Drug companies keep tabs on physicians

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Spin Doctored: Drug companies keep tabs on

physicians

 

" Doctors have long maintained that they are immune to the blandishments

of drug companies. The lucrative consulting contracts, fancy meals,

trips to exotic locales, free pens, flashlights, coffee mugs, and

sticky notepads emblazoned with prescription-drug brand names—none of

these are supposed to cloud a physician's clinical judgment. Doctors

like to think they decide which treatments to order and which drugs to

prescribe because of scientific evidence, not marketing.

 

" But the companies think they know otherwise. Last week, five whistle-

blowers from government and industry gathered in Washington, D.C., at a

meeting sponsored by the online scientific journal PLoS and the

Government Accountability Project to discuss the pharmaceutical

industry. Among the attendees were Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, a

former drug company representative and independent filmmaker, and an

unnamed drug company researcher. They detailed for the group how the

companies and the reps know—right down to the pill—whether or not

their sales pitches are working and how to improve them. The

industry's semi-secret weapon is prescriber reports, weekly lists of

every prescription written by each of the 600,000 doctors in the

United States. Relatively few physicians know about prescriber reports,

also known as prescriber profiles. But their existence makes it far

more difficult to imagine that pharmaceutical marketing has no effect

on the doctors it targets. "