Role of global pharmaceutical companies in worsening public health by expanding criteria and creating new categories for people given prescription drugs

As prescribing drugs has proliferated much faster than rates of increase in disease burden or population growth, evidence indicates that they have become the 4th leading cause of death and a leading cause of hospitalization. This presentation will present evidence that most newly approved drugs developed by global pharmaceutical companies provide few advantages over existing ones to offset these serious harms that worsen public health. It will explain how this is rational economic behavior by companies to the incentives, protections, and practices that reward producing mostly marginally different drugs. It will describe six ways in which marketing strategies lead to diluting whatever benefits new drugs provide while proliferating their use. These patterns constitute what has been called The Risk Proliferation Syndrome behind the epidemic of adverse drug reactions, estimated to be 45-50 million in the U.S. a year and 3-4 times that number globally.

New diseases, risks and conditions developed or promoted by pharmaceutical companies are a major strategy for market expansion beyond the saturated markets in which doctors treat sick patients with effective medications. The use of target indicators and surrogate end points will be described, as well as new scales for mental health states. Corporations and profits can only grow by selling more drugs and charging more for them, a sharp contrast to the goals of public health and health care systems. Recommendations will be made for making sure that the approval, funding, and use of medicines advances public health goals more than corporate goals.