Pharmaceutical Feelings

I have always been able to separate what I hear and what I see, and so far, what I see matches what I hear. Last semester, we were presented information in EBM, detailing the business dealings of some pharmaceutical industries, including different statistics on how they settled the court for essentially fraud. Pharmaceutical companies send their representatives to doctors office and buy lunches and how they essentially hire doctors to present the drug product to their colleges. When I worked as a medical biller at my doctors office, there would be a drug representative that comes in to market a new vaccine for HPV and I could remember my doctor just telling me not to bring lunch that day. It is not hard to see why people are distrustful of Big Pharma, with all the money they spend on marketing and advertising. There does not seem to be a justification for the exorbitant prices drugs are charged. But if we are playing devil's advocate, if one spends about 12 to 20 years to develop a drug, one would want to get a return for it. That is what drives innovation and possible cures for diseases supposedly. But a vast majority of the drugs that comes out every year are of the same class; so few are new drugs with new classes. It seems that whenever a company's blockbuster drug is about to come of patent, the company would tweak it or somehow find a new indication for it to extend their patent. The business aspect of pharmaceutical industry is quite questionable. 

On the other hand, when I worked at a free student clinic that provided FREE BRAND NAME medications from companies such as GSK, Pfizer, Merck, Lilly to low income patients. All we had to do was fill out the patient assistance applications and come next week, we have Lantus pens and vials, tons of Lipitor, Protonix, Viagra, Albuterol, and Advair Diskus to sorted out and given to patients. There is a certain generosity associated with companies to who give out thousands and thousands of drugs for zero cost. Based on all of these experiences, I have slight negative feelings towards pharmaceutical companies and hopefully these feelings will change once I learn more about them.