Marcia Angell

drug company promote disease treat fit

“Once upon a time, drug companies promoted drugs to treat diseases. Now it is often the opposite. They promote diseases to fit their drugs.”

—Marcia Angell

healthcare battle money truth

"the real battle in healthcare is one of truth versus money"

—Marcia Angell

nelieve clinical research medical guidelines

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”

—Marcia Angell

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“No wonder big pharma will do almost anything to protect exclusive marketing rights, despite the fact that doing so flies in the face of all its rhetoric about the free market.”

—Marcia Angell

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"Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself."

—Marcia Angell

clinical trial antidepressant positive negative study

"A review of seventy-four clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that thirty-seven of thirty-eight positive studies [that praised the drugs] were published. But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome."

—Marcia Angell

economic terms healthcare profitable massive burden economy

"In economic terms, health care is a highly successful industry - profitable, growing, and virtually recession-proof - but it's a massive burden on the rest of the economy."

—Marcia Angell

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"Drug companies say they need to charge ever-higher prices to cover their research costs, but they spend far less on research and development than they do on marketing and administration, and afterwards they actually keep more in profits."

—Marcia Angell

pharmaceutical industry research drugs PR

"The pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is their incredible PR and their nerve."

—Marcia Angell

pharmaceutical industry waste inefficiency profiteering health

"The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry."

—Marcia Angell

overmedicated society

"I do think that we are an overmedicated society."

—Marcia Angell

health care need commodity sick

"Health care is a need; it's not a commodity, and it should be distributed according to need. If you're very sick, you should have a lot of it. If you're not sick, you shouldn't have a lot of it."

—Marcia Angell