Over the age of 45, nearly half of us are now on 3 or more drugs every day of the year where as in the 1980 a very few of us were on any drugs at all. However, far from transforming our prospects for the better, these new treatments are compromising our quality of life, increasing health service costs by leading to more hospitalizations, and shortening our lives – all because we are taking too many of them at the same time, writes David Healy.

When reflecting on evidence that Solvadi looked like a cure for hepatitis, a 2018 Goldman Sach’s report noted that curing patients is not a good business model (1). Solvadi’s benefits for this debilitating disorder had led Gilead to price it at $80,000 per year. Most patients with this disease, however, lived in developing countries and few could afford these prices. A clamour led the price to tank. This situation was very similar to the discovery in the 1990s that Triple Therapy was close to a cure for AIDS, which also led to calls for its price to drop to the point where wealthy donor countries could afford to buy and donate it to save African lives.