It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.

Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.

Thank you.

 

Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.

 

The Pharmaceutical "Business with Disease"

page: 1
0

log in

join
share:

posted on Jul, 21 2003 @ 03:36 AM
link   
Well i guess i pretty amazing how the creators of the system have done the way of the "never ending circle", and once again we see it here, in medicine, if consumism wasn�t enough or capitalism, let�s keep the people sick to non-stop making profit from it.
This is going just way too fur guys, when are we gonna stop all this Sh*t?



There is an entire industry with an innate economic interest to obstruct, suppress and discredit any information about the eradication of diseases. The pharmaceutical industry makes over one trillion dollars from selling drugs for ongoing diseases. These drugs may relieve symptoms, but they do not cure. We have to realize that the mission of this industry is to make money from ongoing diseases. The cure or eradication of a disease leads to the collapse of a multi-billion dollar market of pharmaceuticals.

I encourage you to read the key points about the nature of the pharmaceutical business and to think about each of them. Now you will understand why we are bombarded with advertising campaigns by pharmaceutical companies wanting to make us believe that they are �Searching for Cures� � Striving for the Eradica-tion of Diseases� or �Increasing Life Expectancy� and other false promises. With these deceptive statements, the pharmaceutical industry has for decades been able to disguise the true nature of its business � maximum profit from ongoing diseases.

The Pharmaceutical "Business with Disease" Causes More Deaths Than All Wars of Mankind Combined
As a direct consequence of the pharmaceutical business, more people have died from preventable disease than in all wars of mankind combined. The following summarizes the steps leading to this tragedy.

The fact that vitamin C stabilizes the walls of arteries, for example, has been known for 200 years, ever since James Lind uncovered vitamin C deficiency as the cause of blood loss and scurvy. Any head of a pharmaceutical company, any Ph.D. or M.D. who denies knowing this fact is simply incredulous.

Why, then, was this information not applied to medicine in order to combat cardiovascular disease? Why was the official RDA for vitamin C set at 60 mg, an amount barely sufficient to prevent scurvy but certainly low enough to make sure that cardiovascular diseases will become an epidemic? The following page gives the answer.

Throughout this century, the pharmaceutical companies knew that an optimum vitamin supply of the population would lead to the collapse of a multi-billion dollar market of prescription drugs. Moreover, vitamins are not patentable and the profit margins are low. On the basis of this analysis the survival of the pharmaceutical industry became dependent on two strategies:

To obstruct research, information, and use of vitamins and other natural therapies by all means available.
To promote the deception that patentable synthetic drugs are the answer to human diseases.

Rest of the article:

www4.dr-rath-foundation.org...



posted on Jul, 21 2003 @ 07:55 PM
link   
They ought to give us drugs for nothing since we allready paid for the development
=======================================
U.S. Healthcare: The Free Choice to Suck

By Christian Parenti, AlterNet
June 27, 2003

We have a health care system in shambles: 40 million uninsured, too many drugs and procedures not covered by most health plans, medical staff overworked thanks to pressure from bean-counting bureaucrats, and rising cost all around. Are free market economics the solution or are they the problem?

The boosters of market mechanisms � from the House ranks of the GOP, to their allies at think-tanks like Cato, Heritage and Olin � claim that the discipline of the market create "efficiency," "innovation" and "choice."

On closer inspection, however, America's for-profit healthcare does not match up with market myths about efficiency and service. Instead it is marked by cruelty, lack of choice and massive corporate welfare.

Take healthcare corporations and insurance companies. Far from being "supple," "quality-oriented" and "intellect" organizations delivering better service at ever lower prices, these behemoths are more accurately described as massive for-profit bureaucracies offering shoddy care at inflated prices. When compared to "socialized" healthcare systems, like those in Canada or Germany, Americans pay twice as much per-capita in medical costs, roughly $4,000 per person.

The extra cash paid out by Americans goes for "overhead." Private U.S. insurance companies on average take 14 percent in administrative costs while public healthcare systems like Medicare or the Canadian health systems spend only around 2 percent of their income in this manner.

But it's not even accurate to describe the extra surcharge paid by Americans as "overhead" � that implies some productive use. In reality, much of the America surcharge pays for bloated CEO salaries and boosting the value of medical stocks.

