The marketing of medicine in inherently unethical because it seeks to override doctors and consumers information-based evaluations, and instead make a choice based on emotional propaganda.
The harm caused by any given medical advertisement is directly proportional to its effectiveness. Every pharmaceutical sales rep is an immoral cancer on our society.
I think society would benefit immensely from banning the advertising of drugs. This includes both medicinal and recreational drugs.
Make all drugs legal, but mandate they have boring text/information-only labels, put the more dangerous ones behind the counter in smaller quantities, and let the only thing influencing their purchase be doctor recommendations/prescriptions or personal research. It should apply evenly from ibuprofen to allergy pills to marijuana to cocaine to alcohol.
Word of mouth or "personal research" is a really ineffective way to discover what drugs are suitable for you. It might be better than TV advertising, but that's a pretty low bar to set. You can understand the desire for a compromise solution like "TV advertising, but you can't lie about it too much and you have to mention side effects". And that is more or less the US status quo.
I think that almost immediately ends up in a morass of private information web sites, none of which are as trustworthy as current FDA-regulated labeling.
Do you prefer Instagram "influencers" to have more control over what drugs people take than the current regulated advertising? I don't.
Isn't the opioid crisis caused by sales reps directly marketing to doctors and promising benefits that didn't really exist (lower risk of addiction, lower dosis required for certain amounts of time)? Not sure how removing marketing to consumers changes the situation.
>Every pharmaceutical sales rep is an immoral cancer on our society.
This seems like one of the most cleanly horizontally divided opinions in all of the US - where nearly everybody agrees loudly and strongly with it except the wealthy and powerful. I wish a presidential candidate would have the balls to echo this severe but obviously popular thought and fix the fucking system with extreme prejudice.
There are at least two currently-running candidates who do seem have the balls to directly confront the pharma industry! Why do you think there aren't?
This may come as a shock to you, but marketing pharmaceuticals is really no different than marketing other products. It really comes down to educating consumers about your product.
Doctors as decision makers are not some monolithic block of individuals who are super educated about every product on the market and every piece of data. Just developing awareness of new drugs is a huge job. I'd say less than 5% of doctors are cutting edge enough that they require no additional education on new drugs.
The best story I can tell was from a friend who worked at a drug company that sold a hepatitis C drug. Once Gilead's drug came out, this company basically decided to discontinue their drug. Incredibly, there were doctors out there still ordering the old drug. The company had to send reps out to these doctors to tell them to stop ordering it. Continuing to use it made zero sense at all.
The problem here is that pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments have a deep conflict of interest. They're incentivized to encourage doctors to use the drug that makes their company the most profit, not the drug that is best for the patient.
And there is plenty of research demonstrating that this is exactly what they do, and that doctors are indeed swayed by it, because, as you say, they don't have the time to do keep up with it all on their own.
And yes, there is a fundamental difference to consider here: My doctor has a fiduciary responsibility to do what's best for my health, to the best of their ability, and drug marketing compromises that. By contrast, nobody has any fiduciary responsibilities related to which brand of toilet paper I use.
Not all marketing is "educating consumers about your product". Some of it is manufacturing a desire for your product.
Look at car ads. Do they say "The new 2019 models are available"? A few do. Do they say "This car gets better gas mileage" or "This car is safer"? A few do. Most say "If you drive this car, you'll get the hot girl". That's not "educating consumers". That's trying to make consumers want your product on the basis of something completely unrelated to your product.
And yes, I fear that marketing pharmaceuticals may in fact not be different from marketing any other product.
Except it's not marketing products to doctors, who are the gatekeepers to access. It's marketing to consumers, who aren't informed, and are then used to badger doctors to make them prescribe medicines they heard about on TV.
Medicine is absolutely different from other markets. The entire premise of the multi-catastrophic neverending train crash in the US is that it is treated as though it isn't different. Educating doctors is critical, but that doesn't necessitate treating pharmaceuticals like any other product.
As an aside, it's insulting to preface a rebuttal with, "this may come as a shock to you".
Marketing comes down to educating consumers about your product? Have you ever seen marketing? Any education that occurs is either accidental or legally mandated.
I do agree with you that pharmaceutical marketing isn’t fundamentally different from marketing other products. Although my conclusion from that is not that pharmaceutical marketing is therefore good.
Not to mention that much of the 1st world prohibits drug advertising. The US is somewhat of an odd case in this regard.
