Pharma isn’t (mostly) evil

Key Story Summary:

• My life is ironic. I work for a corporation that sells medicines to ill people while I believe diet and lifestyle are the keys to preventing disease and suffering.
• Pharma companies aren’t evil. They only play in the rules set up by our economic and regulatory system.
• Regulations and resource-focus changes are needed to improve health.

Despite what you hear on the news about the evils and manipulations of the pharmaceutical industry, I’m here to say this isn’t entirely true. Let me first explain why I think this.

Since my youth, I’ve had a deep desire to help people and to reduce suffering among people, specifically in logical, scientific manner.

I used to believe our bodies were meant to break down and that drugs were inevitable. Human ingenuity, I once believed, could preserve our health and improve on our fragility, and that with more scientific research, we could understand the human body and manipulate it with our discoveries. I believed pharmaceutical companies were our savior.

After a serious back injury forced me to enter the medical system and leave without any improvements in pain or mobility, I was frustrated. By being able to relieve the pain myself through changing my diet and lifestyle, I grew skeptical of medicine.

At this point in my career and in pharmacy school, I already had intentions of working for a pharma company to help develop and educate on new drugs. But with a new understanding of how much health can be improved without them, I began to live a deeply ironic life.

The truth I once thought, that pharmaceuticals were the answer to our ailments, was now shattered and replaced with a new understanding of how to achieve health and wellness.

However, my educational investment in pharmaceuticals was so great, that I chose not to reverse course and study a topic like nutrition or public health. Instead, I tried (and am trying) to bring nutrition and health to the pharmaceutical world.

After working for pharmaceutical companies since 2011, I’ve realized that, unfortunately, these companies get a bad rap because as a whole, they aren’t fully invested in changing behaviors, preventing, or curing disease. It isn’t in the best interests of the corporation to invest in efforts to prevent the very thing from which they make money. Instead, they want to “improve” lives by making incremental benefits to the disease course. Additionally, prices for their treatments are extremely high, but that discussion is for another time.

I believe the negative reputation directed solely at these companies is slightly unfair and actually misplaced.

We live in a reactive society, both as corporations and as individuals. People generally do not change behaviors until a significant life event has occurred. For example, one may decide to stop smoking only after witnessing a loved one pass away from years of lighting up. Pharmaceutical companies feed perfectly into our reactive nature by providing a solution to our problems. In this case, drugs to reduce disease and symptoms.

This mindset is the same with our scientific research efforts. Our tax-paying research dollars are spent on discovering new ways to limit disease once a problem has occurred. We study disease, not health. Even healthcare professional education is focused on learning disease and treatment rather than health and prevention. (Encouragingly though, some schools are beginning to incorporate more health education.)

To address our reactive behaviors regarding illness, the pharmaceutical industry was born. In general, pharma finds people who are sick and tries to fix their problems, i.e. disease. That is their forte and society allows them to do business in this environment. (Sincerely though, pharmaceutical companies do a lot of good helping those with their medicines or philanthropy efforts).

We allow football players to tackle each other in the allowed space of the playing field but this behavior would be unthinkable if it were to occur out of context on the pedestrian sidewalk in a metropolitan city. The same principle goes for the way pharmaceutical companies operate. They aren’t thinking of ways to prevent people from becoming sick in the first place. Instead, they profit from the sick. That is their game. We as a society have written the game rules and allow this conduct to occur. If there were more efforts and resources shifted to preventing disease and researching health, there would be less sick people. With less sick people, the game would change and so would the behaviors of the pharmaceutical industry.

In America, we want freedom and choice and limited government regulations but as we can see through corruption and ignorance, problems can arise when we shift too heavily towards a laissez faire environment. Just look at the explosion of obesity in the last few decades, despite certain industries claiming our sedentary activities are to blame, when in fact these certain industries are likely the culprit. If we let politicians and lobbying groups deny scientific research on health and loosen the regulations of their pervasive marketing I’m sure I’d be having double-stuff Oreo’s for dinner and watching TV until drool rolled down my chin. But because I have been educated on health, I can resist both.

Regulations hold a unique power to keep us healthy. They can tax bad habits, incentivize healthy ones, and shift money towards preventative research.

Our society needs knowledgable, unbiased, public figures to showcase healthy behaviors. To reiterate, we need to set policies that incentivize health, through our food choices, transportation means, insurance policies, etc. We need policies to create deterrents to unhealthy behaviors with regulations and taxation, just like we do with cigarettes. And of particular importance, we need to teach children the importance of eating well, while limiting the toxic advertisements of unhealthy foods. (I’ll discuss in another post the disappointing health education and behaviors of healthcare professionals.)

We are still a long way away from having a perfect, health-promoting system but at least the blame can be partially shifted away from the pharmaceutical companies* and onto the regulations that govern their behavior.

In the words of Ice-T: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

*Of note, when I refer to the pharmaceutical industry, I am speaking in the context of individual companies acting on their own behalf. A completely different thinking can occur when describing the ever-powerful lobbying group PhRMA. Throughout this article, I am not speaking about PhRMA.