Orwellian Pills Spy on Your Compliance With Doctor's Orders

by Heidi Stevenson

13 February 2010

It sounds Orwellian—like science fiction. But the reality of every aspect of your biological processes being monitored by Big Pharma and your doctor—and whoever else might want to profit from it—is upon us. Novartis has just purchased the technology to encapsulate a chip inside a pill that allows doctors—and government and Big Pharma and and the compliance police—to monitor how well you're following orders to take pills. And see if you metabolize them properly, perhaps needing another drug to make the first one work better. And while they're at it, perhaps they'll make sure that you're eating GMO foods and whatever products Big Agra is trying to get rid of this week. Yes, Novartis, the company that has brought you the MF59 adjuvant with squalene, is now in the Big Brother business.

The smart pill isn't futuristic. It's already been tested. Before purchasing the technology, Novartis ran a trial to test for patient compliance in taking their blood pressure drug, Diovan. It must have been successful, since Novartis has purchased the technology.

Novartis's chief of pharmaceuticals, Joe Jimenez, says, "This industry is starting to explode." Andrew Thompson, the CEO of Proteus Biomedical, the company that developed the product, estimates that its share of the smart pill industry will be about $100 billion.

The scariest part of this technology is that it's cheap, so it will quickly become available across a wide range of drugs. Thompson says:

We’ll do all of this for the same price as the drugs you buy now. For one daily price of your medicine you get the drug, the monitoring, the applications and tools, the incentives and the connectivity.

Imagine that you're a pain patient. You need your oxycodone to get out of bed. But your doctor insists that you also take an SSRI drug, and refuses to give you what you need unless you agree to take it. You've always pretended to take the SSRI, but secretly you've just set it aside. After all, you're only depressed when you're in pain and you know just how dangerous SSRIs can be—and the drug can't hurt you if you don't take it.

This scenario isn't unusual. Many pain patients experience it. With the advent of smart drugs, your doctor could force you to take the SSRI.

Patients who are told to take any drug, such as Diovan, the one already tested with a smart pill, could be forced to take it against their will. In the case of Diovan, the risks include potentially fatal liver damage, abnormally high potassium, angioedema, or white blood cell disorder, and several other conditions, including headaches and infections. The risks would be yours, not the doctor's—but you'd better take them or risk your doctor's refusal to treat you, or perhaps an insurance company's refusal to cover treatment.

Not only is Big Pharma creating virtually endemic chronic diseases—such as asthma, diabetes, and neurological disorders—with their vaccines and drugs, they're profiting by treating them with more and more toxic drugs, which create more ill health and an even bigger market for their drugs. Once on the pharmaceutical conveyor belt, you'll be forced to stay on it with smart pills. The electronic chips will be included inside pills and you'll be monitored for compliance.

Trevor Mundel, Global Development Franchise Director, Immunology and Infectious Diseases for Novatis, says, "This technology has tremendous utility." As much as one-third of pharmaceuticals are not taken as prescribed and many aren't taken at all. In new think that only modern medicine could devise, it's believed that this leads to poor health—as if lack of drugs is the cause of poor health! So, the faulty logic of modern medicine is used as an excuse for smart pill technology.

Apparently, once a human has been absorbed into the medical system and renamed "patient", then health is defined as taking the right pills, and to save patients from themselves, they need to swallow electronic chips with their pills to assure that they take the prescribed poisons.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers believe that they lose billions of dollars in sales when people don't fill their prescriptions. Smart pills will help enforce doctors' orders to take medications—and Big Pharma's profits will continue to rise.

When Medtronic, a huge medical device manufacturer that sells many implantable devices, such as pacemakers, neurostimulators, and drug pumps, is nervous about a technology, then it's time to sit up and take notice. According to The Economist, Stephen Oesterle, Medscape's Senior Vice President for Medicine and Technology, has referred to the technology as "a bit Orwellian for drugmakers to keep such intimate tabs on their customers".

You need to sit up and take notice when a company like Medtronic, which manufactures implantable devices, considers a product to be Orwellian.

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