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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 12 2016, @06:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the pointed-commentary dept.

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/


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  • (Score: 2) by julian on Friday August 12 2016, @03:45PM

    by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 12 2016, @03:45PM (#387061)

    Have they no shame?

    I'm sure individually everyone involved has about as much shame as any random person. The real trick late stage capitalism has pulled off is spreading shame out over enough people so that the job can get done with no one feeling bad enough about their own role to put a stop to it.

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  • (Score: 2) by dry on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:32AM

    by dry (223) on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:32AM (#387399) Journal

    It's not just late stage capitalism or any type of capitalism. Fact is that committees spread the blame enough to allow horrible things to be perpetrated no matter what the system is. Seems to happen to all large institutions whether it's a board, cabinet or even the home owners association.