First assignment of group n° 133
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Name of the project
What kind of civic initiative could be set up in order to reveal side effects of medicines ?
1. What Problem do you want to solve ?
We observe that in some cases, pharmaceutical companies do not take the side effects of medicine seriously into account. For example the Mediator made a lot of victims. That’s why we would like to find an alternative in order to facilitate the information process of side effects from patients to other patients. That non awareness could hide some danger due to sides effects of medicines. Highlighting this danger by a civic initiative could influence pharmaceutical companies to review their products or to be obligated to listen to their patients.
2. Why does this problem exist?
The too big lobbying in the pharmaceutical industry avoids the problem linked to the side effects. As a matter of fact, the strength of the pharmaceutic industry is so important that the patients cannot faced the industry. In order to illustrate our minds, we will give just an example. If 100 people get a side effect from pills, only 60 will tell their doctors and on these 60 persons, only half will be considered by the pharmaceutical industry. Those percentage are not exact but it is just a way to explain the issue of our project. Then, scandals and medias intimidate pharmaceutical industry. There are not many scandals, and so the pharmaceutical industry doesn't make a lot of changes on its medicines. We think that the industry is probably trying to avoid the scandal by ignoring the side effects alerted. This topic is all the more important as it deals with a crucial issue of people health. If no one openly speaks about the side effects, they will always exist. Furthermore, it's well known that industry is making profit over people's lives, so it would be profitable for it to take into consideration the too many deadly cases of side effects.
3. What breakthrough are you commited to creating?
In order to inverse the power balance already existing between the different actors on the drug industry, we would like to give the opportunity to the patients and testers to have a significant impact on the process. Actually, information only goes into one way: from labs to clients, throughout notices or mere recommendations from doctors to their patients. There need to be a drastic change in this process, and we would like to put clients at the edge of the balance power. Given the fact that the pharmaceutical industry only evolves thanks to the diseases the human body creates, it is not in its interest to solve every disease. Therefore, we underlined 3 problems actually freezing the situation: 1- The pharmaceutical industry is only making profit over famous diseases that are striking a great amount of people 2- Drug consumers are not aware of side effects 3- The pharmaceutical industry has no interest in reducing the risks of the medicine it creates
What we think can be a disruptive innovation is to inverse this power balance, by giving voice and importance to drug consumers, so that they will not be victim of dangerous side effects that are well-known of the drug manufacturers (just check the Mediator scandal). Thanks to the incredible increase of community websites, or collaborative economies, we deeply believe that a change is possible if we create and manage to organize the right process that would give more power to consumers.
Who would be concerned? Everyone! The interest of this project is to put every single drug consumer in a situation of power, where his or her voice would count, and not only if it because a great scandal that is reveled years later. Everyone has a voice that should be listened and money shouldn’t be made over people’s life.
Experts Panel:
Mr Eric Cielsa: Health Market Head and territorial collectivities, SAS Thalès
Mr Sofiane Chiadmi: Pharmacist
Mr Xavier Serrault: Pharmacist
Mr François Birault: General practitioner and teacher at the Poitiers CHU
Mr Xavier Augay: President of ICANOPEE, specialist of the shared medical file
