One of the great successes of modern medicine is the system that encourages pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs. Big Pharma invests billions in the hope of discovering a breakthrough — and if they succeed, the reward is patent protection. For around 15 years they enjoy exclusive rights to sell the drug, recoup their investment, and make the profits that fund the next round of innovation.
It’s an arrangement that has delivered extraordinary benefits to society. But it also has a serious, structural flaw that no one seems prepared to confront.
The Problem: No One Has an Incentive to Study Off-Patent Drugs
What happens when a cheap, long-existing medicine is found to have a new therapeutic effect?Nothing.
And that’s precisely the problem.
Once a drug is off-patent, there is no financial incentive for any pharmaceutical company to spend hundreds of millions of dollars running new clinical trials. Even if those trials proved the drug could save lives, the company would have no way to recover the cost. Anyone could manufacture it. Anyone could sell it.
So promising treatments are simply left on the shelf — not because they don’t work, but because nobody stands to profit from proving that they do.
This isn’t a theoretical issue. We are surrounded by real-world examples.
COVID and the War on Repurposed Drugs
We saw a stark demonstration during COVID.
Drugs like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine — long proven safe, widely used, inexpensive — showed early promise in lab studies and real-world data. Instead of curiosity or scientific urgency, the response from much of the medical establishment was hostility, dismissal, even censorship.
It is now impossible to ignore the fact that these medications posed a threat — not to public health, but to the pharmaceutical industry’s commercial interests. You can’t make billions selling a cheap generic. And if you have an expensive antiviral or mRNA platform in the pipeline, the last thing you want is competition from a repurposed drug you don’t own.
We all lived through the result: suppression, vilification, and a frantic insistence that only patented, high-priced solutions were acceptable.
Fenbendazole and Cancer — A Case Study in Missed Opportunities
Dr John Campbell's recent titled "Fenben and Cancer, your reports" (see below) is filled with heartfelt comments from real patients, carers, pharmacists, and doctors describing shocking outcomes: stage-four cancers reversing; terminal patients returning to work; aggressive tumors disappearing or shrinking dramatically.
Are these anecdotes? Yes.
Are they proof? Of course not.
But when you see hundreds of consistent accounts — and the only barrier to testing is money — the moral failure becomes obvious.
Fenbendazole is off-patent, cheap, and sold for animals. No pharma company will ever fund the large-scale trials needed to evaluate its efficacy in humans. So we’re stuck in limbo — with potentially life-saving treatments swirling in the fog of “unproven,” not because they’ve failed trials, but because no one will run the trials.
As Campbell says “People are dying while governments twiddle their thumbs.”
Lithium Orotate and Alzheimer’s — The Same Story, Again
The groundbreaking research showing the effects of low-dose Lithium Orotate on Alzheimer’s has rightly received attention. The results are astonishing — and could change millions of lives.
But it is an over-the-counter supplement.
No patent.
No billion-dollar profits.
So Big Pharma won’t touch it. Clinical trials — if they happen at all — rely on university labs, philanthropy, or visionary researchers willing to push against the economic grain.
The result?
Patients and families, who have nothing to lose, are quietly trying it themselves — while official medical systems wait, shrug, and do nothing.
Natural Remedies: The Evidence Doctors Never Hear
Another layer to this problem is how effective natural compounds receive almost no attention in mainstream medicine.
Take curcumin (from turmeric).
Strong anti-inflammatory.
Solid clinical evidence.
Safe, accessible, inexpensive.
In many cases it performs on par with conventional anti-inflammatory medications — yet most doctors are barely aware of the findings. Pharma companies will never promote it; it competes with products that actually make money. So patients simply never hear about it.
The System Is Broken — And People Pay the Price
This is not an anti-pharma rant. We need pharmaceutical innovation. We need strong companies pushing the boundaries of science.
But we also need a health system that doesn’t ignore treatments simply because they’re unprofitable.
Today, society has no mechanism to:
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fund clinical trials for off-patent drugs
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independently evaluate low-cost alternatives
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investigate promising repurposed medicines
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compare natural remedies to pharmaceuticals
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capture real-world treatment data from patients
The result is a distorted system where the most effective and most affordable treatments are often the least researched, least promoted, and least available.
This is unacceptable.
We Need Reform — And a New Model for Evidence
If the goal of healthcare is to improve health — not corporate profit — then society must create a public pathway for evaluating low-cost and off-patent treatments.
This could take the form of:
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a publicly funded clinical research fund
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a global registry of patient-reported outcomes
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independent trials run by universities
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AI-assisted analysis of real-world treatment data
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government incentives for repurposed drug research
Because in a sane system, a drug’s price should not determine whether its potential is studied.
Here is Dr Campbell's video that prompted this post.
