on not publishing a study, and research has found that published drug studies show more variation in condition improvement than most unpublished studies (Overmedicated Society). This is because almost all drug studies with positive results are published, but only one-tenth of negative or uncertain studies are published (Overmedicated Society). As The United States of America – An Overmedicated Society states, “Advertisement doesn’t even inform you about precisely what the pill supposedly does.” Pending drugs aren’t normally tested as long as they should be, so they sometimes don’t show the long-term symptoms (Overmedication). Studies are even sometimes conducted to make a medicine seem better than it really is, on account of the fact that most studies are being conducted by the drug company itself, who wants the study to come back positive. The United States of America – An Overmedicated Society also asserts the fact that “Medication side effects are the 4th leading cause of death in the US annually.” Furthermore, many experts are being bribed by pharmaceutical companies to recommend their products to other physicians (Overmedicated Society). In fact, as Pill Nation USA remarks, “…8% of doctors feeling strongly pressured to prescribe the advertised drug.” Indeed, the falsehood of pharmaceutical companies, especially by omission, has a huge role in American’s use of

For example, Vedula (2012) notes that FDA guidelines state pharmaceutical companies can use peer-reviewed articles to publicize evidence of a drug’s effectiveness for off-label uses, as long as a number of conditions are met—perhaps the most essential of which is that “the information disseminated must not be false or misleading.” However, Vedula continues, there is no unyielding regulation that all research findings have to be published. Therefore, a company can still choose to selectively disseminate favorable findings. His article concludes that there is now a copious amount of evidence that suggests selective reporting of study results, based on the strength and direction of findings, is performed extensively by the pharmaceutical industry.

Another question we come across in this case is "Should these pharmaceutical companies have a moral obligation to make the drugs available to the people who they performed clinical trials on?". Again we clearly should see that the pharmaceutical companies should allow the access of these drugs to the people that are being used to test their products. There is a huge risk for these people who are taking a new drug, not knowing exactly what the outcome can be and are merely treated as guinea pigs for the

Thousands of people voluntarily enroll in clinical drug trials every year. They are putting their health and safety at risk by participating in a drug trial. One would think they would be doing this to promote medical advancement, but in all actuality, it is for the high dollar amounts they receive for compensation. People that frequently enroll in drug trials are often called “guinea pigs.” The monetary amount people are paid can go as high seventy-five hundred dollars. The more invasive the procedure is the higher the compensation. These “Guinea pigs” are required to pay taxes on the money they do make. (Elliott, 2008)

The pharmaceutical industry confronts several dilemmas every year. Most of these dilemmas revolve around money or whether or not to sacrifice now for a bigger payoff in the end concerning money and/or lives. Pharmaceutical companies tend to use shortcuts that create ethical problems. Drug companies have spent millions/billions of dollars in research, and they obviously want to see