Patents Against People: How Drug Companies Price Patients out of Survival and boycott homeopathy

As our television screens toggle between pundits squabbling over Obamacare’s insurance rules and ads for erectile dysfunction remedies, another health care battle rages in village clinics and corporate boardrooms. Behind the seductive commercials for breakthrough treatments, multinational brands and technocrats are concocting supranational policies to hold poor patients hostage to pharmaceutical markets across the Global South through elaborate intellectual property schemes in international trade.


And while the industry sutures the future of medicine to the business of exploiting disease, poor countries serve as an incubator for neoliberal policies that boost the industry’s power in Washington, capitalizing on regional inequality to degrade public health on a global scale.
The struggle for access to medicine presents a legal and ethical minefield for rich and poor countries alike—one that is being fought out as humanitarians challenge corporations over intellectual property rights. A recent landmark decision by the Indian Supreme Court thrust that conflict into popular awareness. The ruling blocked a request by the global pharmaceutical giant Novartis for a patent on a Leukemia drug, Gleevec. The company claimed to be introducing a new formulation of the drug that warranted a fresh patent. But the court determined that the new Gleevec was virtually identical to the old one. This cleared the way for mass production of a much cheaper generic version. While a cancer patient in the United States might spend around $70,000 for Gleevec, India’s version could cost as little as $2,500.
The defeat of Novartis sent shockwaves across the drug industry. Companies have long structured their profit systems around an obscure set of intellectual property controls, and the ruling represented a growing global pushback against their political and commercial hegemony.
Homeopathy is a system of medicine which involves treating the individual with highly diluted substances, given mainly in tablet form, with the aim of triggering the body’s natural system of healing. Based on their specific symptoms, a homeopath will match the most appropriate medicine to each patient. This type of treatments are much cheaper and even more effective than normal chemical drugs which have enormous side effect!!