Some of the most common mental health disorders and illnesses for which people take prescription drugs include:. Some disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder require medication to keep patients stable and to help manage their symptoms, just like physical illnesses such as heart disease or diabetes.
With other illnesses like depression and anxiety, medication is also often used to help treat patients with severe symptoms. Medication is often paired with talk therapy or is prescribed by a general physician who checks in with the patient every few months to assess anxiety and depression levels, and adjust the dosage as necessary.
Regardless, there's a lot of room for interpretation when it comes to whether someone should take prescription medication and which drug is best for mood disorders, phobias, and anxiety. Furthermore, practitioners and therapists have differing opinions of dosage, even within their own specialties. This has opened the door to what many consider to be abusive practices by the pharmaceutical industry by way of over marketing and pushing doctors to over prescribe certain drugs in order to boost their profits.
The practice has been well-documented, and in the case of the opioid epidemic, has resulted in massive settlements in favor of the American people and the local governments that have footed the bill for the death toll. For younger Americans perhaps born in or after the s , pharmaceutical drug company marketing and advertising are just a normal way of life.
By extension, so is getting a prescription for even the most minor of "conditions" or health problems. In fact, issues that were once considered wellness issues to be addressed and monitored through lifestyle adjustments have now become verifiable medical problems thanks to pharmaceutical industry branding campaigns "dry eye syndrome" being one example.
But for older Americans, there was once a time when the decision to prescribe medication belonged almost exclusively to doctors and health care professionals — experts who based their decisions on medical precedent, accepted practices, and the individual patient's needs. Today, American doctors and consumers are under constant pressure not just to utilize prescriptions, but to figure out how to pay for them.
Pharmaceutical companies launch commercials and advertising campaigns that target consumers and encourage them to "ask their doctor" if a certain medication is right for them. But on a less obvious level, they also employ armies of brand ambassadors and pharmaceutical sales representatives to target doctors and incentivize them to prescribe the drugs on their company's product offering. And if that weren't enough, insurance companies often broker deals with pharmaceutical companies to put certain drugs on their "preferred" coverage lists — even medications that perform the same function and retail at similar prices.
The difference is that Brand A brokered a deal that Brand B could not close. If the patient feels that Brand B works better for them, they'll have to jump through multiple hoops in order to obtain a special authorization for the prescription — and even then, it's not always possible. Along with the ethical implications of price gouging consumers, these practices have helped to foster a chaotic and dangerous economy where the cost of essential drugs are grossly inflated.
Additionally, it has created a market that is saturated with prescription drugs that some people might not necessarily need. This ultimately makes it more difficult for the people who actually do need these medications to be able to afford them.
Despite the fact that so many Americans suffer from some type and degree of mental illness, they aren't necessarily comfortable seeking or willing to seek treatment.
Statistics show that mental health disorders like anxiety have practically doubled in young people over the past decades, but children and adolescents often aren't getting the help they need — something that is crucial at such an impressionable age.
There are many factors that affect how and why people get treatment for mental health issues, but experts believe that the cost of prescription drugs in the United States is one of the primary barriers to access.
Anxiety is among the leading mental health disorders among Americans. Whether it's a popular mental health drug like Abilify or a statin like Lipitor to manage high cholesterol and the risk of heart disease a leading cause of death for both men and women in the U.
Regulation is typically frowned upon when it comes to corporations and industries in the United States. In countries like Canada and member states of the European Union, regulations are considered a commonsense practice that ensure businesses play by the rules and engage in fair market practices.
The vast majority of the time, these regulations are said to be in place to protect consumers and to allow greater access to important resources. The aim of this study was to assess the relative cost-effectiveness of escitalopram compared with citalopram in patients with major depressive disorder. Resources use was recorded using a standardized form recording use of healthcare services and days of sick leave for the 2-month prestudy period and for the 8-week study period. Statistically significant improvements were observed in patients treated with escitalopram.
