(Martha Rosenberg)
Patient expirations explain the demise of Vioxx, Bextra, Premarin/Prempro, Avandia, Paxil, Chantix, Seroquel, Ketek, the previously popular Baycol, and fen-phen.
Forty years of marketing the “diseases” of menopause and aging—Over 35? You Might Be at Risk for Menopause!—ended when hormone replacement therapy was found to cause, not prevent, the symptoms women feared.
A decade and a half of osteoporosis profits collapsed when bone drugs Fosamax, Boniva, and Actonel were found to cause, not prevent, fractures and jawbone death in some cases. Nor did it help that Boniva czar Sally Field allegedly broke a bone.
And speaking of causing, not preventing, SSRI/SSNI antidepressants are linked to so many suicides—660 in newspaper reports alone—the pharma-founded and operated American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is staging massive anti-suicide walks in June—against an epidemic it largely created.
Even asthma inhalers are causing deaths they were supposed to prevent.
What’s a pharmaceutical industry in the middle of a recession with nothing in the pipeline to do?
Say hello to “monotherapy” and “treatment-resistant” conditions.
Expensive and dangerous drugs that don’t work are now said to not work as monotherapy. You need to add a second or third drug.
Conditions that don’t respond to expensive and dangerous drugs that don’t work are now said to be treatment-resistant—not treated with the wrong drugs or even given the wrong diagnoses.
Monotherapy and treatment resistance keep patients taking their meds—including ones that fail as monotherapy—in the absence of any evidence the meds are working.
They up sell a patient who was on one med into taking two or three meds and double or triple revenues especially if meds are required for side effects.
But most importantly, monotherapy and treatment resistance shift the emphasis from pharma’s failures to a patient’s “failures”: It’s not our drug that’s not working. It’s your treatment-resistant condition.
Monotherapy has often been the hallmark of drugs that don’t work in pediatric “conditions” like bipolar disorder, ADHD, major depression, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, passive-aggressive, oppositional-defiance, and obsessive-compulsive disorders and other personality and conduct disorders that surfaced when pharma exactly had medications to treat them. (And states had disability tax dollars to pay for them.)
But children with treatment-resistant depression, aggression, mania, anxiety, mood, and psychotic disorders, bipolar disorder, and ADHD are also now being seen—and enrolled in clinical trials.
While some say a developing child is by definition too young to have treatment-resistant anything, that was also said about schizophrenia, which is suddenly “recognized” in 4- to 6-year-olds as the FDA considers pediatric schizophrenia drugs next month.
Lilly-funded Gabriele Masi, M.D., hopes increasing “awareness of childhood-onset schizophrenia” will overcome “hesitancy on the part of clinicians to make a diagnosis,” in the journal CNS Drugs.
Meanwhile in March, the FDA approved Lilly’s Symbyax, a combination of Zyprexa and Prozac as the first medication for “Treatment Resistant Depression” (TRD) in adults.
Zyprexa and Prozac are so checkered with adverse effects and law suits—Lilly agreed recently to pay Georgia $6 million for hiding Zyprexa’s diabetes, high blood sugar, and excessive weight-gain side effects—it is hard to believe they’re still on the market, much less approved as new drugs.
In fact, when 7-year-old Gabriel Myers of Margate, Fla., killed himself in April after being prescribed Symbyax, according to the Florida Department of Children & Families, it barely made the papers.
