Spin Doctored: Drug companies keep tabs on physicians

[Guest guest]

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. "

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> Full article at:

> http://slate.msn.com/id/2119712/

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