Quite possible the largest alternative health scam ever.

[Husar]

False fear.

People are already getting desperately sick, there is no need for the drug companies to make people ill to increase profits. And speaking of profits; BigPharma profits are not larger than any other profit in the same location. It's big in absolute numbers, but that's because the industry is large, not because the profit percentage is big.

I never said they intentionally make people ill, I said in a few cases they might have an interest to keep people ill instead of finding an ailment. And I said that investors want to get as much ROI as possible and that may be an incentive to inflate prices when people can hardly afford not to buy a drug. It's certainly an incentive not to produce drugs that can only be sold on markets with a majority of relatively poor people.

I don't quite see the need to talk about alternative health scams, that's basic life knowledge.
The real question is why, how and to what extent may the others scam us as well?

The official profit percentages can also be easily manipulated by paying higher wages or making bigger "investments" etc.
Such as lobbying "investments": http://www.drugwatch.com/manufacturer/

From 1998 to 2013, Big Pharma spent nearly $2.7 billion on lobbying expenses — more than any other industry and 42 percent more than the second highest paying industry: insurance. And since 1990, individuals, lobbyists and political action committees affiliated with the industry have doled out $150 million in campaign contributions.

The argument that their profit percentage share is average but their market is huge may sound grerat at first, but my argument was that they may keep the market that huge on purpose. Especially in the US it seems like doctors are incentivized to sell people more medication and here in Germany some people see it as a problem when doctors actively advertise expensive solutions from big pharma that are not covered by insurance. And doctors are incentivized to do so by the pharma companies.

So yes, people do get sick by themselves, but in many cases the doctors get a lot of leverage in defining what is sick and what is quite alright. In that sense BigPharma often operates in a similar way that you accuse alternatives of doing, except BigPharma indirectly sells it as official established stuff by incentivizing real doctors to sell it for them.

There is also a huge problem with illegal and fake drugs being sold, that's also a huge scam worth mentioning.