Money may not buy happiness, but it can pay for you to avoid the hassle of a doctors or hospital waiting room. Well-off executives and their families increasingly are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for high-end medical services. ”Wealthy people want to have a little exclusivity and want better service than they can get at their normal health-care facility, and they’re willing to pay for it,” said Rick Flynn, principal and head of the Family Office Group with Rothstein Kass, a Roseland, New Jersey-based accounting and consulting firm. Concierge medicine, a doctor on a retainer, in other words,...
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The Independent (UK) today reports on the story that SPGB previously reported upon in June of how the pharmaceutical industry preys on the poor to trial new drugs. Clinical trials for new pharmaceutical drugs are a sensitive business. But tests can be expensive. If they go wrong, companies are liable for compensation. No surprise, then, that in a globalised economy this business – like many others – is being outsourced to countries such as India where costs are far lower. In a country of 1.2 billion people, where more than half the population lives in chronic poverty according to a recent UN...
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Mental illness in America has become an established epidemic. So-called miracle drugs like Prozac are taken by 11% of the population – and Prozac is only one of the 30 available antidepressants on the market. Antidepressants are accompanied by anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs. Xanax, America’s leading anti-anxiety medication, is so ubiquitous that Xanax generates more revenue than Tide detergent. Anti-psychotics drugs alone net the pharmaceutical industry at least $14.6bn dollars a year. Psycho-pharmaceuticals are the most profitable sector of the industry, which makes it one of the most profitable business sectors in the world. Americans are less than 5%...
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Poisoned for Pennies – The economics of toxics and precaution: principal author Frank Ackerman with Lisa Heinzerling, Rachel Massey, Wendy Johnecheck, and Elizabeth Stanton (2008) The purpose of Ackerman’s book is to expose the weaknesses of the “cost-benefit method” of economic analysis, which has been promoted heavily since the Reagan administration, and increasingly used in this capacity since then, as the best way of determining whether a particular attempt at instituting public health safety or environment regulation of society, business, and industry should be allowed to proceed. Ackerman, who has spent the 21st century devoting his writing and...
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Each year half a million people in India and other tropical countries catch visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever (kala-azar). Infected by the bite of a sand fly, they rapidly weaken and lose weight before dying with painfully swollen livers and spleens. A safe and effective treatment for black fever was found long ago: the antibiotic paromomycin (cure rate 95 percent). But the firm that developed it — Pharmacia, a precursor of Pfizer — shelved it in the 1960s for lack of a “viable market.” What that means is that the people who need it cannot afford to...
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Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the Environment (originally published in WSR #20) All chemicals ingested or applied externally have the potential to be introduced into sewage systems and from there to aquatic or terrestrial environments. When those chemicals are components of personal care products such as suntan lotions, makeup, and toiletries, or human and veterinary pharmaceuticals, they represent a particular class of pollutants now being investigated by the Environmental Protection Agency, water and sewage treatment services and academia. These chemicals are given the acronym PPCP to facilitate communication and research on what can be a mind-boggling array...
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The latest book by Aubrey De Grey, “Ending Aging” (St. Martin’s Press, 2007), raises the mind-bogglingly provocative possibility that science may within 20 years be able to extend human life long enough to develop successive improvements in life-extending therapies, thus potentially rendering humans capable of a youthful lifespan of 1,000 years. It all seems to hinge upon the much-anticipated ability to extend the lifespan of a middle-aged 2-year-old mouse to 5 years rather than the usual 3 using bioengineering techniques that would essentially clean up the junk that is produced within and outside their cells, as it is with...
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Female circumcision, like male circumcision, is a practice that dates back to the remotest of times in history. Today, however, the former has come under fire by feminists and other concerned groups and individuals. Why male circumcision is not touched is not clear. Perhaps the whole issue is still part of the male chauvinistic nature of contemporary society since it may not be plausible to claim that male circumcision is harmful as there are no statistics regarding the casualties the practice has caused or how it has affected fertility. I am not holding brief for this custom but some...
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Nature can sometimes do worse things than capitalism. An earthquake kills 40,000 in a few minutes. A tsunami wipes out 200,000 in hours. And now the Department of Health contingency plan for bird flu in Britain is contemplating a ‘not impossible’ 750,000 deaths if the H5N1 virus goes pandemic. The government is buying up 14m doses of Tamiflu, a general-purpose antiviral and probably not very effective prophylaxis against a virus strain that hasn’t evolved yet, which in any case won’t be available until April next year and is only enough to treat 25% of the UK population. Meanwhile the...
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Big Pharma: pushing harmful drugs
Last year I wrote about the rebellious teenagers ‘diagnosed’ with the newly invented Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and the highly profitable industry that has grown up to ‘treat’ – that is, abuse – them (MW, January 2012). The American Psychiatric Association has included ODD in the latest edition of its authoritative handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), together with Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder, for people who get angry too often, and Hoarding Disorder, for people who don’t like to throw things away. The biomedical model In early May the Division of Clinical Psychology of the...
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