Bad Pharma!

Whether in workers’ compensation or group health, pharmaceuticals have become one of the largest and certainly fastest growing segments of our health care dollar. We search for answers as new drugs proliferate and old drugs are tweaked and twisted to facilitate renewing their patents. New delivery systems for opioids, beginning with Oxycontin in 1996, have contributed to the explosion in prescription drug abuse.All of which leads me to steer you to a new book guaranteed to be a great read: Bad Pharma:How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. Written by British physician Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma, according to its author, is an attack on the pharmaceutical industry. The balance of the book seeks to defend the following:

“Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments.”

Goldacre tells us about withheld data, explains how drugs are conceived and developed, examines bad regulators, bad trials and the mammoth issue of marketing. It’s an incredible eye-opener and important to everyone in the industry who pays for large amounts of drugs for carriers, groups and claimants.

You’ll be hearing more about this from me, but for now, know that OMCA can help you through the haze and maze of excessive pharmaceutical use. Our nurses and physicians are uniquely equipped to reduce the amount of narcotics your claimants are using and impact your overall drug bill in a meaningful way.

Call us, We can do better.William Faris, JD
Chief Executive Officer
502-495-5040
william.faris@omca.biz
www.omca.biz