I often ask foreign expats in America about the strangest aspect of American culture in their opinion. Believe it or not, pharmaceutical advertising is one of the most common answers I get.
> This may come as a shock to you, but marketing pharmaceuticals is really no different than marketing other products. It really comes down to educating consumers about your product.
That's how it is, in practice.
But some of us take that Hippocratic Oath thing seriously.
You make a good point. I wonder how is drug marketing handled in places like EU. How do their doctors learn of new drugs and decide which meds to prescribe?
If this system only educates doctors about the benefits of profitable patented effective drugs, they are overprescribing an arbitrary subset of effective drugs because they lack information about non-profitable treatment options.
To play Devil's Advocate - without pharmaceutical companies developing and marketing drugs, how do we set up an incentive structure that encourages R&D and innovation?
If there is any devil that doesn't need your help, it's the pharma industry.
It's important to realize that to a first approximation, advertising prescription drugs is pure waste. The main case is pharma companies battling for fixed market share. That is, there are N people who have the problem, and companies X, Y, and Z are spending money trying to maximize their share of the market. The ad spend changes which pharma company does the best, but that money comes from the sick people, who would be better off without it.
The other case for advertising is demand generation, and for drugs I think it's mostly waste as well. I definitely know a couple people who are not sick enough to really need drugs (or perhaps not sick at all), but advertising-induced hypochondria means they badger their doctor until they get a prescription. That's an expensive boondoggle.
I'm sure there are some people who hear an ad and realize they have an actual problem. But if that's a significant issue, I'd rather we just paid for public service announcements for disease awareness, rather than hoping the very profitable drugs are the same ones people have the biggest medical need for.
And theory aside, advertising prescription drugs to the public was illegal for decades and we still did fine on the medical innovation front.
I find the argument that humans will stop studying pharmacology if they can't monopolize their results quite unconvincing. Current pharma co R&D and innovation only effectively investigates the benefits of drugs with recent patents (with enough years remaining to monetize).
There is moral validity to profit-seeking investment in drug trials which find effective treatments, but the current system enables this only with great amounts of inefficiency.
Why do you think advertising promotes innovation? I would see it as the other way around, why innovate when you can just invest more into advertising an inferior product?
Another Devil's Advocate argument- make patients aware of drugs that could solve XYZ health problem that they weren't previously aware of. They just want you to "ask your doctor about..."
What the current system gives us isn't "R&D and innovation". It's mostly ~equivalents of top-selling products. Plus new stuff that's actually less effective than old products that went generic so long ago that there's ~no promotion.
It would be nice if we tried to shift our focus away from drugs. We generally over emphasize the importance of drugs and surgeries to so-called healthcare and downplay or outright pooh-pooh more basic things, like hygiene, exercise and good nutrition.
Seems simple: what are they willing to pay for a completely boring just-the-facts advertisement, the sort of thing you’d see in the classifieds? If the answer isn’t “pretty much the same” then they know the glitz and bullshit is critical.
For prescription drugs this wouldn't make sense. Only a doctor is qualified and legaly allowed to prescribe a drug. They have a tough job of making difficult diagnoses, weighing pros and cons for each treatment and dealing with a human in their specific life situation.
A patient that walks into a doctor's office asking for a certain medicine they heard about on TV distorts the process. After all the patient needs to believe in the treatment and might shop around for the doctor that gives them what they want.
Learning about a product in a medical context can't really happen in an ad. A doctor would have to go to a conference or read journals to figure out the latest science on treatments, and can then go and then choose an appropriate drug. They would probably look for the one that has 20mg of X in it, regardless of brand name or hype.
It was certainly closer to true historically that ads were a necessary and mostly harmless way to inform and educate consumers. Now we have advertisements being tuned with machine learning and marketers that fully understand memetics. Advertising is now dangerous and it will only get worse.
I would like to see a compromise where new drugs are allowed to be advertised to the public for say 1 year following their release then never again.
People need agency in their own medical choices, and knowing there is a drug for your medical condition is very empowering. Especially as we talk more and more about moving to a single-payer system, it's important to make sure patients have the power to question their doctors and explore their own health instead of essentially being dictated to by the state.
Find a natural experiment where two very similar populations, chosen at random, were placed into two different cohorts. I'm sure there's one somewhere in the recent and well documented past.
>The marketing of medicine in inherently unethical because it seeks to override doctors and consumers information-based evaluations, and instead make a choice based on emotional propaganda.
