Pharmaceutical Marketing: Ask Your Doctor if It's Right for You

I was catching up on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and an interesting topic arose...pharmaceutical marketing and the unethical money that goes behind it. Overall, about 70% of Americans take at least one prescription drug, and 50% take two prescription drugs. Over 4 billion prescriptions were written in 2011 and prescription drug spending raised by 3% last year to $330 billion ($1,000 per person in the US).

It is impossible to escape pharmaceutical ads. You can't turn on the TV without being subjected to an endless stream of sleeping juice moths, old men getting erections while varnishing chairs, and cartoon bladders leading around their owners. However, drugs aren't like most other products because you need someone else's permission to buy them. All drug ads end with the same catchy phrase, "Ask your doctor if ____ is right for you." Drug companies know that doctors hold all the real power in the prescription drug business. While these companies spend over $4 billion annually marketing to us, they spend $24 billion annually marketing to doctors. According to BBC, 9 out of 10 Big Pharma companies spend more on marketing than on research and development. And according to John Oliver, "Drug companies are like high school boyfriends, they are more concerned being inside of you than they are being effective." Drug companies will tell the public they are there to educate doctors, but behind closed doors it can be a little bit different.

The problem comes when the reps don't understand the effects of the drug they're pushing though. A former pharmaceutical sale rep, Shahram Ahari stated, "I was in a room with twenty-one classmates and two trainers and I was the only one with a science background. In fact on the first day of training I taught my class and my instructors the very basic process by which two brain cells communicate." So basically pharmaceutical reps are like the cast of Grey Anatomy, they're young, they're hot, and they have virtually no medical training what-so-ever. It is alarming that drug reps are even allowed in doctors offices at all, but they don't come empty handed. They come bearing free lunches and free samples. Jamie Reidy stated that some offices even advertise in the job description that there is free lunch everyday, not on the office's expense, but from the pharmaceutical sales reps. Between delicious lunches and free samples, the reps know this remedy works almost every time on a doctor. Additionally, pharmaceutical reps monitor how many prescriptions the doctors that signed with them are prescribing of their drugs, and how many prescriptions they are writing for the competitor's drug. If they are supporting the competitor too much, these perks will be taken away. Leaving the doctor with less incentive to prescribe what is actually in the best interest of the patient.

Crossing the line even more, reps even pay doctors to talk to other doctors about their drugs over expensive steak dinners paid for by the reps. The pharmaceutical reps convince the doctors to participate in this unethical practice by saying, "Our company has identified you as a thought-leader, would you like to be a thought-leader for our company?" At this point, many doctors cannot refuse an paid dinner and an ego-booting title such as a "thought-leader." However, they are not a thought-leaders at all because they are merely reading off of a script given to them by the reps. Lawsuits have even been filed against pharmaceutical companies for treating doctors lavishly in exchange for the promise of prescribing their drugs. Hiring doctors as paid spokesmen is a conflict of interest and it is alarming how common this practice is. Multiple pharmaceutical reports have shown that the doctors that prescribe the most of a certain prescription drug are often getting finically compensated by the corresponding pharmaceutical drug company. Which is alarming, because we trust doctors. When we see a regular ad for a product, we take into account that the person in the ad is getting paid to be there; we don't see doctors the same way when they are recommending a certain drug, and we shouldn't have to.

There recently has been a new new clause placed in the Affordable Care Act that for the first time allows average citizens to research a federal website to see all of the perks given to physicians given to them by pharmaceutical companies. You can visit this site at OpenPaymentsData.CMS.gov. The first numbers are now online covering the first half of 2013. If drug companies are really going to be able to regain our trust, they are going to need to let us know the effect that their money has on doctors.