As for salaries, consider the following: in 1999, C.A. Heimbold of Bristol Myers-Squibb made $168 million; J.A. Stafford of Wyeth made $116.3 million; while W.C. Steere of Pfeizer made a mere $28.8 million.

Stock prices and dividends are even more important. One industry analyst recently described healthcare corporations as "islands of strength in otherwise turbulent market waters." For example, the common stock of Healthcare Corporation of America has grown 25 percent in the last five years, massive Aetna US Healthcare Incorporated has grown 69 percent since it started trading three years ago, and HealthNet has grown by almost 65 percent in the same period. Sierra Health Services, which "delivers innovative managed care benefit plans" through a "family of companies" has surged by over 70 percent since '99.

"Who cares?" say the market radicals. You get what you pay for and thanks to the rewards of free enterprise we get better care. Not so. Socialized or largely socialized healthcare systems deliver better care for less money. Take Japan, which has an infant mortality rate that is half that of the United States and a life expectancy average 5.2 percent better, while paying only 44 percent of what Americans pay. Similar conditions obtain in the Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany and even Spain.

"Unfair comparison!" cry the pro-market ideologues. Our private system spends mightily on research and development, creating miracle drugs which these other systems take advantage of without paying full cost for. Nonsense.

In America, most pharmaceutical and medical research is paid for with government money. During the 1990s the federal government spent over $10 billion annually on pharmaceutical R&D. According to a major internal federal study (that only saw the light of day when Ralph Nader's group Public Citizen forced its release under the Freedom of Information Act), taxpayer-funded scientists conducted 85 percent of the research, tests and trials that created the top five drugs of 1995. Ulcer-treating Zantac and the anti-herpes drug Zovirax were among the drugs created and tested almost entirely with grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Given such lavish federal aid it is no surprise that Fortune routinely ranks the pharmaceutical industry "more profitable than any other." To the extent that pharmaceutical firms do spend, they devote almost as much to advertising and lobbying as to research. On average drug companies shell out $2 billion annually on marketing.

The federal government also pays for the bulk of all scientific training that creates the expertise that creates the famous drugs and medical procedures. In short, the high-tech wonders of American medicine are the product of steady government spending, not shrewd private investment.

In all honestly, we should view the high costs of American healthcare as a massive private tax levied on workers and employers alike by the for-profit medical bureaucracies. Creating a less expensive, government-funded, single-payer healthcare system would liberate billions of dollars a year that could stimulate consumption and investment throughout the economy.

Christian Parenti is currently a fellow at the University of Minnesota Humanities Institute's Summer Think Tank.

� Home � Top Stories

Print

Get a print-friendly version of this story.


Also in Top Stories

MoveOn and Dean Make the Big Leagues
By Don Hazen
Jul 1, 2003

SCHEER: Blame Bush in State Fiscal Crisis
By Robert Scheer
Jul 1, 2003

IVINS: Supreme Tantrums
By Molly Ivins
Jul 1, 2003

TECHSPLOITATION: Sex in the Library
By Annalee Newitz
Jul 1, 2003

HIGHTOWER: Whatever Happened to Corporate Reform?
By Jim Hightower
Jul 1, 2003



posted on Jul, 22 2003 @ 03:45 PM
link   
Hey there ColdAnger,

Looks like no one cares about DRUGS except you and I. Can't help but wonder what that says about us or them? We must be SICK!!!!LOL or are they?

tut tut



posted on Jul, 22 2003 @ 04:15 PM
link   

Originally posted by tututkamen
Hey there ColdAnger,

Looks like no one cares about DRUGS except you and I. Can't help but wonder what that says about us or them? We must be SICK!!!!LOL or are they?

tut tut


I actually don't know, but i think this is a matter of worry, VERY DISTURBING INFO, and i see no reply, but no problem, seems that everyone can't do anything about this, we are in a circle of sickness continously, and that's how medicine works as another company more for the cabal...

The question about them, well i don't know, i think i prefer to not know it...



posted on Jul, 23 2003 @ 03:11 PM
link   
Now I'm really glad I'm not studying farmacy anymore...




top topics
 
0

log in

join