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mulva wrote:

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Thanks for posting that Sleazykitty! I read about it on enturbulation.org too. I guess the scienos are so out of touch they will believe anything. I mean, come on, WTF would the drug companies care about protesting scientology?

Sorry to go off on a tangent here, but I think what has really hurt the drug companies is their ability to advertise on TV. For example, when I see a drug commercial and they start naming off all of the possible side effects, they sound so much worse than the actual condition you are taking the drug for! There's one commercial, I can't remember what the drug is, but one of the possible side effects is uncontrollable gambling! That cracks me up every time!

I don't recall the name of the drug, but I believe it was a treatment for Parkinson's Disease that has been linked to uncontrollable gambling.

I'm probably more sympathetic to drug companies than most people; drug discovery is an expensive and risky business and, if you find a new chemical that may actually be useful, there is a limited amount of time to make money off that chemical before it goes off patent. Having said that, I think that drug companies have been shooting themselves in the foot almost as much as Scientology has. The direct to consumer advertising that mulva brought up is one example, but there are many others.

mulva wrote:

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Rene Lafayette wrote:

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I'm probably more sympathetic to drug companies than most people; drug discovery is an expensive and risky business and, if you find a new chemical that may actually be useful, there is a limited amount of time to make money off that chemical before it goes off patent. Having said that, I think that drug companies have been shooting themselves in the foot almost as much as Scientology has. The direct to consumer advertising that mulva brought up is one example, but there are many others.

I totally agree. My father's life was saved by the newest chemo drugs that came out within the past 5 years. I know chemo drugs are different depending on which type of cancer, severity, etc.., and although chemo was rough for him, he didn't lose his hair or throw up at all. I'm so thankful for all of the life saving drugs that we do have and are made possible by their constant research. To condemn all drugs as bad as the scienos do is just stupid. Of course they don't even subscribe to common biological facts either, but that's another story...

I'm glad to hear that your father is winning his battle with cancer, mulva. Ironically, for pharmaceutical companies, anti-cancer drugs are safer to produce, from a legal viewpoint, than say, antidepressants. By the very nature of anti-cancer drugs, which work to kill cells that are not fundamentally different from other cells in the human body other than out of control reproduction, you can only expect nasty side effects. Most anti-cancer drugs are based on the hope that you can kill cancer cells faster than killing non-cancer cells. This means that you have to make an explicit cost-benefit analysis, and one that is not based on a futile demand for absolute safety. In the case of drugs like antidepressants, there seems to be a demand that the drug be absolutely safe for everyone who uses it. As a result, things that may just be statistical blips, such as an alleged increase in violent behaviour or an alleged increase in suicidal thoughts (among a population, the depressed, who would be expected to be more suicidal than average) end up as dire black box warnings that deter some people from taking the medication when they might benefit from it. An example that hits closer to home in this particular forum is vaccines, which are one of the great triumphs of medicine.