The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.

Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.

The pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is their incredible PR and their nerve.

The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.

We should be willing to spend the money in return for the innovation.

You see that the people who are drawn to alternative medicine are often fairly healthy and they go to alternative medicine for what I call the 'symptoms of life.' Fatigue, joint pains, inability to concentrate, perhaps, the kinds of things that anyone over twenty-five gets at some point.

Alternative medicine plays into this exaggerated notion that you can prevent disease simply by doing the right thing.