Tag: marketing

How Big Pharma Markets to Doctors

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

John Oliver opened the second season of HBO’s “This Week Tonight” with a humorous but sobering segment on how big pharmaceutical companies market their drugs to doctors, spending an estimated $24 billion per year in direct marketing.  In his witty but serious way, he explains that 70% of Americans take at least one prescription drug, and spent $329 billion, $1000 per person, on those medications in 2013. John quipped, “Walter White could have made more money cooking up rheumatoid arthritis medication.”

Big Pharma tactics include everything from lunch, to sexy sales reps to expensive dinners with other doctors who pitch the sale as “thought leaders.” The drugs are often pushed for “off label” use, that is, use that the FDA has not approved and most of the reps know very little, if anything, about the drugs that they’re pushing.

Drug companies are like high school boyfriends, they’re more interested in getting inside you than in being effective once they are there.

One a the good things that the Affordable Care Act did is it created a web site, OpenPaymentsData.CMS.gov that which enables average citizens a chance to search for perks given to doctors by pharmaceutical companies.

The Drugging of America

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The United States and New Zealand are currently the only countries in the world where the pharmaceutical industry is allowed to market and advertise prescription drugs. Direct to consumer advertising is one of two industry practices that have some under fire recently. The other is paying doctors to promote drugs.

One of the biggest market for drugs have been parents concerned about their children’s success in school. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is now “the second most frequent long-term diagnosis made in children, narrowly trailing asthma, according to a New York Times analysis of C.D.C. data.”

The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder

By Alan Schwarz, New York Times

The Number of Diagnoses Soared Amid a 20-Year Drug Marketing Campaign

After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating.

Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond.

But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”

“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.

The rise of A.D.H.D. diagnoses and prescriptions for stimulants over the years coincided with a remarkably successful two-decade campaign by pharmaceutical companies to publicize the syndrome and promote the pills to doctors, educators and parents. With the children’s market booming, the industry is now employing similar marketing techniques as it focuses on adult A.D.H.D., which could become even more profitable. [..]

Like most psychiatric conditions, A.D.H.D. has no definitive test, and most experts in the field agree that its symptoms are open to interpretation by patients, parents and doctors. The American Psychiatric Association, which receives significant financing from drug companies, has gradually loosened the official criteria for the disorder to include common childhood behavior like “makes careless mistakes” or “often has difficulty waiting his or her turn.”

The idea that a pill might ease troubles and tension has proved seductive to worried parents, rushed doctors and others.

The Selling of ADHD: Diagnoses, Prescriptions Soar After 20-Year Marketing Effort by Big Pharma

Taken at face value, the latest figures on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suggest a growing epidemic in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 15 percent of high school children are diagnosed with ADHD. The number of those on stimulant medication is at 3.5 million, up from 600,000 two decades ago. ADHD is now the second most common long-term diagnosis in children, narrowly trailing asthma.

But a new report in The New York Times questions whether these staggering figures reflect a medical reality or an over-medicated craze that has earned billions in profits for the pharmaceutical companies involved. Sales for ADHD drugs like Adderall and Concerta topped $9 billion in the United States last year, a more than 500 percent jump from a decade before. The radical spike in diagnoses has coincided with a 20-year marketing effort to promote stimulant prescriptions for children struggling in school, as well as for adults seeking to take control of their lives. The marketing effort has relied on studies and testimonials from a select group of doctors who have received massive speaking fees and funding grants from major pharmaceutical companies.

We are joined by four guests: Alan Schwarz, an award-winning reporter who wrote the New York Times piece, “The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder”; Jamison Monroe, a former teenage Adderall addict who now runs Newport Academy, a treatment center for teens suffering from substance abuse and mental health issues; Dr. Gabor Maté, a physician and best-selling author of four books, including “Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It”; and John Edwards, the father of a college student who committed suicide after he was prescribed Adderall and antidepressant medications at the Harvard University Health Services clinic.

One drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, a British owned company, has decided to stop paying doctors to promote their prescription drugs:

Andrew Witty, Glaxo’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview Monday that its proposed changes were unrelated to the investigation in China, and were part of a yearslong effort “to try and make sure we stay in step with how the world is changing,” he said. “We keep asking ourselves, are there different ways, more effective ways of operating than perhaps the ways we as an industry have been operating over the last 30, 40 years?”

For decades, pharmaceutical companies have paid doctors to speak on their behalf at conferences and other meetings of medical professionals, on the assumption that the doctors are most likely to value the advice of trusted peers.

But the practice has also been criticized by those who question whether it unduly influences the information doctors give each other and can lead them to prescribe drugs inappropriately to patients. All such payments by pharmaceutical companies are to be made public next year under requirements of the Obama administration’s health care law.

