If you want to make a lot of money, invent a drug that treats chronic conditions without ridding patients of symptoms entirely. Your customers will be on the hook for your product for the rest of their lives, boosting your bottom line all the while.
A Village Voice blog post lists the five highest revenue-generating drugs, noting that the one thing they have in common is that none cure illnesses:
Making the list are cholesterol-lowering Lipitor ($7.5 billion gross revenue in 2009), stomach acid-neutralizing Nexium ($6.3 billion), blood-thinning Plavix ($5.6 billion), asthma-soothing Advair Diskus ($4.7 billion) and anti-psychotic Seroquel ($4.2 billion).
If you pop any of these deliciously profitable pills, how are they working out for you?
The 5 Most Profitable Drugs: They Never Cure You [Village Voice]
(Thanks, Chester!)
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And headache meds cause you to have headaches. This is the drug business. Don’t try to cure them, just give some temporary relief so they go back to the pharmacy.
…what?
It’s so amazing these types of people that hold the ” we know everything” about the topic but evil neerdowells are stopping us from using that knowledge.
Our knowledge of the workings of the human body is akin to a 4-year old kid knowing about international diplomacy. We are ignorant fools when it comes to medicine. This will change, we will know more and continue to improve the human condition, but it will not be much different for multiple generations to come.
This is a remarkably stupid story. Many diseases aren’t curable. That’s what makes them “chronic”. Insulin doesn’t cure diabetes. We don’t know how to cure diabetes. We don’t know how to cure asthma. We don’t know how to cure psychosis.
It’s not as if the drug companies are pumping treatments instead of a cure; it’s that there is no cure.
Thank you for this. Americans always want the easy way. Pop a pill! God forbid you change your habits.
Sheesh.
Yeah, all those asthma patients have to do is stop breathing. Like that’s so hard.
I haven’t taken Nexium, but for a year I was on a similar proton pump inhibitor. It did cure me of my chronic stomach problems. Essentially, my problems were that NSAIDs and smoking destroyed the lining of my stomach. Stopping those things along with taking a proton pump inhibitor allowed my stomach to heal, so when I stopped taking the PPI my stomach was all better and didn’t get damaged by mild irritants like tomatoes. That was many years ago and I’m still gastritis-free. Even over the counter Prilosec is sold as a temporary course of treatment, to allow the damage to heal. Is anybody ever really prescribed PPIs for life?
Measles. Polio. Rubella — how many vaccinations did you get as a child? More recently we see the Hepatitis A & B vaccines, and the HPV vaccine. Cures do not fall out of the sky, it takes years, decades, even (heard of AIDS??), and millions upon millions of dollars to even find a drug that works as a therapy. Articles like this enrage me.
Of the people complaining here, have you volunteered for a research study?? Did you do it for free?? Do you mind side effects? Like, if your acid reflux would be cured, but you would drool constantly, would you accept that?? Would you allow a doctor to operate on you, not knowing if the surgery would help or hurt, and there was a pill option??
I’m on two. Wow. Yay for me.
I have reoccurring atrial fibrillation. If I let it go on too long, I get prescribed Plavix to prevent blood clots. If I did develop a blood clot in my heart and then it goes back into regular rhythm, the clot could travel to my brain, causing a stroke. I’d say that while it doesn’t cure any diseases, Plavix is extremely important to me and I’m willing to pay much more than I currently have to in order to get it.
i work for a company that has some treatments for chronic illnesses and the patient population i work is constantly saying that there will never be a cure because it’s more profitable to treat. but the thing is, the company will never run out of things to find treatments or cures for. there are so many diseases out there that don’t get the research for even a treatment because more people have something else. if we cure one thing, there will be something else waiting in the wings to take its place. and with the patent time limitations, it’s more profitable to cure something and move on to the next medication on a new patent.
i sleep well at night knowing that one of the potential future products my company makes, that’s in early testing, is showing signs of maybe being a cure, or as close as anyone’s gotten. the hard part is the years of testing to come to prove it to be effective and hopefully also safe.
after we cure this one, there’s a whole long list of orphan diseases that aren’t even getting decent treatment right now
These are drugs for conditions that aren’t cureable in most instances. I think I’d rather my dad take Plavix than die from blood clots, my husband take his asthma meds than possibly stop breathing, and my mother take her Lipitor so she doesn’t have 3 strokes like her mother did. Making a comment on these drugs is pretty ridiculous. What about insulin? Or synthroid? Those medications don’t ‘cure’ a disease but they certainly help people live.
