Getting the Health Care We Need Instead of the Products Someone Wants to Sell

Reading the articles in this issue has made me think a lot about how often our health care becomes distorted away from its essential purpose – to care and to support health. Instead, our visits with health care providers and our awareness of health issues are heavily influenced by the marketing of profitable products. Take statins, for example. These cholesterol-lowering drugs are among the heavily used medications in the U.S. It’s hard to watch TV without seeing an advertisement for one of the many statins on the market. The ads imply high cholesterol alone is enough to make taking a statin worthwhile, and that men and women benefit equally. Not so! In her article, Electra Kaczorowski explains what studies have and haven’t shown about the effectiveness of statins in women and concludes that a focus on health would lead to a dramatically different approach to preventing heart disease

The new HPV vaccine is another example of marketing going way beyond the real need for the product. Alicia Bell’s article on does a great job explaining what the HPV vaccine can and can’t do to improve the health of young women and reduce the likelihood of developing cancer. A slow and sensible approach to introducing this vaccine in the U.S. would make sense for many reasons, but that’s not what’s happening. Instead, the manufacturer of this vaccine is pushing hard for millions of young women to get the shot in the next few months, as part of school vaccination programs. Why the rush? It seems pretty obvious to us that the manufacturer wants to corner the market before another vaccine is approved. In fact, the FDA is reviewing another HPV vaccine right now.

The fact that we don’t yet have a safe and effective microbicide for women to use to protect themselves against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections is another painful example of how the development of products we need takes a back seat to companies’ focus on products with a large profit margin. Bindiya Patel’s cover story about microbicides explains how dedicated researchers working in respectful collaboration with activists can come up with exciting new products and ethical approaches to testing them in women. But, and this is a very big but, it’s 20 years after women started talking about the need for a microbicide, and we still don’t one. Funding for microbicide research has come mostly from the government and private foundations – and it hasn’t been nearly enough. The pharmaceutical industry could have seen this need, thrown their resources into the problem and gotten products to market years ago. But most big pharmaceutical companies believe that the market for HIV protection won’t be profitabl, and have been slow to act in this field.

As we raise women’s voices for health care for all, let’s keep talking about what health means to us, and what we really need, and keep working to make that a reality for all women!