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- Title
Pharmaceutical Company Corruption and the Moral Crisis in Medicine.
- Authors
Batt, Sharon
- Abstract
A much-debated series of articles in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 2015 labeled the pharmaceutical industry's critics 'pharmascolds.' Having followed the debate for two decades, I count myself among the scolds. The weight of the evidence overwhelmingly supports the claim that pharmaceutical policy no longer serves the public interest; the central questions now are how this happened and what to do about it. I approached three of the most recent books on the industry with these questions in mind. Deadly Medicine and Organized Crime (CRC Press, 2013), by Peter Gøtzsche, Bad Pharma (Faber & Faber, 2013), by Ben Goldacre, and Good Pharma (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), by Donald Light and Antonio Maturo, all situate their critical assessments in high-income countries globally, depicting the problem of pharmaceuticals as too many drugs approved with too little evidence, causing too many needless deaths, and prices spiraling to heights unimaginable just a decade ago. Light and Maturo, while no less critical of the status quo than Gøtzsche and Goldacre, take a different tack: they detail the success of an alternative model for pharmaceutical research, the Mario Negri Institute in Italy, citing it as proof positive that we can indeed defy capitalism's profit imperative.
- Subjects
PHARMACEUTICAL industry
- Publication
Hastings Center Report, 2016, Vol 46, Issue 4, p10
- ISSN
0093-0334
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/hast.575