My billion dollar business idea
A while back I watched a little minidocumentary about a startup company and I remember almost none of it except one part. I remember the guy talking about how he felt like he had an idea with the potential to become a billion dollar company. Today, here and now, I’m going to give mine away. It’s not every day that someone gives away such a valuable thing as a billion dollar idea. Today is that day.
You might take umbrage to the last paragraph on the notion that it’s possible to even have a “billion dollar idea”. You are right, of course. This idea is so good that once you start making piles of cash, everyone will be coming out of the woodwork to compete with you. Proper execution includes fending off rivals, navigating a brutal regulatory system, and possibly fixing a few legal obstacles. The industry we will be targeting is absolutely flush with cash. The drug industry. And our angle into the drug industry is with the single most successful drug in human history. No, not penicillin. Much bigger. The placebo! My billion dollar idea is a placebo pharmacy. What could possibly go wrong?
Now I know what you are thinking: there are already placebo pharmacies. In fact, selling snake oils of various types is one of the oldest businesses in the history of humankind. This idea, however, is to have doctors write fake prescriptions and have pharmacists fill fake prescriptions, and have everyone lie to the patient. This may seem unethical, but it is medically necessary! I promise. What happens if the idea catches on and everyone else starts making sugar pills to compete with you? Do what big drug companies always do, crush them with patents, regulations, and legal maneuvering!
A Crash Course
1. The patient must believe
The only requirement for effective placebo treatment is that the patient must be deceived. This means doctor’s need to be able to write prescriptions for your placebo drugs and patients need to not find out they are placebos. There are many ways you could accomplish this but you will need a sufficiently painless way for doctors and pharmacists to keep up on the names.
2. Colorful placebos are stronger than white ones
Not only do colorful pills work better than white ones, but certain colors have certain side effects. Blue pills, of course, will make you drowsy. Yellow ones will keep you awake. Design your pills accordingly. Version, version, version.
3. Presentation makes placebos stronger
The more impressive the bottle, the more side effects that are listed, and the more the doctor warns the patient of the potency of the drug, the more powerful the placebo effect. A doctor in a white coat gives stronger placebos than a doctor without his coat. You can’t make this stuff up.
4. More expensive placebos are stronger than less expensive ones
Amazing, and true. Placebos are like the luxury item of the drug world. Price is the ultimate signal. What could work better to a young businesses advantage than this? You see, it’s not “unethical” (ethics, bah) to sell insanely expensive sugar pills. It’s medically necessary!
5. The future
Last but not certainly not least, placebos are getting stronger! Contrast that with sissy antibiotics which are losing their war with the theory of evolution. Astoundingly, over time, as the human race is inundated with more and more advertising and faith in the medical and drug industries, the placebo effect is increasing. This particular industry has been around forever, and will be around for a very, very long time.
Conclusion
All joking aside, I do wonder if there is a way to “legitimately” (read: ethically) take advantage of the placebo effect. There are entire industries based on the placebo effect right now. There is billions of dollars being made by people selling treatments with absolutely no proven medical efficacy whatsoever. Would you consider it ethical to sell a drug that worked solely on placebo effect? Most people would presumably say no. However, could it be? What if you had a deal worked out with doctors and pharmacies for placebo drugs. The doctor wrote a prescription. The insurance company “covered” the cost. And the patient was misled into believing it was an effective and expensive (and colorful!) drug?
It seems to me unfortunate that we leave the effective placebo therapy for the scam artists.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
As long as you use the profit to finance clinical medicine, that’s fine with me.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
You are quite right with your idea.
If people will show that something is very important to them one will automatically start thinking that this is very important.
It’s not only with placebo… everything.
People can talk you into anything
November 9th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Instead of prescribing real antibiotics when a person has a common cold prescribe a placebo. Antibiotics aren’t going to do anything to help you recover from a cold but are still prescribed because people demand it.
That way we don’t develop more super bugs and the people taking these pills don’t have to deal with side effects from an actual drug. I mean what are the real long-term effects of a placebo as opposed to drugs?
November 9th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
How would we know that existing pharmacy companies aren’t already perfectly executing your idea?
November 9th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
You’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg.
You neglected that thousands of scientific studies, treating many many hundreds of completely unrelated diseases found that placebo is highly effective across almost the entire spectrum of human maladies.*
You got the ‘placebo-MAX’ concept, (more placebo effect per pill) would indeed separate our product from competition in the mind of the user, which is the only place that matters, especially for placebo’s. You might go farther, be bold, recognize and EMBRACE the source of the placebo’s power, the intrinsic property of Placebo, is the very power of the human mind itself. In fact, NO OTHER DRUG can claim to cure ailment based solely on it’s power to unlock the awesome power of the human mind.
And, if placebo’s are considered against so-called ‘commercial’ drugs, one finds that by far, the total number of clinical studies in which placebo beat out commercial drugs is tens of thousands to one. What I mean by this is: take every drug study that’s ever been done, all of them in one huge database. Sum up the number of people that have been cured by any given drug, then compare those paltry numbers to the sum total of all people who have been cured by PLACEBO! Really, there is no other drug known to man that even comes close, including so-called ‘natural’ cures!
And, Placebo has NO SIDE EFFECTS! And what other drug can be said to have been tested by such a variety of respected researchers, by private corporations, government health agencies, top universities, and in every conceivable manner of study including the highly regarded ‘double blind’ study.
Is it not apparent that the very reason the placebo is used in these studies is that IT IS THE DRUG TO BEAT! Certainly in specific cases a very specialized and expensive drug can perform somewhat better than placebo, but when doctors are ‘in the trenches’, fighting an unknown malady, they call for placebo action. Have you ever heard ‘take two asprin and call me in the morning’? This age-old cure is in fact based on the placebo effect, so why not buy the original!
(now in super concentrated ‘Placebo MAX’, and ‘Placebo 24′, time release placebo). And we now guarantee that if original Placebo, Placebo MAX or Placebo 24 do not cure your ailment in 1 hour or less, you should see a doctor.
*Placebo family products are NOT to be used for cases of severe bleeding, stopped respiration, heart attack, poisoning or stroke.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:04 am
But gosh, what if I overdosed on placebos in a suicide attempt and you gave me diabetes?
November 11th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
heh @john,
A great analysis except for one key point. Placebos do have side effects! The lesser known cousin of the placebo effect, the nocebo effect.