Under the plan, which Glaxo said would be completed worldwide by 2016, the company will no longer pay health care professionals to speak on its behalf about its products or the diseases they treat “to audiences who can prescribe or influence prescribing,” it said in a statement. It will also stop providing financial support directly to doctors to attend medical conferences, a practice that is prohibited in the United States through an industry-imposed ethics code but that still occurs in other countries. In China, the authorities have said Glaxo compensated doctors for travel to conferences and lectures that never took place.

Mr. Witty declined to comment on the investigation because he said it was still underway.

Popular Culture 20110527: Prescription Drugs Adverts

This piece is a result of a couple of pieces that I have written before and some interaction in comments on pieces from others about prescription drugs advertisements.  They are rife in the popular culture these days, on TeeVee, on radio, and in print.  I really think that this is a horrible idea, and will explain as time progresses.

First, I must do a bit of historical treatment.  When I was in pharmacy school (I did not stay long, because I decided that I should be on the other side of the wall, developing new drugs, but that did not work out either) adverts for prescription drugs were only allowed in professional medical journals.  I mean it.

Those you 50 or older will probably, if you think hard enough about it, days when these drugs were not in the popular media.  Some of you might also recall that tobacco adverts were!  I still remember the jingles for cigars and cigarettes.

Fashion, photography, sexuality and social anxiety?

I probably shouldn’t pull punches here.  I find some of the rhetoric and claims in this video a bit suspect.

Perhaps the oddest part for me is that the videomaker is using imagery that she considers disgusting at least, while arguing (it seems to me) that the ads for children’s clothing used by American Apparel are somehow pornographic.

Now there’s a part of me that sympathizes with this view.  And then there’s the part of me that thinks… didn’t you just manage to make an unpaid ad for this company by using the same images as part of your critique?  Aren’t you also exploiting these children by showing the images, and not only that, but unlike the company that paid the models and their parents, you’re exploiting them without any compensation.  (Then again, by embedding this and drawing attention to it, perhaps I’m doing the same thing?)

It strikes me as a very slippery slope, to say the least.  Before I sound like a pontiff from a religion that doesn’t institutionalize child sexual abuse, let me just embed the video I’m talking about, so you can make up your own mind before I continue my rant.

Don’t view the following video if you think it might contain soft-core pron.

We are being lied to, and being told to get used to it.

And I have to say I’m death on outright lies being told to me, personally, and then being expected to help and support that person despite the lies.  Yeah, yeah, there’s the political process that has been inculcated into each one of the American would-be serf cognoscenti, again and again and again.

Things about coalition building.  Tactics such as “vote for me on this bill and I’ll let you vote no on that bill, so as to look better to your constituents.”  Things about so-called political pragmatism which is as opposite to the actual pragmatism of running a country for the benefit of its people.

People on liberal blogs will tell you that the Republicans are 100 times worse, and so the natural thing to do is to work for and vote for Democrats to keep the Republicans from getting office.

And, if you subscribe to that theory, yeah, there’s some truth in it. There are many names for this reasoning — it’s called “extortionist reasoning” with much truth by some, but from people who employ it sincerely I’m going to call it the “keep the boogeyman at bay” argument.

You see, there’s a dangerous boogeyman outside your door.  What he wants to do is take all your belongings, rape your spouse, sell your children into indentured servitude and burn your livestock — what you are a serf and you don’t have livestock?  Ok, your pets then.

I’ll circle back to that.

In America of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we’ve been steeped in a culture of lies.  Much of it comes with a wink and a nod, and through an initial culture of consumption.  And despite the fact that people bemoan that Americans are clueless, unschooled and unsophisticated in some ways, for example not being able to find Afghanistan on a map, we have become very sophisticated (I might prefer the term “jaded”) in some ways.

When we see advertisements on TV, or on the radio or in print media, we’re totally used to being lied to with wild abandon.  We know that the products and services we’re being sold come with a passel of lies.  We know that vacuum cleaner just will not work flawlessly for years and as a side effect clean the air we breathe.  If we are sophisticated, we know that the paid programming with the latest get rich quick scheme is a total con job.

So, we’re expected to be sophisticated about it, and if we’re not sophisticated, we’re gullible dupes.  Because of this expectation of sophistication, no one else has to take any responsibility for their lies, on the expectation that those who were sold a bill of goods should have known better.  That TV station that aired the total con job with the criminal liar isn’t responsible for any lies the criminal liar tells — heck they even SAID they weren’t responsible!

The Medium is the Message

MdmMssgPcMdmMssgPc

copyright © 2010 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

It happened once, twice; I trust the third time could not charm me more.  I have witnessed the power of a gesture, one made without words.  I have seen the light that glows when people connect in quiet ways.  Now experienced on more than one occasion, I have come to appreciate the peaceful power of consistent communication.  I had not fully acknowledged what could be accomplished until I arrived on the scene, alone.  Then I saw it.  I felt it.  I could hardly believe that a single steadfast individual, could convey a message without words, and still receive such a resounding response.  Yet, while there, it occurred.  I was struck by what had not been apparent for near a decade. The stance of a quiet soul, stated calmly, clearly, and with care, can move more persons than I ever imagined.  

