What a surpise!

Phamaceutical companies spend more on advertising than research.

I got a kick out of reading this story in Science Daily, with its headline, "Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds." Well shut my mouth, who would have thought...

The article highlights research performed by Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin. Gagnon is a Ph.D student at York University (Toronto), and Lexchin is a professor in the School of Health Policy and Management at York. Gagnon and Lexchin published their findings in PLoS Medicine, an online peer-reviewed journal. Their paper starts out with this anecdotal introduction:

In the late 1950s, the late Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver, Chairman of the United States Senate's Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee, put together the first extensive indictment against the business workings of the pharmaceutical industry. He laid three charges at the door of the industry: (1) Patents sustained predatory prices and excessive margins; (2) Costs and prices were extravagantly increased by large expenditures in marketing; and (3) Most of the industry's new products were no more effective than established drugs on the market. Kefauver's indictment against a marketing-driven industry created a representation of the pharmaceutical industry far different than the one offered by the industry itself. As Froud and colleagues [authors of Financialization and Strategy: Narrative and Numbers, 2006] put it, the image of life-saving “researchers in white coats” was now contested by the one of greedy “reps in cars." The outcome of the struggle over the image of the industry is crucial because of its potential to influence the regulatory environment in which the industry operates... Fifty years later, the debate still continues between these two depictions of the industry.

As with other published research papers, the PLoS article details how the duo calculated expenditures for both categories, but their conclusion is what's interesting:

From this new estimate, it appears that pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on promotion as they do on R&D [my emphasis]. These numbers clearly show how promotion predominates over R&D in the pharmaceutical industry, contrary to the industry's claim. While the amount spent on promotion is not in itself a confirmation of Kefauver's depiction of the pharmaceutical industry, it confirms the public image of a marketing-driven industry and provides an important argument to petition in favor of transforming the workings of the industry in the direction of more research and less promotion.

Maybe we need new leadership, like Kefauver's, to help us get control of our imploding health-care system! As candidates speak about health care, I want to hear them talk about what they will do to help spur research and support regulation that is prevention oriented, and how they will deal with an industry that is marketing us to death.