Expecting a cure from Big Pharma? Don’t hold your breath

While the best minds in the world have been able to get a man to the moon and back, see our exact locations via GPS device, create a TV as thin as a matchbook cover, and make robots a reality, certain discoveries have remained elusive.

A cure for cancer is one.

And what about heart disease, which still kills over 600,000 Americans a year? How is it that high blood pressure requires life-long pharmaceutical intervention?

Sure, there are treatments… but I’m talking about cures: Going on to live your life without being tethered to a drug or a shot or more surgery.

The human body is still a mystery, you might say… it’s extremely complicated. Yes, that’s certainly true.

But quantum physics is no piece of cake, either!

These thoughts occurred to me after reading one of the most shocking articles I’ve seen in quite a long time. It was in the financial section, a story about a report just issued by the investment firm Goldman Sachs.

And it tells us something that we’ve suspected all along: Cures aren’t what Big Pharma is after.

The business model for medicine isn’t about making us well… it’s about keeping us sick and dependent and spending more and more on drugs and treatments.

A lifetime commitment

I guess Big Pharma realized somewhere along the way that our trust in the ethics of drugmakers is at the bottom of the barrel.

So, it did what any other business with millions to spend on advertising would do: It went directly to Madison Avenue to get a spine-tingling commercial (complete with music and a dramatic voice-over) made to “prove” how sincere and caring these multi-billion-dollar drug companies are.

But it took financial analysists to be able to tell the real story. And while what they said wouldn’t make for a very good television ad, they hit the nail on the head!

When it comes to making money, cures don’t pay.

As an example, the Goldman Sachs money men cited the drug Harvoni. This med, while it can come with some serious side effects, does something most drugs can’t: It cures a life-threatening disease.

In this case, it’s hepatitis C. And it can do that for over 90 percent of those who take it.

Putting the obscene price tag of the med ($1,000 a pill!) aside for a moment, the bean counters whine that the Harvoni cure is so successful that it has “gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients.”

Ah, but there’s more!

Not only isn’t providing a cure good business sense, but by restoring all of those people to good health (which costs just shy of $100,000 a patient), it decreased the “numbers of carriers” who can transmit the virus to new patients.

Seriously?

And while we keep hearing about the wonderful treatments that are coming down the pipeline, such as gene editing and cell therapy, the report warns about how those “one-shot cures” aren’t good for pharma’s bottom line either.

One analyst said that while these health-restoring innovations are great for patients, any company that wants a “sustained cash flow” will find that, financially speaking, curing people is a “challenge.”

I guess it’s like expecting a wigmaker to come up with a cure for baldness or believing that your computer or phone or car should last longer than it took to pay it off.

Not going to happen!

What all of this tells us is that it’s time to take a long look at any drug or treatment you’re being asked to take. Antidepressants, acid reflux drugs (such as Nexium), and statins are three good examples of meds that pharma expects you to commit to for the rest of your life.

Yet there are plenty of ways to treat these conditions without “marrying” a drug!

This analysis also shows why you need to ask your doctor some hard-hitting questions:

• Will this (fill in the blank) cure my condition?
• Will it involve continued treatments? If so, for how long?
• What were the outcomes for other patients given this drug or treatment?

But perhaps the most important thing you need to determine is what other options you might have, especially ones that don’t involve drugs.

Because until the time comes when lives become more important to pharma than the almighty dollar, you need to become the CEO of your own body – and have your own business model for being healthy!

“Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’” Tae Kim, April 11, 2018, CNBC, cnbc.com