Remember “Swine Flu”? Looks like it was a scam indeed

I guess now that it’s the dead of winter, the time when people can really get sick, the “Swine Flu” panic is a thing of the past.

We have many more things to panic about now, right?   I mean, we’ve got the official CNN 24/7 “terrorgasm”, we’ve got coffers to bill at Big Corporations who can Supply Things To Us That Will Keep Us Safe.

And considering that there was a case of a suicide bomber somewhere (Afghanistan?) hiding the bomb up his rectum, Colbert’s suggestion that all Muslim men have a colonoscopy before boarding an aircraft doesn’t seem like something that would be far-fetched in today’s world.

But that’s not what this is about.  This is about — gosh, I almost forgot it myself, how distracting today’s panics are! — “Swine Flu”, you know that thing that was supposed to kill all of us, that thing we were all geared up to be SCARED SCARED SCARED about — and more importantly that thing that was designed to open all our wallets.

You’ll never see this on our 24-hour news terror programs, but for some reason the European Parliament has decided to investigate this scam:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/i…


The Council of Europe member states will launch an inquiry in January 2010 on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focusing especially on extent of the pharma’s industry’s influence on WHO. The Health Committee of the EU Parliament has unanimously passed a resolution calling for the inquiry. The step is a long-overdue move to public transparency of a “Golden Triangle” of drug corruption between WHO, the pharma industry and academic scientists that has permanently damaged the lives of millions and even caused death.

The parliament motion was introduced by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former SPD Member of the German Bundestag and now chairman of the Health Committee of PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council  of Europe). Wodarg is a medical doctor and epidemiologist, a specialist in lung disease and environmental medicine, who considers the current “pandemic” Swine Flu campaign of the WHO to be “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the Century.”[1]

The text of the resolution just passed by a sufficient number in the Council of Europe Parliament says among other things, “In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines. The “bird-flu”-campaign (2005/06) combined with the “swine-flu”-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies.”[2]

The Parliamentary inquiry will look into the issue of „falsified pandemic” that was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of its group of academic experts, SAGE, many of whose members have been documented to have intense financial ties to the same pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, who benefit from the production of drugs and untested H1N1 vaccines. They will investigate the influence of the pharma industry in creation of a worldwide campaign against the so-called H5N1 “Avian Flu”  and H1N1 Swine Flu. The inquiry will be given “urgent” priority in the general assembly of the parliament.

In his official statement to the Committee, Wodarg criticized the influence of the pharma industry on scientists and officials of WHO, stating that it has led to the situation where “unnecessarily millions of healthy people are exposed to the risk of poorly tested vaccines,” and that, for a flu strain that is “vastly less harmful” than all previous flu epidemics.

There you have it, in plain English.    

What everybody knew, who was paying attention.  Of course NOW they decide to do this, NOW, after the pharmaceutical companies have sold all the vaccines they could, I mean, if you haven’t gotten a vaccine by now, you’re probably not gonna get one, right?

This reeks of the “I am shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on here” line from Casablanca (and forgive me if i’m not quoting it correctly).

I mean, the EU sure wouldn’t want to actually infringe on a corporation’s god-given natural rights to scam the public into making money?    But to keep a little legitimacy in the public eye, they’ll sure pretend to investigate it afterwards, probably to slap a few fines on the perps so they can share the wealth, you know?

I was saying it back when they fear was being ramped up to fever pitch (excuse the pun) over this bogus flu.   That the WHO must have been corrupted.   Because it was, well, just obvious as fuck (pardon the language)..  

The world is completely corrupt.  You can’t believe anything any more.

But the public keeps getting punked.    It seems every year the public is ever-more-easy to punk.

Why is that?

The American citizen: programmed to hell and gone

WELCOME TO GREED ACRES.

WAKE THE FUCK UP!

Tech Talk – An Interview w/ NewsCorpse

Recently NewsCorpse decided to start posting on Docudharma.com.  NewsCorpse runs a site by the same name http://newscorpse.com/ and I’ve been a fan for a while.  The site combines amazing original graphics with hard hitting important stories.  So I took the opportunity to request an interview and this is the result:

Thanks for your reply and invitation to get in touch.  I’m a back-end developer mostly and am interested in who links to what and why…recently I signed Docudharma up on Blogburst and that system has been placing our headlines onto sites like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reuters etc.  

I saw your headlines from another Wall Street Journal story and when I did it reminded me of other times I saw your news on Google News and places reserved, usually, for News Sources not mere blogs.

Until we registered on Blogburst I thought it was nearly impossible to get linked from the top dogs.  You were able to do it much earlier than most.  Until recently I was just submitting links anywhere possible, hoping that would raise the site’s rankings.  Once I got into news feeds I realized there is a lot of hidden potential on the development side.

You appear to understand the concept of a blog/website as a dot com….I am just getting to that point now so here are some questions (below the fold):