The Startling Drug Sales Expenses and the Medical Community's Academic Conferences
On the evening of August 27, the listed company Buchang Pharmaceutical released its 2019 semi-annual report: the company's revenue for January–June was 6.4 billion yuan, up 11.43% year on year. It is worth noting that sales expenses accounted for 3.8 billion, up 13.96% year on year, and more than 90% of this expense was for academic conferences and similar costs.
Because the articles I write have a certain influence, pharmaceutical companies have long been inviting me to all kinds of academic conferences, but I have always politely declined. I have grown accustomed to a secluded, reclusive life and am not used to moving among occasions that demand so much false courtesy.
In the various works written by the Japanese doctor Kondo Makoto, we can see that this phenomenon is no exception in Japan either. According to Kondo Makoto, a certain now widely used global 'star' anticancer drug only muddled through and was approved for anticancer use by dint of sponsoring medical institutions through all kinds of academic conferences.
Nowadays such expensive anticancer drugs are the objects of a superstitious worship by doctors and patients, yet many cancer patients spend over a million a year for no effect.
Patients or families often recommend all kinds of academic medical papers to me; I treat them cautiously, because the credibility of such papers sponsored by pharmaceutical companies is truly not reassuring. To treat disease by reference to these papers, should an error occur, the stakes are high.
Kondo Makoto is a very stubborn man with rigorous academic training—he earned his medical doctorate in the United States. So he reads very carefully all the clinical data published by drug companies and can find signs of fabrication in the various public data. After finding these signs, he publicly questions the data of certain pharmaceutical manufacturers; out of fear of Kondo Makoto's influence, some companies simply withdraw those suspicious data.
Academic conferences in the medical community should not have sunk to the point of being tied to the interests of drug companies; if the medical community's academic conferences become a sales tool of large pharmaceutical companies, then the credibility of some of the medical community's data and papers is greatly affected. The evaluation by drug-company-sponsored academic institutions of the clinical efficacy of certain drugs will also lack impartiality, because such academic institutions have already become stakeholders of the drug companies.
This problem exists not only in China and Japan; in The Emperor of All Maladies, the author Siddhartha (Mukherjee) also exposes the fabrication scandals of the American medical establishment. It is clear that on this issue, the whole world shares the same temperature.