Hard choice for NICE

Greed rules

Only someone subhuman could fail to be moved by the plight of the kidney cancer patients who are denied drugs that could add months to their lives.

Hard choices are unavoidable. The £30,000 per patient used could save or extend several lives in other areas of medicine. None of today’s newshounds attacked the problem from the right direction.

NICE cannot adopt a money no-object policy. That’s make-believe land not reality. But why are the drugs that cost pennies to manufacture priced at £30,000? The Big Pharmas blame the cost of research. At best that’s a half-truth. Even though the miraculous quality of the research is acknowledged.

All Big-Pharmas spend twice as much on marketing as they invest in research. Not marketing life saving drugs, but mass consumed medicines for trivial complaints. Their main investment is made to keep their profits buoyant.

To the media, all new drugs are miracle cures denied to the dying by a mean Government. I investigated one that was being pushed for pancreatic cancer. It was no miracle. The cost was £16,000 a year; it extended life by an average of 12 days and had adverse side effects, including death, in 10% of the patients.

Someone has to make these impossible choices. There is no remedy in calling for a bottomless drugs budget. That cannot happen.

But progress can be made in pressurising Pharmas to curb their greed.

Cold warriors repent

Yesterday the 63rd anniversary of Hiroshima was marked in Newport. For the past 25 years members of local peace groups re-dedicate themselves to the campaign for international  harmony. Flowers are cast on the waters of Tredegar Park Lake to recall a similar ceremony in Hiroshima.

Arguments still rage on the need to bomb the two Japanese cities. Some argue that it shortened the war and saved lives. Others claim that Japan was already in the process of surrendering and the USA wanted to demonstrate their bomb to assert post-war world domination.

The accounts of this largest  civilian slaughter ever still haunt us. A sunny day, a flash of blue light, a thunderous roar, a killer wind, fire and black rain. Then the atomic plague.

There are encouraging signs of previous cold warriors flocking to the cause of a de-nuclearised world.

Will the world eventually obliterate from its military dreams any possibility of a similar act
of mass barbarism?

Iaith Boris

Guto Harri told me on the Eisteddfod Maes today that he had read my blog that chided him for selling his soul to a lobbying firm.

He said he wanted to prove that he could succeed in a job outside of journalism where he has worked since college. His enthusiasm for the world of lobbying is on a par with mine now. But he burbled with joy at his present job as press officer for Mayor Boris Johnson.

I recalled that Boris once tried to learn Welsh when he stood in a North Wales seat. No local people could identify the language he was trying to speak.

Guto revealed that Boris retains some favourite Welsh words that he booms out at the end of a working day.

He relishes the word sglodion ( chips) and cig (meat). ‘Cig’ (pronounced keeeg) he says is a magnificent words that he can the imagined a Roman using as in ‘Slave, bring me my cig.’

Guto fended off my suggestion that Boris is an environmentally inert buffoon with a stout defence of the joys of doing PR for a proven PR disaster area.

We’ll see.

EFFOX OFF This wonderful hit on two horrors, the hideous anti-depressant EFFEXOR and the Republican party. Enjoy.

 

See more Adam "Ghost Panther" McKay videos at Funny or Die

EFFOX off

Comments

[Huw O'Sullivan]

I'm sure big pharma would claim that sales of mass consumed medicines for trivial complaints are where they make most of their money, which then they can invest in research for the drugs for the serious complaints.

Given that shall we say , some, of the mass consumed medicines are utterly without benefit other than the paracetemol they contain, I'm thinking about cough medicines here, containing expectorants or suppressants and in some cases both in the same bottle, albeit with neither at a level sufficient to do their job even if they weren't being countermanded by the other.
Perhaps they should not be allowed to market such products as medicines at all.

Surely though the only alternative to big pharma is government supported research and I don't see that happening on a scale to match them in this country (or in all of europe for that matter) in this century.

But if we are not willing to do it, can we complain at the prices those who are willing to do it wish to charge for products that they have invested time and money in, even or perhaps especially if their biggest money makers are effectively placebos.

On the other hand, given that the genuine medicines are basically just credibility enhancing advertising for the same placebo's one wonders why they charge for the real medicine's at all.

[John]

I can't remember the last time I took a pharmaceutical drug yet I see people reaching for them for anything from a headache to indigestion. I work in the Health food industry and that is awash with the latest snake oil miracle cure that people waste there hard earned cash on.
I'm of the old school who believes let food be your medicine and medicine your food.
As for this case the NHS is not a bottomless pit a line has to be drawn somewhere.I hear that this drug extends a terminal ill patients life by around 3 months (although some live years and some live less ) and in many cases the side effects are horrendous. We all have to die at some time I worry that often quality of life is sacrificed for quantity.
I wonder how many of those bleating about this decison would vote to have their income tax increased to pay for all these so called miracle drugs that NICE rejects??

[paulflynn]

This is another big subject, Huw.

Internationally Big Pharma is uncontrolled. They are free to manipulate the markets and to condition society to become reliant on their products. The regulatory authority here the MHRA is financed entirely by Big Pharma. Promoting a new expensive drug is a PR operation relying on the support of a gullible media hungry for human interest stories.

There are also the damaging effects of medicines that are oversold and over marketed.

[Alan Thrower]

"But progress can be made in pressurising Pharmas to curb their greed."

Shame you are the last MP in the house to consider it seeing as you vigorously back up their marketing exercise to sell Nicotine Replacement Therapy at the expense of freedom of choice.

I can spell hypocrite and I know one when I read their comments.

[PaulFlynn]

Alan Thrower, you are totally wrong again. I have advocated the the legalisation of Snus as the most effective way to improve the health of inveterate smokers and air quality for the rest of us.

Changing to snus by males in Swedean has a far better record of harm reduction that any other smoking reduction method.

The freedom of choice I support is that of non-smokers to breathe un-polluted air that has not been fouled by smokers.