This is far to simplistic. It's fairly common for doctors to be unaware or poorly informed on new or uncommon treatments. They have a finite amount of time and brainpower and are not all knowing.
>They have a finite amount of time and brainpower and are not all knowing.
Yeah, there seems to be this contradiction here that doctors are naive or corrupt and are going to be swayed into prescribing us drugs we don't need, but also that we should be leaving it 100% up to doctors to be informed and prescribe us what we need.
Most other first-world countries have banned drug advertisements, and they appear to be doing just fine. Actually, they appear to be doing significantly better than we are: no opioid crisis.
Marketing can provide information to aid in an information-based evaluation of the best course to take. IMO, that means it’s not inherently unethical, only that done wrong it can be unethical.
I agree that there is, theoretically, the possibility for moral advertising/marketing/promotion in medicine, but the status quo has dropped so low I'm not sure any companies today only use moral methods. I think the key is that moral marketing only serves to inform, and must deliberately avoid any bias or intentional persuasion.
- Supply your molecule for free to all researchers without any strings attached.
- Maintain an inclusive directory of research people have performed with your molecule. Publish a journal of all research and redistribute it for free.
- Commission impartial fact sheets that are surveys of treatments for a given condition - what objective measures of outcomes can be made between treatments, both positive and negative?
I don't like the current system of pharma sales reps either, but black and white thinking like this is not healthy or productive.
Your final sentence isn't conveying any objective information -- in fact, it seems pretty close to emotional propaganda itself. Does that make you an immoral cancer on our society? (No.)
For better or for worse, consulting companies exist to:
1) Enrich their partners
2) Lend credibility to their clients
Consulting firms are hired based on an "appeal to authority" fallacy. Companies don't want to make hard/unpopular decisions, so they outsource them to consultants. Data point: management consulting is one of the industries that is hit hardest by a recession. [0] If consultants truly provided value, this is exactly when they would be most needed.
The people actually doing the work on these deals are 22-25 year olds. They are highly incentivized to make their firm look good (thus enriching the firm's partners). Anything else is gravy. Anecdotally, I have many friends who worked in the industry, and when asked if they would hire consultants for their own hypothetical businesses, the answer was always "No".
All companies exist to provide profits to their owners.
Your argument about the datapoint can also be argued for lending: credit disappears when it’s most needed. It must be completely and utterly useless, then.
Or perhaps when a crisis strikes, if you want to minimize spending, you first eliminate consultant bills, instead of, idk, firing internal employees?
Part of the value of a consultant is that they are more mobile than an employee, so they get to see the same problem in different companies, and get expertise on that issue more quickly that if you stay on the first company in which you solved that issue. I’ve dealt with the same very-specific software on about 20 different banks, for example (disclaimer: I’m a consultant :) ); I have people under 25 on the team that are real experts on very specific things, and run cicles around people with 2x - 5x their experience if you count it in days and not problems solved.
And then of course consultants are sometimes hired for the wrong reasons and asked to do obvious recommendations. Politics were there before the consultants arrived.
>All companies exist to provide profits to their owners.
Management consultants nearly always have a conflict of interest though (i.e. the preoccupation of consultants is almost always "sell, sell, sell" rather than "help the client make money") due to the nature of their work and their short-term contact-based engagements mean they rarely have to stick around and deal with the messes that they create.
Large management consulting firms IME tend to hire (or develop maybe) people who are smart and ambitious but highly conformist and reluctant to challenge authority. Combined with nature of the work I described above (and ofc existing to make owners /partners rich), this is sort of a perfect storm for lots of "semi-unintentional" unethical behavior and sometimes fully intentional unethical behavior.
Fwiw, from what I observed this dynamic actually makes the consulting work environment terribly exploitative and miserable for non-partner consultants but consultants tend not be the personality types who would leave consulting (and the prestige/"potential to become a partner") over it --unsurprisingly, else the industry wouldn't exist as it does now.
>All companies exist to provide profits to their owners.
No. This is very mistaken. There are many more stakeholders that companies have than their owners. For example, their customers. For example. Private Hospitals do not exist to make money. They can make money. But they exist to provide healthcare to sick people. As a side effect they pay their employees and make money for their owners; but if they fail to provide healthcare then they cease to exist. On the other hand, if they fail to make money they are often taken over and continue with new owners.
