Big Pharma’s Newest Sneak Attack on Your Wallet

Let the buyer beware! In 45+ years in the medical field I have watched many things come from the drug companies, some of them truly wonderful and a boon to mankind, some of them pulled off the market for doing more harm than good. While I have sometimes shuddered at the prices and/or the side effects of some medications, I have also considered the irony of how much money people spend willingly and out of pocket on ‘non-approved’ pharmaceuticals even when they know that the side effects can be anything from impaired behavior to death. What ‘non-approved pharmaceuticals’ am I talking about? How about alcohol, cigarettes, street drugs (including pot, meth, cocaine, heroin and now the new ‘synthetics’ like K2, Spice, Bath Salts and Flakka), steroid supplements, and an array of other non-prescription supplements of unknown benefit and unknown danger hyped by the ‘Medicine is bad for you’ group of snake oil peddlers. Then, of course, there are all the miraculous diet pills – a new one comes out in that circus arena almost every week, and the pricier the better!

Humans will spend a lot of money for any chemical marketed well (whether standard commercials or the druggie underground word of mouth), especially if they believe it will help them, but these more recent issues stimulate me to issue a warning to patients and doctors alike about prices going crazy. It was certainly sneaky for the prices of generic medications to suddenly jump 5 – 10 fold in price at the beginning of 2014 – and one clearly cannot blame either the cost of research and development or the cost of advertising when these drugs have been generic – and often on the $4 list – for years! It is a bit appalling that the newest treatment for Hepatitis C consists of 2 pills a day for 90 days ( seems to be dropping to 60 now) at the incredible price of $1000 (yes, one thousand dollars) PER PILL, PER DAY, for a total treatment cost of $180,000 in 3 months. One could sort of say this is teaching people a lesson while saving their lives after they indulged in behaviors that caused their disease! And… the drug company will arrange ‘help’ with lowering your cost quite a bit – to a still unreasonable price akin to that for treating cancer.

It is certainly twisting things a bit to now come up with a ‘new’ disease – ‘Binge Eating Disorder’ – known as BED – as a way of targeting sale of stimulant drugs to people with obesity – although stimulants have long been known to have only short term benefit in that arena. At least it might help people have energy to get out of bed for a while!

But to ‘create a new drug’ by combining 2 other drugs that are so old they have gone to generic or even over the counter – and then charge $400 – $700 a month is a whole new low in manufacturing and marketing creativity ethics (– or a high in benefitting stockholders). There are 2 drugs that have emerged fairly recently that I became aware of and want to pass on the information. One of them is Duexis – a pain medication that will “not hurt your stomach”. It is a combination of ibuprofen and famotidine – that old OTC NSAID pain med you can buy for pennies, and generic Pepcid, another oldie that can be bought OTC – although it might cost you a dollar a pill. Suddenly there is a jump from $40 to $400 a month if you choose to get it as a prescribed combination drug. What a racket. Willie Sutton, the bank robber, would have loved it! The other is Nuedextra – being marketed for ‘Pseudobulbar Affect’ – which they are cleverly but inaccurately presenting as a consequence of head injuries for all those athletes and other head injured people out there – causing their emotions to go wildly out of control – and generating a new problem and a new market to sell to. Here their wonderful treatment consists of a combination of dextromethorphan (yes, the cough suppressant in OTC cough meds) and Quinidine Sulfate – an old, generic and very inexpensive heart medicine. Here, at a stretch, it is about $5 worth of chemicals for a one month supply, for which they will kindly charge you $700 or so for turning it into a combination drug. They will also list an enormous number of serious cardiac effects you can expose yourself to when you take it. While mood swings secondary to head injuries are a real issue, there are better, safer, cheaper treatments.

Kudos to the pharmaceutical industry for creating new illnesses in new markets and then jacking up the price of previously developed drugs to unbelievable levels – it certainly makes their stock prices do well, and the likelihood of law suits is nil since they are old drugs, and they don’t have those high R & D costs in their budget. There are those of us who do believe their marketing costs are about 5 – 6 times as high as their R & D costs, so they won’t escape that bullet, but still the profits will be great!

But ‘BUYER BEWARE’ is the word to the consumer. If you have bottomless pockets (you can bet your insurance company isn’t going to want to pay for these) you can afford them with no worry. Otherwise, be forewarned, and ask your doctor for alternatives and/or do a little creative shopping. I will warn you that with the Nuedextra, the Quinidine comes in 200 mg and 300 mg pills, but Nuedextra only includes 10 mg of the Quinidine and it will be a bit hard to cut that pill into 30 pieces, but … carefully smashing it with a hammer… might handle that and your frustration with the pharmaceutical industry. Have a Great Day!!!