Drug marketing

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Best Choices From the People's Pharmacy Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D. See book keywords and concepts

Physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and even medical office receptionists are also targets PAYING FOR THE FREE LUNCH • There are more than 100,000 drug sales reps in the United States1 • That's one sales rep for every four doctors • drug marketing costs $12 billion to $15 billion per year2 • That's $8,000 to $15,000 spent on marketing per year per doctor3 • 90 percent of continuing medical education materials for physicians are produced by drug companies4 of a full-court press by drug companies.

Big Pharma is developing drugs for the most distressing disease of all: Life Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

It tries to get you on more and more pills. drug marketing executives would like every person in this country, from the moment they're born to the moment they die, to be on at least 15 to 20 different daily pharmaceuticals. I have a question for you about this: If our bodies actually needed such chemicals to be alive and healthy and to live from the moment we're born to the day we die, don't you think that God or nature would have put those chemicals in our bodies in the first place?

Big Pharma and profit priorities: why business ethics never trickle up Mike Adams, the Health Ranger See article keywords and concepts

In a very real sense, the drug reps, drug scientists, drug marketing experts and others involved in the massive pharmaceutical racket playing out in America today are also just "following orders" to keep their jobs. They're not looking at the big picture... the truth that they are merely a cog in a gigantic profit machine designed to expand disease and exploit human suffering in order to generate obscene corporate profits. Both the Nazi party and Big Pharma have killed millions of innocent people. The Nazis did it for political power, Big Pharma does it for financial power.

The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers Katharine Greider See book keywords and concepts

As one drug marketing specialist writing in the journal DTC Perspectives exhorts colleagues, "Ultimately, have you created an experience so empathetic and motivating that sufferers will vault over fair balance and gird themselves for doctors' visits so they can get to the person they want to be? Aided and abetted by your brand, positively reinforced by your messages and supported for the long haul by your tireless attention and contact, are your customers ready for the relationship that will change their lives?

Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels See book keywords and concepts

Likewise, viewers in New Zealand are subject to this sort of promotion. Elsewhere in the world the industry is fighting relentlessly for similar deregulation. For the supporters, this marketing is a valuable service; for the critics, it is putting disease at the center of human life. It is pushing the genuinely ill towards a limited range of the most expensive drug solutions, and making tens of millions of the healthy start to fear that their bodies are broken, dysfunctional, deficient, and decaying.

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It Marcia Angell, M.D. See book keywords and concepts

Katharine Grei-der, in her book The Big Fix, describes in vivid detail how drug marketing permeates the medical profession.21 I mentioned that in 2001 the industry employed some 88,000 sales representatives to visit doctors in their offices and hospitals to promote their products. That comes to something like one for every five or six practicing physicians, depending on whether you count interns and residents.22 These drug reps or detailers, as they are known, are ubiquitous in the medical world.

Some MECCs are even owned by large advertising agencies, making the connection between continuing medical education and drug marketing still more obvious. Now why should MECCs, which are paid by drug companies, be accredited by the ACCME? Well, the answer may have something to do with the makeup of the Task Force on Industry-Professional Collaboration in Continuing Medical Education, which was created to help the ACCME formulate policies on conflicts of interest.

Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs Stephen Fried See book keywords and concepts

A pen or a notepad that a drug company gives out is, basically, a reminder ad and is regulated as such by the FDA's Division of drug marketing, Advertising and Communications ("Dee Dee Mac"). Technically, the agency can act only if a false or misleading ad is published. While companies aren't required to submit their promotional materials ahead of time, DDMAC is usually asked to screen ads and press material before publication or distribution to see if it will consider them problematic.

Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System J.D. Kleinke See book keywords and concepts

According to a Wall Street Journal report, more aggressive use of the Internet for DTC drug marketing and distribution is one of the explicit goals of the recent $75.7 billion merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham into the largest global pharmaceutical company (Waldholz and Moore, 2000). What happens when you combine Web-based DTC by drug companies and providers with hundreds of thousands of independent Web sites and communities? You get the biggest run on the health insurance bank in the history of the industry.

Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs Stephen Fried See book keywords and concepts

The agency's Division of drug marketing, Advertising and Communications felt this was a claim of "total superiority" over its competitors, but there was insufficient clinical proof the claim was true. The division warned the company not to use the slogan because it violated the law, but Abbott used it anyway in a journal ad. Abbott officials were then called to Washington for a two-hour meeting on March 16, during which, according to an internal company memo, "FDA vented a lot of hostility toward us" and threatened "corrective action" if the unsupported slogan ran again.

Avorn and his colleagues did a lot of the pioneering work on drug marketing and prescribing practices. He was one of the first to prove, for example, that much of what doctors know about medicines comes verbatim from pharmaceutical industry advertisements and not from journal articles, as the doctors themselves believe. But he is best known for inventing the very elegant idea of "academic counterdetailing.

Steven Soumerai, has since been invoked in almost every critique of drug marketing. While few places have the money to fund large academic counterdetailing programs—for obvious reasons, drug companies don't readily finance them—variations on his model are used in many hospitals around the world. (One of the more successful programs is the Drug and Therapeutics Information Service in Adelaide, South Australia, which provides bound books of international reprints that give "medicos," as physicians are referred to there, a quickly digested, unbiased syllabus on a particular prescribing topic.

The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook James Green See book keywords and concepts

What herb will cure my____"This approach stems from the "magic bullet" (one drug for one disease) myth conjured by pharmaceutical drug marketing. Herbs are more clever and practical than that. Each herb can do many things and have more than one effect on the human body and mind. The therapeutic actions and the unique blend of organic nutrients of each herb have a natural affinity for a variety of tissues, organs, and systems of the body.

Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs Stephen Fried See book keywords and concepts

One of my personal favorites is the agency's Division of drug marketing, Advertising and Communications (DDMAC), which is referred to as "Dee Dee Mac," like a character from a great old soul song. While searching for more information about Diane's specific reaction and how best to treat it, Flockhart and I also came across some general material about quinolones. It turned out that their strength—the size of the "gun"—had been a concern since they first came on the market in the 1980s. Nobody doubted that the drugs were strong and effective against certain difficult-to-treat infections.

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