Chiron trained nearly every physician worth their salt in the Greek myths. He taught the great healer Asclepius everything he knew about medicine. Yet when a stray arrow from Heracles struck him, Chiron could do nothing for his own wound, and being immortal, he couldn’t die to end the pain. Chiron might have been the greatest healer in the ancient world, but in the end, he was his own incurable patient.
Pharma is like Chiron. Although we have long since overtaken him as the world’s greatest healer, we’re nevertheless facing a similar affliction to his. In some ways it’s worse: Chiron was only hit by one arrow, and at least he didn’t fire it himself. Pharma has several pluming out of its chest, and it has thrust them there willingly.
We pretend that this isn’t the case, that these poisoned arrows were fired by others: lazy HCPs who tune out after the tenth version of the same message this quarter; boards who don’t want to hear a finding that complicates the plan: it’s everyone’s fault except the one holding the bow.
Look closer, and those two arrowshafts have our own fingerprints on them.
Committee logic: the way that a good idea gets filtered level by level through pharma’s own sieve of reasonability. It might be a sharp thesis in the workshop, but it’s blunt by the time it reaches the real world, sanded down at every stage until nobody remembers what it was for or why it should be defended. It’s the tenth version of the same message the HCP tunes out, not because anyone is lazy, but because we filed the edges off it ourselves.
Our outsized obsession with evidence: we pride ourselves on our detailed data right up until it rubs against our strategies. That board didn’t refuse to hear the details, it just filed them. And a finding that ought to stop the plan in its tracks gets annexed to a single slide in an appendix, with the overall direction carrying on unchanged.
Many of us continue to tout AI as the magical salve for these grievous wounds: more content, sharper personalisation, more insight, better evidence. But it hasn’t quite worked out like that. After all, more content is not better judgement, and more personalisation is not a stronger relationship.wordp
Diagnosing the problems is hard enough, but at least pharma already knows its symptoms. The harder question is asking whether pharma, after decades of treating patients, can learn to treat itself.
Removing those arrows is going to be painful; not everyone can pluck up the courage to pluck them out. But we have no choice.
Even if it sometimes feels like we’re Chiron, and that we too are blessed with immortality, pharma has no god-given right to exist. We may be big and mighty, but there are only so many arrows we can deal with before we will collapse.
Do something about it and come to Pharmageddon this October.
