Jan

16

Drug Companies, Doctors and Political Hypocrisy

Posted by cameron

January 16, 2008 |

There is a very interesting article posted at AARP.org which you can see here if you want. The subject is Doctors relationships with Pharmaceutical Companies. Essentially the article speaks to the points of contact between doctors and sales reps and the impact on behavior the contact has. There was one stunning quote I want to share here:

“one drug industry study, for instance, showed that when a drug rep got one minute with a doctor, the doctor’s prescriptions for that drug increased 16 percent. With three minutes—52 percent.”

Two things spring to mind here; the first is how easily swayed our doctors are, and the second is; wow, those sales reps are good. Sales reps are spending lavishly on doctors to get that access time. They are highly trained to take advantage of small windows of opportunity and they don’t need much as you can see.

So where is the hypocrisy? It’s not with the doctors or the sales reps. There is growing alarm with this established pattern of behavior in the wake of some drug disasters like the Vioxx case. More and more politicians are talking about having laws and websites to “shine the light” on these evil-doers; to make visible the ties between doctors and Pharmaceutical companies.  Gifts are changing hands, money is changing hands etc etc. Does this sound familiar? Don’t we already know that special interests and politicians go together like doctors and sales reps or motherhood and apple pie? This seems to be the American way but from where I am standing this is the pot calling the kettle black. I was especially interested to see how special interest groups, pharmaceutical companies in this case, are assailing the politicians in court.  

What we have here is a real dilemma.  On the one hand we have a highly successful drug industry which has done great things to improve lives and, at the same time, the system is wide open to abuse, manipulation and even corruption; which brings me back to politicians….I want to see both situations fixed but I’m not holding my breath.


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