What are some of the ethical issues involving pharmaceuticals?

Question

Most fields of science have ethical issues involved. Cloning, stem cell research, abortion, and genetic manipulation are just a few of the scientific things we can do that are often debated in our society. Are there any issues like the above in the Pharmaceutical field? Thanks!!

Answer 1

Many issues.

The biggest issue, to me, is the kinds of drugs that get researched. It takes at least $1 BILLION to research a new pharmaceutical compound. If you are a pharmaceutical company, and you have no motivations other than money (i.e., no government incentives to research the most needed drugs) you are going to research whatever will make you the most money. You will want to research drugs that lots of people take for a very long time (antidepressants, hair loss medicine, blood pressure medicine, etc). You won't want to research drugs that a few people will take for a short time - new antibiotics for people with multiple drug resistant infections.

Another issue is experimental drugs. A lot of sources, including our current administration, are encouraging cancer patients to consider new, experimental drugs as a first choice for treatment. This is very wrong. If you have cancer, you should try proven treatments first; then, if they fail, you could try experimental drugs which may or may not work at all. Unfortunately, there are so many cancer drug trials, and not enough people to fill them.

Related to pharmaceuticals is access to birth control and Plan B. Our current administration is trying to change the rules, so that Plan B counts as abortion, and so that doctors and pharmacists can refuse to provide birth control if they don't believe in it. This really pisses me off, because I take birth control to manage pain! Do they really want me to be unable to work, because a few people don't think you should take birth control! Also, doctors should be making decisions based on science, not on religion or their lack of belief in birth control. Also, if birth control and Plan B are widely available then there will be less abortion.

Az R, you are right, it's billions, not millions. Where is my brain today?

Answer 2

how pharmaceutical companies are greedy! which ties into the health insurance (or lack thereof) in America

Answer 3

The one i have in mind is the generic name issues under health economy.  This has something to do with doctor's prescriptions. Medicines have generic names and brand names. One side of the issue is that whichever medicine (cheaper one) must be bought from drug stores as long as it has the same generic name, even though the brand name is different from the one prescribed. Another side says that brand names are written by the physicians to benefit the manufacturer (coz they have some kind of agreement through med representatives), and that the exact brand name should be bought.

Answer 4

There's a couple of big ones. One of the major, major ones is the cost involved.

I'll have to disagree with above. It takes about two billion, average, to get a drug approved in the US. It takes 800 million, minimum to get that drug into Phase II testing. This is a staggering amount of money. And the sheer cost of it complicates the development of drugs for rarer disease states. Orphan drug laws help this, but this is the level of safety and efficacy we demand presently.

Another big one is direct to consumer advertising of drugs. Essentially every country with a large health care industry has banned this practice or restricted it severely (you can't mention a drug name for example). It adds enormously to the cost of drugs, to the burden those drugs place on health care. Patients show up to their doctors demanding said drugs, self diagnosing, and essentially harassing the doctor until it's given - regardless of wether or not it's needed or appropriate. Drug therapy is extremely complex, and your average person does not have the expertise to approach it.

Unethical conduct by drug companies - by and large has drastically fallen off after the Neurontin lawsuits which resulted in a whopping 800 million dollar fine. There's only one company that has blatant, egregious violations these days, and that's Eli Lilly. The amount of damage the lawsuits pay out simply isn't enough to stop the abuse that goes on with certain drugs. By and large, most other drug companies stringently manage their ethics and behavior. There's a 'business' group of pharma companies that has layed down some incredibly strict rules about practices by drug companies that are considered unethical just in the last year. By and large, this has severely curtailed some of the more blatant problems.

Government interference in pharmaceutical application and medical data. By and large, the government mucking around with science doesn't work - the system isn't set up to put up with it. Word gets out, scandal breaks out and essentially every major effort to repress medical knowledge has crumbled. As another poster mentions, the Morning After Pill was known to be safe for... over 20 years. No one, not one person, has ever died from it, or ever had a life threatening complication. It has one of the single best safety records of any medicine ever created. Yet it was lobbied against and choked at for decades by the government and religious groups in America because of the thought that it's an abortion. Even when the theoretical risk of 'interfering with implantation' was evaluated and understood: one study put the potential of this happening at greater than 1:200,000,000 and happening through the same mechanism as ibuprofen, and COXIB antinflammatory drugs this fact was ignored. Nevermind that a failed implantation isn't an abortion. Nevermind that between 50 and 75% of fertilized eggs fail to implant in the healthiest person on the planet. This fact was ignored and deprived millions of Americans of easy access to safe healthcare for years.

Oh yes. And price controls are needed. Things are getting a little nutty.