Donuts for doctors - Buying the medical profession

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Donuts for doctors

Buying the medical profession

by Alan Cassels

 

http://www.commonground.ca/iss/0509170/cg170_donuts.shtml

 

In Donuts for Doctors, our cover story this month, Alan Cassels provides a

chilling look at how the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies are turning

healthy people into patients. Employing sly marketing campaigns that convince

people they have something wrong with them, Big Pharma creates niches for drugs

it hopes will become blockbusters. Critical to the commercial success of these

drugs is the cooperation of the doctors who wield the power to write the

prescriptions. So it is that billions of warm donuts – and free drug samples –

are gifted to doctors and their receptionists across the world, compliments of

the drug detailers, the sales reps whose job it is within the pharmaceutical

empire to ensure that doctors prescribe these magic bullets to their patients.

Cassels, a drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria, has written

extensively about the pharmaceutical industry. In his just released, Selling

Sickness, he explains that the intention to target healthy people is anything

but new. Thirty years ago, Henry Gadsen, chief executive of Merck (the company

currently facing more than 4,200 lawsuits over its once immensely popular

Vioxx), told Fortune magazine that he was upset that the company’s potential

markets had been limited to sick people. It had long been his dream to make

drugs for healthy people. Then, Merck would be able to “sell to everyone.” The

late Henry Gadsen’s dream has now come true. Cassels notes, “With promotional

campaigns that exploit our deepest fears of death, decay and disease, the $500

billion pharmaceutical industry is literally changing what it means to be

human.”

In March of this year, Murray Aitken, senior vice president of corporate

strategy at IMS Health – the word’s leading provider of information to the

pharmaceutical and healthcare industries – stated, “For the first time, global

pharmaceutical sales surpassed the $500 billion threshold.” That’s a lot of

drugs being peddled worldwide.

 

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The aroma of fresh baking spills out of Michael Oldani’s car, as the door swings

open and he jumps out to retrieve a large box from the trunk of his blue

Oldsmobile. He lifts out a box of drug samples and stacks two boxes of donuts on

top, which are festooned with stickers bearing the name of the popular

antidepressant Zoloft. As one of an 11,000-strong army of detailers working in

the US for industry giant Pfizer, Michael greets his morning bearing a beguiling

gift – donuts.

The donuts are good icebreakers, a way to get a smile from Joyce, the

receptionist, when he walks through the door of the clinic, and maybe the key to

snagging a few minutes of the doctor’s time. Because he knows Joyce likes apple

fritters, those gooey bits of dough and apple may be what get him an unscheduled

appointment with one of the doctors, even if it is only for a few seconds.

That’s all it takes, just a few seconds. Today he’s not so lucky; the docs are

too busy and already running behind, so he can’t squeeze in any face time with a

prescriber. With military efficiency, he quickly refills the clinic’s sample

cupboard, putting his products front and centre so they’ll be the first thing

the docs see when opening the cupboard. On his way out, he stops to chat with

Joyce.

A businesslike, yet charming, manner can be a detailer’s main asset. Michael’s

jet-black hair and dark Italian good looks may also help open a few doors.

Whether it is his charm, or his fritters, he walks away with a few juicy bits of

intelligence, gathered from Joyce. He found out which anti-depressant the

doctors in the clinic seem to be favouring lately – Prozac – and why they aren’t

using his antibiotic – too expensive and hard to dose. Not a bad return for the

price of a box of donuts.

 

<snip> pretty long to post here

 

 

" When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have

peace. "

Jimi Hendrix