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Marcia Angell

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It Paperback – Illustrated, 9 Aug. 2005

by Marcia Angell (Author)

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During her two decades at The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She sympathized as the American public, particularly the elderly, struggled and increasingly failed to meet spiraling prescription drug prices. Now, in this bold, hard-hitting new book, Dr. Angell exposes the shocking truth of what the pharmaceutical industry has become-and argues for essential, long-overdue change.

Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers.

Zeroing in on hugely successful drugs like AZT (the first drug to treat HIV/AIDS), Taxol (the best-selling cancer drug in history), and the blockbuster allergy drug Claritin, Dr. Angell demonstrates exactly how new products are brought to market. Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective.

The American pharmaceutical industry needs to be saved, mainly from itself, and Dr. Angell proposes a program of vital reforms, which includes restoring impartiality to clinical research and severing the ties between drug companies and medical education. Written with fierce passion and substantiated with in-depth research, The Truth About the Drug Companies is a searing indictment of an industry that has spun out of control.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House Inc
Publication date

9 Aug. 2005
Dimensions

13.21 x 2.03 x 20.32 cm
ISBN-10

0375760946
ISBN-13

978-0375760945
See all details

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Product description

Review

"Dr. Angell's case is tough, persuasive, and troubling."
--The New York Times

"In what should serve as the Fast Food Nation of the drug industry, Angell... presents a searing indictment of 'big pharma' as corrupt and corrupting."
--Publishers Weekly

"The Truth About the Drug Companies is a sober, clear-eyed attack on the excesses of drug company power... a lucid, persuasive, and highly important book."
--The Boston Sunday Globe

"Her prose is clear and readable... Angell does an excellent job [making] a convincing case against Big Pharma."
--Chicago Sun-Times

"If you've ever suffered prescription drug sticker shock, Dr. Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies is the book for you."
--Newsday

"In-depth and insightful"
--Rocky Mountain News

"Put your money on Angell. We need to know why drugs cost what they do, and we need to know how our physicians choose the drugs they give us."
--St. Louis Post Dispatch

"Engaging and well-written"
--San Antonio Express-News

"Pharamceutical companies will need a new miracle pain reliever after the whipping they receive from Marcia Angell in her book....a starting point for serious discussion."
--The Hartford Courant

"If informed criticism contains the sharpest stings, author Marcia Angell's jolting indictument of 'Big Pharma' might just be enough to pierce the beast's hide."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune

From the Back Cover

During her two decades at "The "New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She sympathized as the American public, particularly the elderly, struggled and increasingly failed to meet spiraling prescription drug prices. Now, in this bold, hard-hitting new book, Dr. Angell exposes the shocking truth of what the pharmaceutical industry has become-and argues for essential, long-overdue change.
Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers.
Zeroing in on hugely successful drugs like AZT (the first drug to treat HIV/AIDS), Taxol (the best-selling cancer drug in history), and the blockbuster allergy drug Claritin, Dr. Angell demonstrates exactly how new products are brought to market. Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective.
The American pharmaceutical industry needs to be saved, mainly from itself, and Dr. Angell proposes a program of vital reforms, which includes restoring impartiality to clinical research and severing the ties between drug companies and medical education. Written with fierce passion and substantiated with in-depth research, "The Truth About the Drug Companies is a searing indictment of an industry that has spun out of control.

"From the Hardcover edition.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Inc; Illustrated edition (9 Aug. 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375760946
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375760945
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.21 x 2.03 x 20.32 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 429,540 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 154 in Service Industry
- 241 in Quality Management
- 362 in Industrial Archaeology

Customer reviews:
231 ratings

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Flat earth Christian

Recommended

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 February 2021

Verified Purchase

Good book exposing the lies and corruption in the medical industry, government regulatory agencies and associated science. The love of money is the root of all evil. This was 20 years ago. How much worse is it now!!!
She does not however impinge on the virus/vaccine controversy which has been raging beneath the establishment facade always See Del Bigtree and Janine Roberts.
Most will say; How is it possible that corruption and lies could be institutional?
Or; the world is not so bad. It could be a lot worse. Man does a good job overall.

Answer most people are prepared to lie when it benefits them so the world is full of liars and lies. Don't trust man's knowledge. Don't trust the establishment.
God keeps the world as well as he can though sooner or later man gets so bad that we have destruction in wars or judgment from God. And God made the devil the temporary god of this wicked world seeing as you can't have a world without a controller god.
But God has a plan. Jesus will return to rule the world from righteous Israel, his nation and land. The righteous and trusted saints will rule with Jesus.
And God knows all hearts. The wicked will perish and the just will be resurrected, irrespective of religion.

