I think you could solve quite a bit of it just by writing your own CAPTCHA (instead of using a public one that there's already exploit code for.) There's a PyGimp script you can tweak here:
Given the stuff that ends up in my spam buckets, I'd tend to expect that anything involving medication or health care is one of the "more valuable targets", at least from the set of things that have CAPTCHAs as a significant obstacle.
Or are you wanting to do some screen-scraping of pharma websites?