( Posted by: Desinie Smith- " I'm just passing this information on. You can read the articles and be your own judge.
My opinion: I can tell you from personal experience that injectable
drugs for MS are costing insurance companies $2,500 approx. per month
per patient. These medications have no generics available which allows
the pharmaceutical companies to keep their cost high. If the patents on
said medications were left to run out, generics could be made and the
medication's cost would be able to be brought down considerably. Please
take note to the foot notes at the closing of these articles where the
authors of the articles sight their numerous sources that they used to
compile their facts in which to write the articles. I feel that with the
billions ( yes, billions) of dollars that are being made from these
medications ( and other medications for other diseases also ) the NMSS and other charities that raise money for research of different diseases ( not just MS) are
more likely to give research money to fund the findings of a drug's
efficacy than they are to finding a cure. Also, be sure to read the
recent articles about the newest studies being done by Biogen/Idec and
Elan on Tysabri versus Copaxone and Rebif. Tysabri has already been
proven in previous studies to lower relapse rates in Relapsing-Remitting
MS by 67% and the other injectable drugs are said to be about half as
effective as Tysabri.")
Recently Senator Charles Grassley,
ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking
into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic
physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription
drugs. He hasn't had to look very hard.
Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology
at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him,
children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar
disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which
were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that
purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of
age.
To read the rest of the article click here. And here's a similar article which speaks of the same subject.
