Is the reason doctors usually do not prescribe vitamins and supplements to help manage disease actually the fault of Big Vitamin, rather than Big Pharma?
Many in the alternative health crowd blame Big Pharma for dominating the medical agenda, but could the fault really lie with Big Vitamin?
The global supplements industry is worth around 120 billion each year (which is around one tenth of the 1.2 trillion the pharmaceutical industry earns globally each year). Refs: 1 2
Yet in spite of that huge amount of money coming in, how many clinical trials do Big Vitamin actually run, to test out their products as a means to treat disease? Without providing scientific evidence of efficacy, doctors will not prescribe supplements.
Pharmaceutical companies have to spend around $500 million on R&D and clinical trials to bring each new drug to market, before they get a licence to sell them. Whereas Big Vitamin has no such clinical trial expenses, and can introduce new products with little or no R&D or clinical trials cost.
Therefore I would imagine that some Big Vitamin executives and shareholders are probably making a fortune, as they don't have the high expenses of Big Pharma, but still have a massive global income.
What would happen if Big Vitamin companies got together, with all the various supplement companies chipping in, to pay for major clinical trials of supplements? And once there was some evidence of efficacy, what would happen if Big Vitamin salespeople started court doctors to help promote supplements as a means to manage disease, much in the same way that pharmaceutical company salespeople do? Would this help promote supplements as a useful tool in treating disease?
Let's not kid ourselves that supplements are comparable to the power of drugs in terms of disease treatment and management. If you have serious type 1 diabetes for example, you need insulin, full stop. No supplement is going to replace that. And the same applies for many diseases: there's often no substitute for lifesaving pharmaceuticals. But there is sometimes a role for supplements in helping to manage disease, and I suggest it's this role that Big Vitamin could focus on and promote.
You might find the following image of interest: it shows the 14 mega-corporations that own your supplement brands:
As you can see, a few of the owners of our supplement brands are actual pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Bayer. Others like Nestle and kikkoman are food manufacturers. Reckitt Benckiser are health and hygiene product manufacturers. And the Carlyle Group who own Solgar are a financial services and asset management corporation.
These mega-corporations are very wealthy, and I think they should fund more supplement clinical trials.
Edited by Hip, 28 March 2020 - 02:09 PM.
