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Dr. Lowe (of Things I Won't Work With" fame) has a blog, In The Pipeline, to which he recently posted an interesting commentary on the topic of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing:
There's an op-ed in The New York Times that makes tough reading, and it's something that we're going to be seeing more of. The author, Matt Jablow, lost his wife Ronna to non-small cell lung cancer, undiagnosed until a late stage, which is bad enough.
[...] And now, as Jablow says, he gets to watch commercials for Opdivo talking about how it can extend lives, ask your doctor, and so on, and he's (understandably) not happy about it. I'd find it painful, too – who wouldn't?
[...] The op-ed goes on to note the recent failed trial as dashing "the highest of hopes", but those were the highest of hopes for people who haven't been following the biology closely (which includes many investors as well).
[...] Immuno-oncology, in its various forms, has pulled some people practically out of the grave by current treatment standards, and we're going to see more of that in the years to come. But we're also going to see people who aren't helped by it, not yet, and losing them will be harder than ever.
Much more money is spent on pharmaceutical marketing than on research and about 12.5% of the marketing budget is devoted to direct to consumer advertising. Except for the US and New Zealand, the rest of the world does not allow direct to consumer advertising of prescription drugs.
Some US companies, such as Insys Therapeutics, also pay doctors through "speaker programs" and employ former exotic dancers as sales representatives.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/08/09/a-painful-cancer-advertisement
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/cancer-drug-ads-vs-cancer-drug-reality.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_marketing
http://sirf-online.org/2015/04/24/the-new-killing-it/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @12:42PM
And marketing drugs to doctors requires just memorization of a couple pages of facts, a good personality, and the ability to talk to others. Don't see how an exotic dancer would be underqualified.
That is the real problem. Insys was not sending people to inform doctors about facts - they are trying to manipulate them into prescribing more of their drugs, especially for "off-label" use in non-indicated conditions.
I completely agree about there nothing wrong with someone improving their life by getting an education in an advanced field and getting a better job, but Insys is not the right test case for that.