Our local newsweekly ran a great article this week about big pharma reps. It really shows how people can start with the best intentions and wake up one day to find themselves a "pusher". It also shows how most doctors think they aren't affected by drug reps, but actually they are. Very interesting!
The article can be read at http://www.straight.com/article-160083/pill-pushers?rotator=1
Some quotes from the article:
The first hint of the strange world Ahari had entered came when he was brought to Indianapolis for Lilly’s intensive, six-week boot camp for detailers. There, he met his fellow trainees. They were hundreds of fellow college grads, mostly in their mid-20s, perhaps two-thirds of them women, the vast majority beautiful.
“They were 200 or 300 of the most attractive people I had ever seen,” he said in a phone interview. “The physical appeal was only part of it. They were vivacious, well-coiffured, well-dressed, engaging people.”
Ahari soon learned that charisma was more important in his new job than, say, medical or scientific knowledge. He was the only one in his class of 22 trainees with a science degree, he said.
The training was part CIA, part Freud. He learned to immediately spot items in a doctor’s office that could be used to strike up a personal conversation and, ultimately, friendship: golf paraphernalia, photos of trips or kids, religious items. The information would later be entered into the company’s file on the doctor and analyzed for future approaches.
“It was analogous to training in spy agencies,” said Ahari, who ended up working for Lilly for a year and a half in New York City. “You instantly suss up the person’s personality and look for points of entry. You capitalize on sexual appeal. My more attractive colleagues would say, ‘I’m going to wear my short skirt today,’ or ‘I’m going to wear my low-cleavage top. He [the doctor> seems to get a kick out of that.’ ”
“The explosion in drug costs is directly proportional to marketing,” said Alan Cassels, a University of Victoria researcher who studies drug-company marketing and is a director of Drug Policy Futures, a team of researchers studying pharmaceutical issues.
“The industry knows what it’s worth,” Cassels said of detailing. “Pharmacists have told me they can tell when a certain company’s drug rep has been in town because of a spike in that company’s prescriptions.”
Pushing pills involves fantastic amounts of money. In a study in January in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine, two Canadian academics, Joel Lexchin and Marc-André Gagnon, calculated that pharmaceutical companies spent .5 billion on marketing in the U.S. in 2004. That was nearly double the billion spent on researching and developing drugs.It is a scary and disturbing thing when drug company reps try to influence doctor's decisions. Fortunately, for me, it has not been an issue with my RD. She only recommended a biologic when the MTX left me with a persistent vulnerablility to candida infections. She gave me a brief explanation of the differences between Enbrel, Humira, and Remicaid, told me in her opinion they were equally likely to be effective and left it to me to think about it for a few weeks and decide. If the "reps" are "paying" her, they're not getting much for their money. It's good to know there are still a lot of honest doctors whose patients' needs come first.