Pharmaphobia

For millennia, human survival depended on our innate abilities to fight pathogens and repair injuries. Only recently has medical science prolonged longevity and improved quality of life. Physicians and academic researchers contribute to such progress, but the principal contributor is private industry that produces the tools – drugs and medical devices – enabling doctors to prevent and cure disease. Heavy regulation and biology’s complexity and unpredictability make medical innovation extremely difficult and expensive. Pharmaphobia describes how an ideological crusade, stretching over the last quarter century, has used distortion and flawed logic to make medical innovation even harder in a misguided pursuit of theoretical professional purity. Bureaucrats, reporters, politicians, and predatory lawyers have built careers attacking the medical products industry, belittling its critical contributions to medical innovation and accusing it of non-existent malfeasance: overselling product value, flaunting safety and corrupting physicians and academics who partner with it. The mania has imposed “conflict-of-interest” regulations limiting or banning valuable interactions between industry and physicians and researchers and diverting scarce resources from innovation to compliance. The victims are patients suffering from cancer, dementia, and other serious diseases for which new treatments are delayed, reduced, or eliminated as a result of these pointless regulations. With breathtaking detail, Thomas Stossel shows how this attack on doctors who work with industry limits medical innovation and inhibits the process of bringing new products into medical care.

Medical Innovation: Concept to Commercialization is a practical, step-by-step approach on how to move a novel concept through development to realize a commercially successful product. Real-world experience cases and knowledgeable contributors provide lessons that cover the practices of diverse organizations and multiple products. This important reference will help improve success and avoid innovation failure for translational researchers, entrepreneurs, medical school educators, biomedical engineering students and faculty, and aspiring physicians. Provides multiple considerations and comprehensive lessons from varied organizations, researchers and products Designed to help address topics that improve success and avoid the high cost of innovation failure Recommends the practical steps needed to move a novel, non-developed concept into a tangible, realistic and commercially successful product

While plenty can be said about the dysfunction of our health care system, rarely do business and private players in health care innovation get a good rap. This book takes on skeptics of the partnership between the medical community, political groups, and private businesses, by illustrating how such cooperation can result in world-class innovation and health care delivery.

In the context of a growing criticism on the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on physicians, scientists, or politicians, Conflict of Interest and Medicine offers a comprehensive analysis of the conflict of interest in medicine anchored in the social sciences, with perspectives from sociology, history, political science, and law. Based on in-depth empirical investigations conducted within different territories (France, the European Union, and the United States) the contributions analyze the development of conflict of interest as a social issue and how it impacts the production of medical knowledge and expertise, physicians’ work and their prescriptions, and also the framing of health crises and controversies. In doing so, they bring a new understanding of the transformations in the political economy of pharmaceutical knowledge, the politicization of public health risks, and the promotion of transparency in science and public life. Complementing the more normative and quantitative understandings of conflict of interest issues that dominate today, this book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including social studies of sciences and technology, sociology of health and illness, and political sociology and ethics. It will be also a valuable resource for health professionals, medical scientists, or regulators facing the question of corporate influence.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The priestly class in classical Greece was not as powerful as the scientists who emerged in medieval Europe, and so the writings of Francis Bacon still have the power to startle. Bacon was the first great philosopher of science, and he wrote that science was a gateway to the sublime. #2 While science has flourished in the modern era, it has lately come to be captured by the state. Scientists have long sought state funding, and as a result, they have long aligned themselves with state doctrines. #3 The argument that science is a public good is false because it ignores the principle of opportunity benefit, which is the converse of opportunity cost. If there is a choice between doing A or B, and if A is chosen over B, the opportunity cost is the forgone benefit from B. But if A is more valuable than B, it is rational to choose A for its additional or opportunity benefit. #4 The linear model, which looks like this: was proposed by Bacon, and it was believed that academic research was the source of industrial technology. But modern scholarship shows that it is advances in industrial technology that stimulate academic research.

This book provides a guide to innovation and entrepreneurship within academic surgery and details how these approaches can develop new technologies and programs that advance healthcare. The pathways, barriers, and opportunities for commercialization and entrepreneurship are identified and discussed in relation to licenses, start-ups, and obtaining funding. The book aims to help create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across academic medical centres around the world, with the belief that this can improve patient care. This book is relevant to surgeons of all disciplines, as well as medical students and researchers.

Managing the Drug Discovery Process: How to Make It More Efficient and Cost-Effective thoroughly examines the current state of pharmaceutical research and development by providing chemistry-based perspectives on biomedical research, drug hunting and innovation. The book also considers the interplay of stakeholders, consumers, and the drug firm with attendant factors, including those that are technical, legal, economic, demographic, political, social, ecological, and infrastructural. Since drug research can be a high-risk, high-payoff industry, it is important to researchers to effectively and strategically manage the drug discovery process. This book takes a closer look at increasing pre-approval costs for new drugs and examines not only why these increases occur, but also how they can be overcome to ensure a robust pharmacoeconomic future. Written in an engaging manner and including memorable insights, this book is aimed at redirecting the drug discovery process to make it more efficient and cost-effective in order to achieve the goal of saving countless more lives through science. A valuable and compelling resource, this is a must-read for all students and researchers in academia and the pharmaceutical industry. Considers drug discovery in multiple R&D venues, including big pharma, large biotech, start-up ventures, academia, and nonprofit research institutes Analyzes the organization of pharmaceutical R&D, taking into account human resources considerations like recruitment and configuration, management of discovery and development processes, and the coordination of internal research within, and beyond, the organization, including outsourced work Presents a consistent, well-connected, and logical dialogue that readers will find both comprehensive and approachable

Strong international focus with high profile contributors from the UK, US, France, Spain and the Netherlands Lack of material attempting to evaluate critically health promotion and health service responses, particularly with regard to community based interventions among hard to reach populations Richard Hartnoll is Co-ordinator of the European Multi-City Study of Drug Misuse and Priniciple Investigator on the Multi-City Study of Cocaine Use