Companies exist to serve a function in our society, they depend on our society and they are part of it. They are not cash machines.
Boston Consulting Group 18,500 (2018) $7.50 B (2018)
Bain & Company 8,000 (2017) $3.8 B (2017 est.)
--- end table ---
BCG is the only one that should have as much headlines provided they are similar in nature to McKinsey. If they are, then your hypothesis might be correct that the NYT has a lot of McKinsey sources. But how could you rule out that newspapers simply like to bash the #1 instead of the #2 or #3 if the industry leading companies are behaving in a similar fashion?
As someone currently dealing with chronic pain, suits like this are highly aggravating. It's just another front of the failed drug war.
People who need pain relief get screwed as doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies treat every single patient like they're a drug addict waiting to happen. The real drug addicts will continue to get their pills, while the upstanding members of society writhe in pain.
I see comments like this on every single opioid news thread.
I'm sure that you are being honest about feeling that you need to take opioids every day, but I'm sure that you understand the addictive nature of the pills and why we should avoid making more people addicted.
I have had a total of two opioid pills in my life and I could feel exactly how it could take over.
The attitude towards prohibition that your parent comment described is exactly what set the stage for the recent opioid epidemic.
We were just coming out of another era where opioids were restricted to the inhumane point where people with serious problems were left in debilitating pain - to the point where Purdue's lies were accepted because doctors felt genuine sympathy towards the suffering they saw.
There is a happy middle ground. There are people who benefit from opioid medications.
It was bad moral choices by this generation's pharmaceutical companies that caused this outbreak. That is where the fault lies.
Management Consultants: A bunch of 20 sth year olds with fancy degrees and zero experience in growing a business helping huge companies grow by whatever means possible. I always found this hugely ironic.
It's an interesting business. I've known some management consultants who were serious pros and it's a seriously impressive skill. I've also seen the army of kids who descend on an office and produce nonsense reports to provide the execs with CYA for whatever predetermined decision.
Readit News
The harm caused by any given medical advertisement is directly proportional to its effectiveness. Every pharmaceutical sales rep is an immoral cancer on our society.
Make all drugs legal, but mandate they have boring text/information-only labels, put the more dangerous ones behind the counter in smaller quantities, and let the only thing influencing their purchase be doctor recommendations/prescriptions or personal research. It should apply evenly from ibuprofen to allergy pills to marijuana to cocaine to alcohol.
This is already the case in many places outside the USA (Canada, Europe, Brazil, Hong Kong).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-consumer_advertising
Do you prefer Instagram "influencers" to have more control over what drugs people take than the current regulated advertising? I don't.
This seems like one of the most cleanly horizontally divided opinions in all of the US - where nearly everybody agrees loudly and strongly with it except the wealthy and powerful. I wish a presidential candidate would have the balls to echo this severe but obviously popular thought and fix the fucking system with extreme prejudice.
Dead Comment
Doctors as decision makers are not some monolithic block of individuals who are super educated about every product on the market and every piece of data. Just developing awareness of new drugs is a huge job. I'd say less than 5% of doctors are cutting edge enough that they require no additional education on new drugs.
The best story I can tell was from a friend who worked at a drug company that sold a hepatitis C drug. Once Gilead's drug came out, this company basically decided to discontinue their drug. Incredibly, there were doctors out there still ordering the old drug. The company had to send reps out to these doctors to tell them to stop ordering it. Continuing to use it made zero sense at all.
And there is plenty of research demonstrating that this is exactly what they do, and that doctors are indeed swayed by it, because, as you say, they don't have the time to do keep up with it all on their own.
And yes, there is a fundamental difference to consider here: My doctor has a fiduciary responsibility to do what's best for my health, to the best of their ability, and drug marketing compromises that. By contrast, nobody has any fiduciary responsibilities related to which brand of toilet paper I use.
Look at car ads. Do they say "The new 2019 models are available"? A few do. Do they say "This car gets better gas mileage" or "This car is safer"? A few do. Most say "If you drive this car, you'll get the hot girl". That's not "educating consumers". That's trying to make consumers want your product on the basis of something completely unrelated to your product.
And yes, I fear that marketing pharmaceuticals may in fact not be different from marketing any other product.
As an aside, it's insulting to preface a rebuttal with, "this may come as a shock to you".
I do agree with you that pharmaceutical marketing isn’t fundamentally different from marketing other products. Although my conclusion from that is not that pharmaceutical marketing is therefore good.
