Pharmaceuticals

Pharmaceutical companies are using a loophole to patent certain drugs that have been used for decades to treat certain diseases effectively, but those drugs were never actually FDA-approved for that particular disease. The most controversial case in point is the drug colchicine, which has been used for decades to help people with flares of a painful and disabling condition called gout. A drug company did a simple and inexpensive study recently that showed statistical significance that colchicine helps people with acute gout flares, something all prescribers have known (again, for decades). They went ahead and got FDA approval and now have the rights to re-brand it. Colchicine is now ONLY available under the trade name Colcrys and sells for about $5 per pill. When it was produced generically it only cost a few pennies per pill.