#for essentially being unflavored water spheres

[doesnotloveyou]

you guys remember the pineberry? this exotic, viral fruit that lookeddeceptively like a strawberry but tasted like "pineapple" and only grew in idk the netherlands or somehint, that pineberry. so the other day i tried one. i saw a whole SHELF of them at the store and i thought "wow that's so extravagant to see at meijer" (the price should've been the tip 0ff) and i thought it would be soooo cultured of me to try them and experience a new fruit (yet too chicken to try lychee) so i buy a box of these berries. andi take them home and i wash them and i bite into one and it's like

"huh. this tastes like...a tart strawberry"

they taste like underripe strawberries and they're white so they even look like the little strawberry fists that have just seen the light of day. eating a pineberry is just the experience of eating a whole adult strawberry but with the sharp flavor of a baby strawberry. and i'm annoyed by this and the packaging implies these pineberries—of which i have a whole container—were grown locally in the USoA so i google "pineberries" to get some kind of backstory as to why i was sold inFeriOR pineberries and..........they're just geneitcally modified strawberries. from the US. some american was like "i know, what if i took a strawberry but made it white?"......as if that isn't the most american thing to say ever....like othello. "othello, but white" ... "okay and the rest of the cast is black?" - "nononono, everything stays the same except we take othello and make him white. y'know like a pineberry"

[drferox]

Actual ‘Big Pharma‘ Douchebaggery in Vet Medicine

There is a lot that could be said about ‘Big Pharma’, and most of it comes from the human medicine side, probably because it is a larger market and, well, USA. But even in the veterinary sphere I am seeing more generalized ‘douchebag moves’ made by large pharmaceutical companies.

A lot of the Anti-Pharma movement is just memes for the cult of health, that seems to think that vegetables and fresh air will cure all your ills. This is simply not the case, there are serious, legitimate needs for pharmaceutical products, but putting all those disingenuous memes aside, large pharmaceutical companies are definitely not playing nice.

The difficulty is that we need these companies to be conducting the research and development that advances veterinary medicine, but every time there is an advance there is significant push to capitalize on that advance which goes far beyond recouping investment if the share prices are anything to judge by.

And as a veterinarian, I often get blamed for the high price of treating animals. There are lots of factors that come into this, but the wholesale price of prescription (and non-prescription) medication is something that I can’t control.

Every business that sells a product has a mark up on everything they sell. You buy an item wholesale, you add your mark up and tax, then you sell it at a retail price. That’s how business works, and a veterinary clinic is still a business. There might be a fixed percentage mark up, or a fixed fee mark up, or a combination of both, but everything sold is marked up somehow.

But the wholesale prices are mostly set by the manufacturer, that is to say the ‘Big Pharma’ itself, though wholesalers or distributors might add a small margin, they make their profits with bulk buying and selling and the charging of delivery fees, not the products itself.

And the unfortunate reality is that the wholesale price of a drug is basically set by what the manufacturer thinks people are willing to pay, not what it costs to produce or even develop.

(NB: If you want to know what a wholesale price for a veterinary drug is, google a pet pharmacy, and their listed prices will be pretty close, or even below the wholesale price a vet clinic is paying. This is why we can’t compete with them. How are they getting it cheaper than our wholesalers? Hmm, I wonder.)

A couple of examples from the last ten years or so:

Cerenia (Maropitant) hit the market with basically a monopoly for an anti-emetic (stops vomiting) drug that doesn’t cause sedation, which in addition to it’s other medical uses has a significant potential for treating car sickness in dogs. Everyone used the injection, but far fewer people than expected were buying the tablets for that purpose, because they were expensive. After a couple of years of poor sales, those prices dropped to about 30% of their original.

Reconcile (Fluoxetine) was produced as a flavored chew for dogs, but it was 4 to 8 times more expensive than buying the human one and giving unflavored tablets, which most owners chose to do. As vets we’re legally obliged to used the veterinary registered product before the human one... unless the owner ‘requests’ it and we have the conversation about off label use. Which most people ended up doing because it was an awful lot cheaper. Reconcile was removed from the Australian market after a few years.

