Pharma jobs in an RBE

Supposing it was discovered that (say) eating a handful of grass every day would ward off cancer. In an RBE there would be much rejoicing at the discovery and studies would look into how we can produce and distribute enough grass to meet this new need, and/or how we could extract or manufacure the active ingredient if that would make the remedy more efficient. The objective would be to derive the most human benefit from the least unit of resource.

In our current economy, the jobs of people who work in big pharma and the cancer industry would be at stake. It would be in the vested interest to discredit the claim that grass cures cancer, or to corner the market in grass, or to monetise it or the active ingredient that brings the benefit. It is easy to deride this need to protect vested interests, but it is a very real need. If people don't have jobs their lives collapse. Therefore there's a trade off of jobs for other gains. The "need" to have a job has to be weighed against other needs.

In an RBE, there is no need to do work for its own sake and if work can be handed over to machines or obviates, that is done as soon as possible. Thus if grass cures cancer and there is no more need for people to work in big pharma or the cancer industy that is good. Those people can do something else.

Scientific objectivity

I was reading an article lamenting the use of libel action against scientists, and therefore by extension science itself, when I came across an item about a high school blogger being threatened by such an action because of a blog entry. I take it that the comment  "I take no issue with calling Stanislaw Burzynski a quack and a fraud" gets to the point.

A quack or fraud tries to get money under false pretences - a quack being someone who makes exaggerated or untrue claims about a medicine/drug that he is selling. Burzynski does own the patents to antineoplastons and does stand to gain by their being sold. His opponents say that antineoplastons are unproven. This may be true, but big pharma has an interest in them remaining unproven as they don't own the patents to them and if they were to be proven, the profits they make on their cancer treatments would plummet, with disastrous results for those employed in the industry and conceivably for the research it does.

You see, just as Burzynksi stands to gain from selling his cancer treatment, so do all patent owners of drugs/medicines stand to gain from their sale and therefore from people getting the illness they [claim to] cure/ameliorate. They are all vulnerable to accusations of exaggerating or falsifying claims about their products, and of playing down or undermining the claims of rival products.

I don't see why the medical establishment should be seen as objectively scientific all the while that big pharma has this massive conflict of intetrest, any more than 'mavericks' like Burzynski should. The only solution I can envisage is to remove the perverse incentive of "pay-per-pill".

In a Resource Based Economy, there wouldn't be any money, so no-one could fruitfully be accused of fraud as it would not be technically possible to commit it. The success of drugs/medicines would [could?] only be judged by their effects on patients and not by how much of them was sold or prescribed and there would be nothing to gain by exaggeraton or understating the efficacy of any substance.

Perhaps there is a way of fixing a monetary ecomomy to eliminate the paradox for medicine, but I can't think of it.

Cancer, Burzynski, antineoplastons and how profit has to come before life

Polish doctor Burzynski pioneered cancer treatments using antineoplastons see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antineoplaston. The film 'Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business' shows the concerted efforts of various bodies in Texas and the USA to undermine him, whilst his patients and/or their parents movingly witness how they have lived way beyond the expecatations of the prognoses of oncologists.

Underlying all this is the vested interest of big pharma in continuing to use existing treatments, from which they are making big money, along with the natural conservatism of the medical establishment.

The powers that be don't want important medicines to be in the hands of an individual through patents - tey want institutions to have the rights to them - this usually means big pharma.

Given that Burzynski invented/discovered antineoplastons, and first patented them, we might resonably argue that he should benefit from the money made from them. In fact he has has to spend $millions defending hiself against accusations including of being a fraud a quack.

How much better is it, though, for Burzynski to benefit from ANPs than big pharma? For money to be made out of medicine, people have to be ill. The cancer sufferers in the film make emotional pleas in courts and hearings for Burzynski to be allowed to treat people unhindered by government/industry to stop him, but even if Burzynski had always held the rights to the drugs unfettered, this would still be a problem, as he would still be making money from people being ill, and could conceivably want to protect his patent. If someone came out with a better or cheaper treatment, they would then make all the money. How would he feel about that?

If your livelihood depends on things going wrong that you have to fix, you face the same paradox. In an RBE, the patient would come before the patent. In fact there would be no patent. Discoveries / inventions would be open source, and used to benefit humanity as much as possible, within the overall limits of the earth's resources. Money would not be a limiting factor.

Motivation, profit, big pharma

The big pharmaceutical companies are trying to make profits for their shareholders. That's part of the profit system. Have a look at "Big Pharma Big Bucks" on YouTube - US based, with more direct advertising than UK, but you'll get the idea. They can effectively relaunch drugs under a new name, and we all know how generic drugs can often be much cheaper than branded ones. They also 'invent' lifestyle diseases - "disorders" that don't really have any pathology, but play on people's desire to be/feel better, in an effort to sell more drugs. The companies can't really get out of this. If company A starts marketing a new product, company B has to compete.

These companies are selling powerful chemicals, whose unwanted side effects they will want to play down, and the more they sell (ie we take) the higher their profits. Which is supposed to be better. This provoked a thought about motivation. Critics of TVP/TZM claim that without money there would be no motivation. But do you really want pharmaceutical manufacturers / sellers / pharmacists / GPs that are motivated by money if money comes from selling more pills and potions? Plainly we ideally want people motivated by making people better, and it we can't have that we must harness the motivation that money provides to that goal, and not the goal of selling more drugs.

Of course people aren't actually motivated by money - only by the goods and services that they can use it to obtain. Even the power money brings can only be used to obtain goods and services in the end. Because of the monetary system, we have an advertising industry that tries to make people want goods and services, so that they buy them and keep the profits coming in. That's the system - we have to keep that money on the move.

If we step back and look at what we actually want for ourselves, our fellow humans and our planet, a different picture will emerge. What we want from our pharmaceutical industry is good health, for example.