Leave it to the clueless people at the Village Voice to not know the difference between treatment and a cure.
Antipsychotic drugs have allowed otherwise capable and intelligent people suffering from mental illnesses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia to lead more or less normal lives. Whereas perhaps as recently as forty or fifty years ago those people would have been institutionalized or (at best) marginalized, antipsychotics have given many of them time to achieve and succeed in ways that are not possible without these drugs. No, schizophrenia and bipolar cannot be cured, but they can, in most cases and to some extents, be managed with medication and CBT or other talk therapies. The implication that these drugs are profit mills for drug companies is a separate issue; these are, for the foreseeable future, decent treatments for conditions that are incurable.
This.
I was hospitalized for a week, misdiagnosed with psychotic depression and put on Abilify, which without insurance would cost me $800/month. Not gonna happen. Problem is Abilify was the only drug I’ve taken that worked (in the sense that I felt nothing and thus no negative feelings! YAY) and the drugs I can afford (Paxil/Wellbutrin) were the ones that originally broke my brain.
Nothing will ever cure my chronic illness, but I agree with previous posters that quality of life is worth the payoff. Then again, I’m still paying off the $8000 debt I incurred in ONE WEEK on the psych ward.
In conclusion, health insurance is sort of important. ~*THE MORE YOU KNOW*~
So what’s the point of the story? To impugn drug manufacturers who spend millions to develop and test drug which treats symptoms of a disease? To imply they are somehow “evil” because the drugs don’t actually cure the disease? To imply a sinister motive because these drugs must be taken forever or until a better drug is available?
Since I take one of these drugs on a regular basis to prevent more serious disease, I’m pleased that a drug company developed, produces and sells that drug.
If the drugs work and people take them because they work, why is that a bad thing?
Seroquel is high earning b/c it’s v popular. It has a lot of off-label uses, it’s more effective with less side effects, and is tolerable so it allows patients with debilitating diseases to lead a normal life.
It isn’t as simple as saying these drugs aren’t cures. The diseases they treat don’t have cures. It’s like complaining about the never ending sale of tylenol because drug companies haven’t cured pain.
Maybe we should tell the drug companies that if they can’t give us a cure for everything that ails us, they should just quit. It’s an all or nothing proposition. Perfection our else.
Maybe we should tell the drug companies that if they can’t give us a cure for everything that ails us, they should just quit. It’s an all or nothing proposition. Perfection our else.
Lipitor, along with a non-statin, ezetimerol, works for me, keeping my chloresterol down to a safe level. But then, I do have an inherited condition, famial hyperchlorestemia, which killed my mother at 44. Just because some drugs get too widely prescribed to people that don’t really benefit from them doesn’t mean they don’t help people with the conditions that they were originally intended for.
So we should just wait for a cure for all these diseases instead of taking drugs that treat them?
If I hear another naturopath talk about how western medicine never “cures” anything, I’m going to drive a bulldozer through their diploma mill. That, and it’s a shitty argument that everything has an immediate “cure”, the people who talk about how science doesn’t cure anything supply cure-alls and snake oils in abundance, none of which actually DO anything aside from psychosomaticisms.
“anti-psychotic Seroquel ($4.2 billion).”
Yeah, what a TOTAL WASTE, right? Sheesh.
Let me know when you get smug about “curing” mental illness.
And no, Scientology doesn’t work.
Note that three out of five of these drugs treat symptoms that are preventative to a large extend through proper diet.
A university psychiatrist gave me a little sample pack of Seroquel about ten years ago. I was very depressed and made complaints about the school and its students that might have seemed rather psychotic if taken completely literally — this place is awful, these people are a bunch of sheep, etc. I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, he introduced the idea by asking me if I’d been getting enough sleep, and said that if I hadn’t Seroguel might help. What an asshole. I didn’t read the package carefully or notice the term “anti-psychotic” on the label. I took one that evening. It dulled me to the point that I couldn’t eat cereal without spilling it all over my face, or understand what was different about this from how I normally ate cereal, or care. Nasty stuff. Like many antipsychotics it can cause permanent ticks.