Vetmedin is a heart medication that greatly improves the quality and duration of life for most dogs it’s prescribed for. It’s really useful, but unfortunately expensive, especially for larger dogs. But its expense was just a fact of life for those that needed it, and many vet clinics were marking it up less than other products to make it more affordable. Until recently when the drug came off patent, and now a generic is available at 60% of the cost. So now the manufacturer of vetmedin is throwing about all these free product deals to try to keep their market share. If they can afford to give out that much free product, I’m pretty sure they could have lowered the price, or at least not raised it every 6 months, in these last 10 years while they had a monopoly.

Frontline Plus was offering insanely generous deals with free product for clients that bought a box in the twelve months before we stopped stocking it. Of course, by then we couldn’t even give it away.

I personally take a little bit of satisfaction seeing pharmaceutical companies go into a panic when their monopoly ends.

Some pharmaceutical companies take a different route, and copyright not the active ingredient, but the delivery method, which may be a separate chemical, or a structural component. Medicine isn’t just an active component mixed with powder or water. Some have very clever things going on, like slow release micro-spheres or encapsulated actives to produce a long duration of action or to bypass clearance mechanisms. And because they’re not drugs, as such, they’re not subject to quite the same copyright rules, which expire after ten years.

This is particularly frustrating because it means an excellent delivery method can’t be used for other drugs I would find useful in that formula, at least until someone’s copyright expires.

Speaking of copyrights expiring, there are some pharmaceutical companies out there that seem to exist only to wait for expensive meds to come off copyright, to then register a generic at significantly cheaper cost. Not gonna lie, I use these companies a lot, but their number one perk is giving the clinic more free stock, so they could have put their prices lower, if they wanted to. The other perk they gave us was sticky tape that was green.

All of this is old news though. The new douchebaggy moves have me very suspicious.

One company, one simply too big to fail, has announced it’s going to stop offering its products through wholesalers, instead forcing vet clinics to buy all its products from them directly.

This is suspicious, but also leads to worse service when it comes to ordering meds in a hurry. We also haven’t seen a price drop now the wholesalers are being taken out of the equation, and where we could previously bundle orders together from multiple different manufacturers to get free shipping from the wholesaler.

It may not look like much of a big difference, but if all the ‘big pharma’ groups do it, it makes it more difficult for smaller producers to gain a market share. Currently a clinic can do one big order to a wholesaler, and get products from all the different manufacturers. If they all split, the temptation is certainly there to just order from the few big ones to save on shipping and time.

Another, even worse offering by the pharmaceutical companies right now essentially amounts to a pyramid scheme.

This is what this particular pharmaceutical company is doing, which shall remain unnamed here, but Aussie vets probably know who it is:

Market a ‘new’ arthritis supplement. Claim it’s different for products with the same active ingredient because the extraction process is different.

Offer an online store where clients can buy this product directly, as well as all your other products, but an inflated price.

Give clinics a discount code they can give their clients, or anyone else. Purchases made with these codes are discounted generously, and the clinic earns a small commission for the referral.

The clinic is charged around about $1000 a year for this code, unless they buy and sell a lot of the product in question.

The vet clinic is charged a lump sum for the privilege of ‘maybe’ earning a commission for referring their own clients to the pharmaceutical company’s website.

That is not how commissions are supposed to work. It should be you make a referral, you earn money. Not you pay for the chance to earn your commission.

That is like Amazon saying “First you pay me money. Then you send me other people who pay me money, and I’ve give you a tiny cut.”

That absolutely reeks of a scam. And I can only really, desperately hope that business model doesn’t catch on.

Big Pharma absolutely chase the money. They make products they think there is demand and a market for (like flea products, ridiculous money is spent promoting flea products to vet clinics). Big Pharma is accused of a lot of rubbish that simply isn’t fair (all humans not needing the medication that makes their life livable/possible for example) but there are real shenanigans they’re up to as well.