Whether or not you personally believe the cost of research and development to be expensive, it's safe to assume that drug companies will attempt to make up as much of this cost and others as possible when pricing any drugs that have already made it to the market. And while the amount of capital that drug companies pour out in the interest of developing new drugs may be somewhat hazy, the amount of money that these companies see flowing in — and the effects of generic-drug competition on that inflow — are much more clear cut.
When a major pharmaceutical company develops a new drug, it can place multiple characteristics of said drug under patent. These characteristics can be anything from the incorporation of a newly-discovered chemical into the drug's formula, to a novel method of drug-delivery. Generally speaking, obtaining a patent in the pharmaceutical industry is no different from obtaining a patent in any other field; the benefits afforded a pharmaceutical company for the discovery and implementation of a new chemical compound are the same as those afforded Eli Whitney for his patent on the cotton gin, or Buckminster Fuller for his patent on the structure of the geodesic dome.
For twenty years after being granted the patent, companies retain the exclusive rights to producing that drug, and can therefore charge pretty much whatever they want for it. From a financial perspective, having a patent on a drug is one of the most valuable chips in a pharmaceutical company's pocket.
Once the patent s protecting a prescription drug expire, other companies can start making their own versions of the drug — these generic drugs almost always enter the market at a significantly reduced price. Take Prozac, for example. The generic version? Three dollars. As you might expect, competition provided by the generic drug typically has the almost immediate effect of driving the profits on brand name drugs into the ground.
For a better idea of the kind of financial impact generic drugs can have on pharmaceutical revenues, have a look at this chart, borrowed from an article published in in the New England Journal of Medicine. According to the article:. The average relative price is the average price of a generic version divided by the price of the brand-name drug. What the figure illustrates is how patent expiry results in falling drug prices. Falling drug prices, in turn, translate into falling profits.
But with retail prescription prices increasing at an average of 3. The Hatch-Waxman Act and the Rise of Generic Drugs The passage of the Hatch-Waxman Act in injected price competition into the prescription-drug industry by making it easier for generic-drug manufacturers to bring a product to market. This was accomplished by permitting generic-drug makers to skip clinical trials, allowing them to seek FDA approval of their generic-drug formulations before the relevant patents on their brand-name equivalents expired.
These provisions not only made bringing a generic drug to market more economically feasible, they also ensured that generic options could be made available the instant that patent s on brand-name drugs expired. According to Frank, generic drugs "save consumers and purchasers of prescription drugs tens of billions of dollars per year.
More on this later. But just because pressure for the development of truly innovative drugs exists doesn't mean that they're actually being produced. Manufacturers of both brand-name and generic drugs have responded to the provisions of the Hatch—Waxman Act in ways that advance their own economic interests In other words, competition from generic brands has inspired brand-name drug manufacturers to produce new versions of old drugs in the process we mentioned earlier called "evergreening.
Remember Celexa and its upgrade, Lexapro? In , just one year after Lexapro hit the market, the patent on Celexa expired. Health policy professor David Light agrees with Frank.
In a recent paper for the journal BioSocieties , Light and economist Rebecca Warburton write that current laws encourage major pharmaceutical companies to develop many new drugs that are just tweaks on the old ones, rather than rewarding them for focusing on drugs that are measurably superior to their predecessors.
The researchers note that while this particular method of drug development may appear to translate into profits in the immediate future, in the long run it actually hurts major pharmaceutical companies by snuffing out the innovation necessary for real medical breakthroughs. Even the team of analysts employed by pharma giant Eli Lilly and Company recognizes the lack of innovation in contemporary drug development practices:.
Given that nearly everyone seems to agree that the vast majority of newly-developed drugs are failing to offer much in the way of groundbreaking medical value, one is left wondering if Light's assessment of the industry is correct. Our current set of regulations and laws have driven the pharmaceutical industry to develop more and more patented drugs.
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