I often ask foreign expats in America about the strangest aspect of American culture in their opinion. Believe it or not, pharmaceutical advertising is one of the most common answers I get.
That's how it is, in practice.
But some of us take that Hippocratic Oath thing seriously.
A lot of marketing does not seem very educational and more manipulative.
Most advertising is more about triggering emotions and using other cognitive dark patterns than educating anyone.
Really? You don't see the difference between marketing, say, a car or a smartphone, and marketing a drug that treats a life-threatening condition?
Perhaps you should think about this subject a bit more deeply.
>> I'd say less than 5% of doctors are cutting edge enough that they require no additional education on new drugs.
What do you base this on? Do you have some citations to support it?
It's important to realize that to a first approximation, advertising prescription drugs is pure waste. The main case is pharma companies battling for fixed market share. That is, there are N people who have the problem, and companies X, Y, and Z are spending money trying to maximize their share of the market. The ad spend changes which pharma company does the best, but that money comes from the sick people, who would be better off without it.
The other case for advertising is demand generation, and for drugs I think it's mostly waste as well. I definitely know a couple people who are not sick enough to really need drugs (or perhaps not sick at all), but advertising-induced hypochondria means they badger their doctor until they get a prescription. That's an expensive boondoggle.
I'm sure there are some people who hear an ad and realize they have an actual problem. But if that's a significant issue, I'd rather we just paid for public service announcements for disease awareness, rather than hoping the very profitable drugs are the same ones people have the biggest medical need for.
And theory aside, advertising prescription drugs to the public was illegal for decades and we still did fine on the medical innovation front.
Doctors/hospitals can learn about new drugs through dry, informative leaflets - TV ads or salesmen talking directly to doctors distorts the demand.
There is moral validity to profit-seeking investment in drug trials which find effective treatments, but the current system enables this only with great amounts of inefficiency.
What the current system gives us isn't "R&D and innovation". It's mostly ~equivalents of top-selling products. Plus new stuff that's actually less effective than old products that went generic so long ago that there's ~no promotion.
we're gonna pay for the drugs either way, so we may as well create our own incentive structures to ensure that it's done right.
Well, there's disease, death, suffering and injury. If you need more of a structured incentive than that, then I am not sure really what to suggest.
How can we prove that this is false or that the benefits are smaller than the drawbacks?
A patient that walks into a doctor's office asking for a certain medicine they heard about on TV distorts the process. After all the patient needs to believe in the treatment and might shop around for the doctor that gives them what they want.
Learning about a product in a medical context can't really happen in an ad. A doctor would have to go to a conference or read journals to figure out the latest science on treatments, and can then go and then choose an appropriate drug. They would probably look for the one that has 20mg of X in it, regardless of brand name or hype.
People need agency in their own medical choices, and knowing there is a drug for your medical condition is very empowering. Especially as we talk more and more about moving to a single-payer system, it's important to make sure patients have the power to question their doctors and explore their own health instead of essentially being dictated to by the state.
Find a natural experiment where two very similar populations, chosen at random, were placed into two different cohorts. I'm sure there's one somewhere in the recent and well documented past.
This is far to simplistic. It's fairly common for doctors to be unaware or poorly informed on new or uncommon treatments. They have a finite amount of time and brainpower and are not all knowing.
Yeah, there seems to be this contradiction here that doctors are naive or corrupt and are going to be swayed into prescribing us drugs we don't need, but also that we should be leaving it 100% up to doctors to be informed and prescribe us what we need.
or possibly just delivering takeout to them at the hospital so they can relax and research new treatments while eating.
(seriously, drug companies give doctors free takeout)
- Supply your molecule for free to all researchers without any strings attached.
- Maintain an inclusive directory of research people have performed with your molecule. Publish a journal of all research and redistribute it for free.
- Commission impartial fact sheets that are surveys of treatments for a given condition - what objective measures of outcomes can be made between treatments, both positive and negative?
Every time I hear “Ask your doctor about ____” I cringe. How is this ok?
Your final sentence isn't conveying any objective information -- in fact, it seems pretty close to emotional propaganda itself. Does that make you an immoral cancer on our society? (No.)
1) Enrich their partners
2) Lend credibility to their clients
Consulting firms are hired based on an "appeal to authority" fallacy. Companies don't want to make hard/unpopular decisions, so they outsource them to consultants. Data point: management consulting is one of the industries that is hit hardest by a recession. [0] If consultants truly provided value, this is exactly when they would be most needed.
