Thank you for taking your meds

A Google search of 'evil pharmaceutical industry' returns 789,000 results in 0.15 seconds. This doesn't surprise me all that much. I know from speaking to many people that the industry has a reputation of greediness and unethical behaviour. I've been often asked to question whether I really do want to be associated with and working for the evil. I can usually quite easily say that yes, I do.

Last Friday, I was thrown onto a soapbox for a rant in favour of the pharmaceutical industry. Being put on the spot at a party to question my career aspirations usually results in me thinking about my choice and opinion for several additional days. I am happy to be put in the uncomfortable position of having to make these considerations, and even more happy that I always come out undeterred to continue pursuing an industry position.

So, I say that I've been thinking about it over the past few days. Here are some of the thoughts and wonderings that occurred to me in those thinkings:

• Statistics can be powerful in arguing a side and I wish I had more. A drug costs about $1 billion dollars to be brought to market. The majority of useful drugs are brought to market by the big pharma companies - what percentage? The money spent by industry for research is huge compared to the amount available by academia and government - how many leagues difference?
  
• All industries push products (many that we don't need and catering to our whims that are so carefully researched and identified). I guess it isn't nice to pin-point cosmetics as a profitable place to place your products, but all of the clothing, jewellery, and make-up designers do it. Pharmaceuticals are viewed as something that the industry owes the public, but the industry is responsible to their shareholders, so they need to be profitable.
• The industry is not even in the same ballpark of profitability as it was a decade or two ago.
  
• Is advertising drugs a bad thing? I can side with both answers to this question. Advertising should be seen as an education tool, leading to discussions with physicans or to further research about a particular drug.
  
• I've never been (and probably never will be) on the sales end. I want to contribute to the research and development of new medicines that may relieve a person's ailments or cure or prevent their disease. I hope that physicians (or other audiences) demand honesty and hard facts from salespeople.
  
• Nobody is ever going to know everything about a drug. The clinical trial requirements attempt to identify safety concerns before a drug makes it to market, but these trials will never be able to reach every person (with their unique genetic, environmental, lifestyle conditions) to find out if they may not respond well. Thousands may receive a drug when it is in trials; hundreds of thousands may receive a drug when it hits markets.
  
• Drugs are rushed to market. Every day it isn't on the market is a day that it is not making money, and the less of the research costs will be recouped. Every day it isn't on the market is a day that someone is not receiving that treatment.
• The industry is a machine that knows how to bring a drug to market. It has streamlined the process to squeeze as much knowledge and prediction out of the fewest experiments and trials. Universities and small companies are fantastic breeding grounds for novel ideas and inventions, but they lack the resources to bring it through all of the trials and ultimately be available to the public. The big companies are the ones that have to do this.

Maybe I'm just looking at it all through rose-coloured glasses.