The first domino piece to topple seems to be that “we know too much”: research medicine publishes over 40,000 reports every week … while the average physician can read about 6! Wonderful knowledge is produced but cannot be digested. That leaves the responsibility of transmitting data from lab to the bench to the one entity that “lives in both worlds”: the drug maker. Because the average doctor is so busy seeing patients, he’s usually updated on the newest and latest during the periodical visits of the friendly pharmaceutical company representatives.
“Drug makers are not in the business of saving lives.”
Milestones in Medicine
Above: The first ever Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1901 to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845 –1923) a German physicist, who, on November 8, 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as x-rays. The discovery ushered a new era in the diagnostics of everything from skeletal issues to tumors.
Left: One of the first X-ray photographs, taken by the Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen of his wife's hand.
They, obviously, put their best foot forward. People love making the pharmaceutical manufacturers out to be the villains, but it should be kept in mind that it costs up to $2 billion to push a drug through the maze of FDA certification to the market. Every new drug, in effect, is a huge gamble. This is why they use every trick in the book to push their merchandise. With the drug companies being the almost exclusive conduit between research and
practice – both of information as well as actual drugs – it’s very understandable why the discoveries that do pass from research to the physician are only those that are profitable for the drug industry. But before one makes drug makers an easy target, one must keep in mind the plain, if unsavory truth: Drug makers are not in the business of saving lives. They are in the business of making and selling drugs – something they do very well. Saving lives is the job of doctors. It is their role to use the drug companies to accomplish that goal. People would say medicine has “fallen captive” into the hands of the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, doctors have been more than willing “victims.” But can you really blame them?
Easy and Safe Justified or not, the litigious society we live in presents doctors with the risk of malpractice lawsuits. We call it the advent of justice. One of the side effects of this justice is to make doctors practice “defensive medicine.” Defensive medicine is first and foremost sticking to “accepted protocol.”
05