The people actually doing the work on these deals are 22-25 year olds. They are highly incentivized to make their firm look good (thus enriching the firm's partners). Anything else is gravy. Anecdotally, I have many friends who worked in the industry, and when asked if they would hire consultants for their own hypothetical businesses, the answer was always "No".
I highly recommend this article on McKinsey's work restructuring Puerto Rico's debt - it pulls back the curtain on the industry: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/mckinsey-in-puerto-ri...
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/1a229d54-4548-11de-b6c8-00144feab...
All companies exist to provide profits to their owners.
Your argument about the datapoint can also be argued for lending: credit disappears when it’s most needed. It must be completely and utterly useless, then.
Or perhaps when a crisis strikes, if you want to minimize spending, you first eliminate consultant bills, instead of, idk, firing internal employees?
Part of the value of a consultant is that they are more mobile than an employee, so they get to see the same problem in different companies, and get expertise on that issue more quickly that if you stay on the first company in which you solved that issue. I’ve dealt with the same very-specific software on about 20 different banks, for example (disclaimer: I’m a consultant :) ); I have people under 25 on the team that are real experts on very specific things, and run cicles around people with 2x - 5x their experience if you count it in days and not problems solved.
And then of course consultants are sometimes hired for the wrong reasons and asked to do obvious recommendations. Politics were there before the consultants arrived.
Management consultants nearly always have a conflict of interest though (i.e. the preoccupation of consultants is almost always "sell, sell, sell" rather than "help the client make money") due to the nature of their work and their short-term contact-based engagements mean they rarely have to stick around and deal with the messes that they create.
Large management consulting firms IME tend to hire (or develop maybe) people who are smart and ambitious but highly conformist and reluctant to challenge authority. Combined with nature of the work I described above (and ofc existing to make owners /partners rich), this is sort of a perfect storm for lots of "semi-unintentional" unethical behavior and sometimes fully intentional unethical behavior.
Fwiw, from what I observed this dynamic actually makes the consulting work environment terribly exploitative and miserable for non-partner consultants but consultants tend not be the personality types who would leave consulting (and the prestige/"potential to become a partner") over it --unsurprisingly, else the industry wouldn't exist as it does now.
No. This is very mistaken. There are many more stakeholders that companies have than their owners. For example, their customers. For example. Private Hospitals do not exist to make money. They can make money. But they exist to provide healthcare to sick people. As a side effect they pay their employees and make money for their owners; but if they fail to provide healthcare then they cease to exist. On the other hand, if they fail to make money they are often taken over and continue with new owners.
Companies exist to serve a function in our society, they depend on our society and they are part of it. They are not cash machines.
All companies exist to provide profits to their owners.
Overly simplistic.
Not all companies exist to provide profits to their owners. There are thousands of companies in the U.S. and elsewhere which exist for other reasons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/business/mckinsey-hedge-f...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/world/mckinsey-bribes-boe...
Firm Employees (Year) Revenue (Year)
McKinsey & Company 21,000 (2017) $10.0 B (2017)
Boston Consulting Group 18,500 (2018) $7.50 B (2018)
Bain & Company 8,000 (2017) $3.8 B (2017 est.)
--- end table ---
BCG is the only one that should have as much headlines provided they are similar in nature to McKinsey. If they are, then your hypothesis might be correct that the NYT has a lot of McKinsey sources. But how could you rule out that newspapers simply like to bash the #1 instead of the #2 or #3 if the industry leading companies are behaving in a similar fashion?
Was an actual quote from distributors...
People who need pain relief get screwed as doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies treat every single patient like they're a drug addict waiting to happen. The real drug addicts will continue to get their pills, while the upstanding members of society writhe in pain.
I'm sure that you are being honest about feeling that you need to take opioids every day, but I'm sure that you understand the addictive nature of the pills and why we should avoid making more people addicted.
I have had a total of two opioid pills in my life and I could feel exactly how it could take over.
We were just coming out of another era where opioids were restricted to the inhumane point where people with serious problems were left in debilitating pain - to the point where Purdue's lies were accepted because doctors felt genuine sympathy towards the suffering they saw.
There is a happy middle ground. There are people who benefit from opioid medications.
It was bad moral choices by this generation's pharmaceutical companies that caused this outbreak. That is where the fault lies.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/01/report-mckinsey...