At a pharma-sponsored spa retreat in Costa Rica this past week Dr. Littlepill, Dean of the School of Public Health, announced a new campaign to maximize pharmaceutical industry dollars.
In his remarks, Dr. Littlepill explained his conclusion that the most profitable strategy in public health is to identify a large population with a diet and/or lifestyle-related illness that has potentially very damaging consequences and find a drug that treats that illness more easily than changes in diet or lifestyle.
Dr. Littlepill stressed the importance of the scare factor in the profit model, citing as examples the fear of heart attack that motivates Americans to take a drug to lower cholesterol caused by poor diet; the fear of suicide that pushes people to take SSRIs instead of seeking therapy; the fear of deafness which motivates parents to treat all child ear infections with antibiotics when only a small fraction of ear infections are bacterial; the fear of premature death that motivates Americans to take insulin for Type Two Prediabetes instead of improving diet; the fear of breast cancer leading to expensive over-screening.
In his remarks, he elaborated that it is essential that a small group of identified users face a very real risk from the disease in question, and that it must be possible to point to dramatic examples of untreated illness leading to dire results or death in order to motivate the larger population to embrace the expensive treatment. Instead of focusing on identifying the smaller groups most at risk for a given illness because of genetic or other factors, this approach treats everyone with the most expensive remedy.
The Standard American Diet (SAD) is sufficiently deadly that it can be relied on to provide a range of illnesses that fit this model and have the potential to be pharma cash cows for Fred’s University. Dr. Littlepill suggests the urgency of identifying cash cows early in the research process so as to obtain monies relating to the first patents. The original drugs can then be tweaked and re-patented ad infinitum. Industry-sponsored trials with a very small sample size and corporate conferences were cited as particularly rich revenue streams for Fred’s University.
On a more personal note, Dr.Littlepill shared that he particularly enjoyed corporate press junkets to luxury resorts with his young graduate student girlfriend. Bottoms up!