Inventing Disease to Sell Drugs
By James Ridgeway
Tue May. 11, 2010 9:15 AM PDT...
Adriane Fugh-Berman, a Georgetown University doctor and colleague of mine on Pharmedout.org, drives the pushers nuts with her research and writing exposing their underworld. She has published a new article in the Boston Review setting out a basically unknown and genius way that Big Pharma makes a killing. In addition to buying docs, the drugsters invent or exaggerate diseases. They then pump knowledge about the creepy new condition into the medical world through a process known as Continuing Medical Education, or CME. This is how docs and health care professionals are supposed to keep abreast of new developments in their field. It works like this:
CME is the pharmaceutical industry’s most important marketing tool. Through a largely unnoticed process that plays out over a course of years, the pharmaceutical industry uses CME—which, unlike other forms of drug promotion, is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—to prepare the market for new drugs, expand existing markets, position products against competitors, and promote unproven uses of treatments. Here’s how it works. Pharmaceutical-company employees, or specialized vendor services, identify opinion leaders—influential (or up-and-coming) health-care professionals at academic medical centers....
Selected opinion leaders are wooed, perhaps over an expensive one-on-one meal with a company researcher or executive—not someone identified with marketing.
...
Opinion leaders whose perspectives align with a company’s marketing goals are then courted. A company may nurture relationships with targeted health-care professionals over many years and will pay them to educate their peers at CME events and other settings.
Industry-paid speakers frequently deny espousing marketing messages. I’ve heard many physicians justify their pharma-funded speaking gigs by saying, “I never emphasize their product” or, triumphantly, “I don’t even mention their drug!” But these comments only highlight their sales skills. Pharma doesn’t hire doctors to sell drugs; that’s a drug rep’s job. Pharma hires physicians to sell diseases.
Hit up the motherjones.com link above or check out the original article the mojo reporter quotes from: http://bostonreview.net/BR35.3/fugh-berman.php
So, big pharma hires doctors to function like the mainstream media as fear mongers, while conveniently supplying the solution for said threat in the form of a new drug.
That'd be like a defense contractor hiring a politician who could monger some fear in the public and then conveniently supply the government with loads of services related to fighting said threat.
But that would never happen... COUGHdickcheneyCOUGH.
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