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Post by Deleted on Sept 4, 2009 19:32:13 GMT
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 5, 2009 1:05:47 GMT
Gad -- I wish I could hire an airplane and blanket the world with that article.
To avoid investing in failure, researchers say, pharmaceutical companies will need to adopt new ways of vetting drugs that route around the brain's own centralized network for healing.
Ten years and billions of R&D dollars after William Potter first sounded the alarm about the placebo effect, his message has finally gotten through.
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Post by fumobici on Sept 16, 2009 5:01:43 GMT
My hypothesis: People are now more conditioned than ever by omnipresent and sophisticated advertising hyperbole and thus increasingly more credible and suggestible as their their critical and skeptical faculties atrophy- the science of marketing has made real strides here. Secondly all the low hanging pharmaceutical fruit has long since been picked, essentially all that's left is to produce patentable analogs of long-known compounds. Thirdly, big pharma has no financial incentive to cure conditions as doing so is counterproductive to their business models, so the emphasis is on creating products that instead of actually fixing whatever the ailment is, are designed to "control" or provide temporary symptomatic relief- and thus dependence and long term revenue streams. You want the customer to be convinced they must take the drug daily for the rest of their lives. This will be easiest to accomplish by targeting conditions with fuzzy and imprecise indications and diagnostic definitions. Psychotropics like antidepressants are perfect for all these reasons: control not cure, fluid and highly subjective indications for use, huge potential markets (episodic unhappiness is almost universal and efficacy rates for drugs touted as treating them are essentially statistically unquantifiable).
All of this quite naturally leads to new drugs being developed and marketed to treat those complaints most amenable to successful placebo effects. Even drugs with proven efficacy like antibiotics are now routinely prescribed essentially as placebos to give the patient a pill to take even if they are suffering a temporary viral infection like common influenza. The alternative is to tell the patient something like "We really don't have anything better than cheap generic OTC drugs for temporary symptomatic relief." Even if true, given the bother and expense of getting in for a physician's consultation, this is not what your average patient wants to hear.
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