3 people found this helpful

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Important

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 July 2021

Verified Purchase

One of the best books I read on subject, very informative and eye opening , just confirm what I been told by some doctors and pharmacists

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 February 2018

Verified Purchase

Interesting. Good companion to Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Pharma' (which I'd actually recommend over this), but Angell's book is an easier read—especially if you're not in academia.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 May 2019

Verified Purchase

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 October 2014

Verified Purchase

We need more information about drug companies.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 May 2015

Verified Purchase

Very good book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 May 2015

Verified Purchase

Excellent service book as described

Helpful

MeTZelf

Blowing the whistle, but not too loudly

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 August 2011

Marcia Angell was (chief) editor of the renowned New England Journal of Medicine for two decades. As stated on the back of the 2005 paperback edition of her book, she "had a front-row seat on the growing corruption of the pharmaceutical industry."

She fleetingly mentions possible negative effects to health by drugs, although she is not skeptical, for instance, of the need to medicate when high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, or HIV are diagnosed. She has faith that in some distant future, genetic research will lead to new and helpful drugs. Naturally, she does not mention forced medical treatment, nor the effects of the massive amounts of drugs we collectively excrete on the earth we all share.

Angell's main beef is that the drug companies are too profitable. She correctly identifies that they are NOT a free-market success story. They live off industry-friendly laws and regulation, publicly funded research, monopoly rights, protectionism, and tax breaks. Their best client, the biggest single purchaser of prescription drugs, is government.

The pharmaceutical industry uses its wealth and power to manipulate congress, federal and state legislators, the Food and Drug Administration, and the courts. "[It] has essentially hired government to do its bidding." It has by far the largest lobby in Washington. Drug companies even hire family members of congressmen to lobby them. And they "donate" copiously to political campaigns. "Legislators are now so beholden to the pharmaceutical industry that it will be exceedingly difficult to break its lock on them."

Meanwhile, some of the public is growing more skeptical of the pharmaceutical industry, as evidenced, among other ways, by the many books criticizing it that have recently come on the market. In the preface to the paperback edition of The Truth About the Drug Companies Angell lists four titles that appeared around the same time as her own. Blech's book is not included, nor is that by Medawar & Hardon .

The industry is responding by increasingly disguising its propaganda as education. It hides behind supposedly grass-roots patient groups, which are in fact funded and often founded by drug companies. It advocates its products using paid anecdotal testimony, preferably by celebrities. Industry domination of medical schools and journals ensures that physicians are trained to reach for a prescription pad, and learn no other way of dealing with their patients' complaints.

Most of the new drugs coming on the market are me-too drugs. (Some other authors call them copy-cat drugs.) Drugs that are not proven to be better than existing drugs should not be allowed onto the market, Angell contends. But how does she expect the benefit of a drug to be proven, while she acknowledges that the research that delivers such evidence is subject to wide-spread manipulation and fraud?

In my opinion the most shocking revelation Angell makes in her book is about research on children. As an incentive to include children in drug testing, which Angell endorses, the US government grants a six-months' extension of a drug's patent rights. (This same legislation is now being pushed through the EU.) When the drug is a good seller, this proposition is immensely lucrative, so drug companies test drugs for conditions such as heartburn and "premenstrual dysphoric disorder" on children, even though these conditions never affect children. At the same time, the government's goal is defeated, because less lucrative drugs for rarer conditions that do affect children remain untested on them.

Except for her call to repeal parts of the Bayh-Dole act, and to repeal the extension of exclusive marketing rights for testing drugs in children, the solution Angell proposes is more regulation. With this she joins the ranks of the large majority of the population that continues to believe that regulation protects the individual citizen, even though it has never accomplished this in the past. She admits that every regulatory law legislated, no matter how well-intentioned, winds up benefiting the industry. Yet she proposes even more of those laws. This is the same logic by which some people think that if their appliance doesn't start to work when they kick it, they must have to kick it harder.

Who "except for libertarian extremists and The Wall Street Journal" could possibly want legal restrictions on pharmaceutical marketing removed, Angell rhetorically ponders. Yet she does not address arguments in favor of removing restrictions, except by the epithet "extremist" and by positing that before regulation, all sorts of "worthless and dangerous patent medicines" were peddled to a gullible public. The latter is true, but after a whole century of regulation, we have more of such worthless medicines than ever, and precisely the ones that are covered by prescription laws and regulation are the most dangerous.

When Angell mentions law suits brought by individuals or consumer groups, she suddenly seems to switch sides. She rallies to the defense of the drug companies, calling the charged offenses "alleged," a word she never uses to describe her own hefty accusations, and claiming that many of these charges are frivolous.

Angell has done a fine job of diagnosing the pharmaceutical industry's disorders, but most of the medicines she prescribes will do more harm than good. The one remedy she apparently finds unfathomable is leaving the individual citizen free to be responsible for his own health care.

Copyright © MeTZelf

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