Scientists – you know, those people with white labcoats and glasses who tirelessly Mine The Seam Of Truth for all mankind – have been getting very excited about the role of Money in the development of new Wonder Drugs.
Useful Definitions:
‘Wonder Drug’
A Wonder Drug is a drug which has just been launched, so it has yet to kill anyone and will not have proven itself to be an abject failure in reality until years later. The use of small numbers of people in a succession of drug trials by the pharmaceutical giant that produced the chemical concoction will have thrown up, through normal anomaly, at least one group with an apparent success rate (when converted into percentage terms) that would be truly useful if it were not just an anomaly, but will turn out to be very misleading in comparison to the way the drug will really perform across the board.
This cleverly dishonest procedure is all that is necessary to get the medication passed as if it were genuinely effective, and officially labelled “evidence-based medicine”. The use of small numbers of trial subjects overall, and the specific exclusion of certain types of depressed, anxious and volatile subjects minimises the risk of bad reactions which might otherwise lead to caution in the approvals procedure. At this stage, any evidence of actual risk must be carefully avoided at all costs. Once approved though, the Wonder Drug can be given to all and sundry and it usually takes months or years for the evidence of serious side effects to build up to the point where journalists start asking awkward questions about it. Approval bodies may then consider whether a warning should be attached to the medication to offset a little bit of this. This belated damage-limitation excercise doesn’t help the victims of the deception at all, but it does signal the end of the drug’s ‘Wonder’ status.
Studies revealed that there are no Old Wonder Drugs, only New ones.
‘Drug’
A drug is a chemical concoction which is supposed to be useful in treating illness or injury – or in the case of the more recent type of drugs, managing a condition or preventing illnesses that haven’t actually happened yet. Once approved as if it were genuinely safe and effective, the approval bodies will not remove the approval status even if it later proves to be useless or even deadly in some cases. This is because they are approval bodies, not disapproval bodies. It is also because the people who work for medication approval bodies are very fond of pharmaceutical companies, and feel very sorry for them if some people die, or are horribly damaged by one of their unnatural chemical concoctions. They know that it costs the pharmaceutical giants a lot of money to produce and market a new drug – especially if it is to be hyped as a Wonder Drug – and it can take a while to recoup that investment through worldwide sales before they start making fat profits from this farcical scam. So if it were to become common knowledge that the drug has horrible side-effects and doesn’t really work anyway, that might spoil everything. Therefore the approval bodies try to help out in any way they can, slowing the inevitable demise of the existing ‘approved’ drugs, and getting their big rubber stamp all ready for the next one to come out of the cauldron.
Active Ingredient: Money
In a bid to understand how drugs which usually don’t work but do sometimes kill people – such as Champix, for instance – can nevertheless become the recommended and publicly-funded treatment whilst other treatments which work far better and don’t kill anyone ever – such as hypnotherapy, just to give one example right off the top of my head – are stubbornly ignored, scientists began searching for a key factor that might be influencing the behaviour and choices of everyone involved in perpetuating this sorry and dangerous state of affairs. What they discovered left them deeply shocked – as it would anyone who still believes that Science is all about Truth.
They discovered that although quite a lot of early scientific discoveries were made by enthusiasts who could do any kind of experiments they liked because they weren’t working for any vested interests, all contemporary scientists are paid Money by vested interests and have to do what they are told whether they like it or not.
They discovered that although drug testing used to be carried out by relatively independent academics in Universities – hence the presumed validity of the term “evidence-based medicine” – all drug trials are now organised and carried out by the drug companies themselves, so everyone involved is paid Money by them. When that trial work is concluded, however, then notable academics may be offered handsome sums of Money to add their signature to the drug company documents that will be presented to the approval bodies, to give the impression of academic involvement in the trials themselves which is in fact completely bogus. Without this Money, scientists discovered, none of them would do that.
Two of the scientists actually fainted when they discovered how much Money was used to market and promote a drug like Champix. In their innocence they had just assumed that if the drug was as successful as the drug companies said it was, it would naturally become the smoking cessation approach of choice by reason of its success. How could it not?
They discovered that Doctors were being paid Money to prescribe medications for smoking cessation, on the pretext that this helps smokers to quit. The obvious fact that this would affect some doctors’ clinical judgement and encourage them to keep prescribing even if it wasn’t apparently working made a number of the scientists frown – as well they might, for this is particularly unscientific.
They also discovered that quite a lot of Money was being spent on treating doctors and key medical professionals to lavish ‘conferences’ in very pleasant locations which were really just marketing exercises by drug companies to promote their medications. None of this Money was wasted on non-decision-makers, and although scientists couldn’t actually prove that this was just corruption, the facts suggested that the drug companies weren’t just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Conclusions
So it seemed that Money was indeed the New Wonder Drug, because without the generous injection of Money at all these key stages in the development of new chemical concoctions, none of them would ever be considered to be Wonder Drugs at all, even briefly. Shortly after concluding this the scientists vanished into thin air, after one of them pointed out that because they weren’t being paid any Drug Company Money themselves, they didn’t exist. They were merely a figment of the imagination of a certain hypnotherapist.
Certain, that is, of one thing: Truth Will Out.