Restless Toe Syndrome

I watch the news every night with my wife and we love the ads more than the news. A singing group of old guys crowing about taking Viagra and then bringing home the bacon, so to speak?
Or the ads for Alzheimer's drugs that prey on fear and don't bother to tell you the drugs really don't work that long or at all?

But our favorites are for the ads for the new diseases seemingly created to get an FDA approval and to sell a drug. The winner by far is "restless leg syndrome" which sounds even more ominous when it is called by its powerful and mysterious acronym, RLS. Sure some people may actually have RLS - whatever the hell it is -- but I am willing to bet a whole lot more people bug their doctors or end up taking the pills for a while than actually have RLS. And what is next -- Restless Toe Syndrome?

OK, OK, what is the harm you ask? If a patient is responsible and a physician is responsible, who will use it? Don't kid yourself - these kinds of things scare the hell out of many people, especially older people, not to mention hypochondriacs. It ties up physician hours, wastes hundreds of millions in office visits and drugs you may be paying for with Medicare taxes, and is something that is emblematic of the problems with Big Pharma.

Big Pharma companies lobby and testify saying they need fat profit margins to advance medical care. Many people buy the argument. I would too if they had a different pipeline. Pfizer just cut a big deal and bought into a company for a new pain medication. Who cares - what does that investment give us but more ads? Big Pharma invests hundreds of millions, nah, billions, to cure what we don't need cured, such as that great crippler across the generations, Restless Leg Syndrome. I mean, some of the things you see on TV or I know is in the works are not exactly up there with the black plague, Alzheimer's Disease or cancer in the pantheon of human misery throughout the centuries.

This is a major reason Big Pharma is under assault - their product emphasis and the way they market some ridiculous products strains all credibility. They seem to create new diseases for prime time ads, or me-too drugs, or incrementally improved drugs to extend patent protection. Are these good reasons for Americans to pay the highest drug prices in the world? Hey, I am not Michael Moore, I am not even a tree hugger (I do hug endangered species, for scientific reasons), my concern is that this ridiculous investment behavior will drive the Feds into more rather than less regulation, more rather than less interference in the health care economy.

C'mon, think of it in simpler terms -- I mean, next time to you see a Viagra ad, ask yourself if battery companies would develop a longer lasting battery just for vibrators and how would the energizer bunny fit into an ad? Or next time you see a Restless Leg Syndrome ad, ask yourself if Apple would use its investment dollars to re-digitize soon to be out of copyright songs, and get new copyrights, and market them for the "musically impaired?"

Bottom line: ranting can be fun, but this is also serious. It is also why you need to shun Big Pharma stocks except for the Jurassic Park part of your portfolio and focus on growers, fast growers, cheap fast growers - real biotech and life sciences companies, not the Amgens (AMGN) of the world making believe they are a biotech outfit when they behave just like Big Pharma, with no real pipeline, layoffs and stock buybacks.

Stay tuned - I head for the beach, where I get to do some real thinking on longer-term tech and science and regulatory trends, and that is what I will be doing the next couple of weeks. If there are topics of interest, stop being a wuss, post something will ya?