TRANSLATION FOR NEWSWEEK SELECT
Drug advertisements and the latest products they tout are omnipresent, but are these new drugs better than those previously on the market, and are they really making us healthier? Harvard University senior lecturer Marcia Angell’s “The Truth About the Drug Companies,” reveals the shocking inside story of America’s pharmaceutical companies. During the course of an editorial career that’s spanned more than two decades, Angell, the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, witnessed the transformation of the pharmaceutical industry from an agent of “developing and producing useful medicines” to a “vast marketing machines” in search of profits.
Angell disputes the pharmaceutical companies’ claim that nearly every drug maker relies on public-sponsored research. The top-ten U.S. drug makers, for example, spend as little as 14 percent of their total revenue on R&D. Additionally, many of them manipulate the results of clinical trials and exaggerate the effects of their drugs.
Large scale expenditures on marketing, bribery, government lobbying, and hiring scores of lawyers to protect and extend copyrights are the main causes of today’s high price of prescription drugs — the cost of which eventually falls upon the ill. Through facing a hailstorm of criticism and inflammatory accusations over her controversial work, Angell wants to push for substantive industry reforms, including remodeling clinical trials to be impartial and severing the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and medical education. As China is on the verge of healthcare reform, this book holds many lessons to draw upon.
-Zhou Min
制药业黑幕
药品广告铺天盖地袭来，推陈出新的药品真的更好和能让我们更加健康？哈佛大学高级讲师玛西亚•安吉尔的《制药业的真相》（The Truth About the Drug Companies）把美国制药业的诸多惊人内幕展露在我们眼前。安吉尔是美国《新英格兰医学杂志》的前总编辑。在20余年的编辑生涯里，她曾目睹过不少制药公司从肩负“研发和生产有用药物”的使命的机构变质为巨型的唯利是图的市场营销机器。她在书中指出，所有药厂几乎都是依赖公费资助进行研究。以美国十大制药公司为例，它们今天的研发费用也只不过是占其销售收入的14%。另外，不少药厂还涉及操纵临床试验结果和夸大药品功效等非正常手段。
高比例的宣传开销、贿赂、游说主管部门和雇用大量律师以求保护专利权益和延长期限等，都是造成今天药品价格高涨的主要原因。而这些支出和结果最终都转嫁到病人身上。安吉尔试图通过直言无讳的批评和耸人听闻的内幕，以唤起包括重塑临床实验的公正性、切断制药公司与医药教育间的联系等的实质变革。对正在摸索前行的中国医疗制度改革，这书具有不少值得借鉴的地方。
—周敏
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