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How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

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Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#31

Post by Bancakes »

varispeed wrote: post #29
Bancakes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't pay the doctor, the healthcare pool does. And then, the doctor is incentivised to cure me, not keep me in a perpetual drug-purchasing lifestyle as big pharma would.

Doctors get cash and hospitality benefits from big pharma though based on how they prescribe. If there is drug X from company Y and drug A from company B and then there is no difference in therapeutic benefits between two drugs, but company B gives doctor cash and has access to regional sales data where the doctor operates, they can modify the benefit based on sales. Then the doctor is incentivised to prescibe the A.…

In my country, general practitioners can only prescribe a limited number of drugs and specialist visits a month, so as not to overwhelm the healthcare system. It's their moral choice to deem a person sick enough for a certain course of action.

Whatever pill the doctor writes me up, I always end up asking the apothecary or looking up online the cheapest substitute. This is how the elderly here cope, they can barely pay bills, let alone choose which pills to skip. I've personally not had any problems with big pharma substitutes so far.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#32

Post by mns »

durnygbur wrote: post #21

> How Big Pharma Finds Sick Users on Facebook Living in a country where advertisements of pharmaceuticals are allowed, it's unbearable. Basically Facebook in real life - in TV, on billboards, in newspappers, YouTube ads, omnipresent leaflets. All flavours of dietary suplements, Rutin and Ibuprofen products, cures for fungal and intimate infections, wonder cures for liver and joints, "digestion catalysers". They're th…

I had to come back to my home country for a few weeks now, having been away for one year and a half, and it's absolutely insane how every ad on tv and radio is for drugs. They even target children for car sickness. Instead of educating people to avoid these things, everything is: smoke and bad breath, get breathazol, drink too much or eat only unhealthy stuff: forteliver plus. There was a movement to ban all pharma advertising, but the lobbying was just too strong and the project did not move forward.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#33

Post by durnygbur »

mns wrote: post #32
durnygbur wrote: post #21

> How Big Pharma Finds Sick Users on Facebook Living in a country where advertisements of pharmaceuticals are allowed, it's unbearable. Basically Facebook in real life - in TV, on billboards, in newspappers, YouTube ads, omnipresent leaflets. All flavours of dietary suplements, Rutin and Ibuprofen products, cures for fungal and intimate infections, wonder cures for liver and joints, "digestion catalysers". They're th…

I had to come back to my home country for a few weeks now, having been away for one year and a half, and it's absolutely insane how every ad on tv and radio is for drugs. They even target children for car sickness. Instead of educating people to avoid these things, everything is: smoke and bad breath, get breathazol, drink too much or eat only unhealthy stuff: forteliver plus. There was a movement to ban all pharma a…

Ah yes, the radio ads - forgot to mention these.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#34

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

Facebook is disclosing to third parties that its users have an "interest" in a medical condition although FB purports not to disclose users' medical conditions.

Per @refurb in the comments, when people have an "interest" in a medical condition, they almost always actually suffer from that condition.

It's almost like the algorithms are in charge over there, unsupervised.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#35

Post by robbiep »

varispeed wrote: post #29
Bancakes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't pay the doctor, the healthcare pool does. And then, the doctor is incentivised to cure me, not keep me in a perpetual drug-purchasing lifestyle as big pharma would.

Doctors get cash and hospitality benefits from big pharma though based on how they prescribe. If there is drug X from company Y and drug A from company B and then there is no difference in therapeutic benefits between two drugs, but company B gives doctor cash and has access to regional sales data where the doctor operates, they can modify the benefit based on sales. Then the doctor is incentivised to prescibe the A.…

This is absolutely not true in most countries. Where I practice you can get into big trouble for this. You have do declare pharma affiliations, cannot accept sponsorship and the age of junkets through drug companies is long in the past.

I could be deregistered if I was found to be accepting anything (travel, hotels, conferences) and not declaring it

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#36

Post by helloworld11 »

dools wrote: post #2

The article seems to suggest this is a bad thing, but my first reaction is "fantastic". Pharmaceutical companies create life saving medicines and then use advanced social media targeting to locate the people that need them. The only bad thing about it is if those people targeted can't afford the medication, which is why healthcare needs to be a universal right. People love to bitch about Big Pharma but I have a magic…

I don't know why you were downvoted into the grey zone. I don't entirely agree with your points about Big Pharma finding needy patients instead of doctors prescribing based on professional experience (though there's still plenty of room for bias there too) but overall, fully agreed, the pharmaceutical industry is a wonderful thing on the whole, and while it gets a lot of knee-jerk hatred from too many people, i'd love to see somebody suggest something practically better (as opposed to ideally better based on their limitless dreams of a perfect world).

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#37

Post by designium »

smcl wrote: post #17
moksly wrote: post #7

“If you’re a drug manufacturer looking for patients”. Maybe I’m just too Scandinavian to understand, but wouldn’t it be the other way around? Now I also wonder if I should see a doctor. I’ve been getting a lot of “is your will in order” commercials from law firms on Facebook recently. I sure hope big tech advertising doesn’t know something I don’t.

Did you fill your date of birth on any age-protected content (websites for distilleries or breweries, for example) as 1st January 1940 or something? They could just mistakenly believe you're 81 based on that :)

But it could be similar to the case where Target was able to targets ads to women who did not even know they were pregnant.

In this case, the above commenter could be doing things signaling that he may need a will soon due to diseases or life situation that he is not aware of. Or he/she has looked into content similar to those people in need. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#38

Post by pjc50 »

dools wrote: post #2

The article seems to suggest this is a bad thing, but my first reaction is "fantastic". Pharmaceutical companies create life saving medicines and then use advanced social media targeting to locate the people that need them. The only bad thing about it is if those people targeted can't afford the medication, which is why healthcare needs to be a universal right. People love to bitch about Big Pharma but I have a magic…

Has everyone forgotten the OxyContin scandal? Or are we just all grateful that Big Pharma has saved us from the pandemic that we're going to overlook the past specific, illegal, actions of pharmaceutical marketing?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/

> When Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin in 1996, it was aggressively marketed and highly promoted. Sales grew from $48 million in 1996 to almost $1.1 billion in 2000.1 The high availability of OxyContin correlated with increased abuse, diversion, and addiction, and by 2004 OxyContin had become a leading drug of abuse in the United States.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#39

Post by senbarryobama »

dave84 wrote: post #18
GuB-42 wrote: post #13

Is there some proof that big pharma really targets sick people? The article mentions targeting for things like "cancer awareness" as a proxy for cancer patients. But why target patients? Patients usually don't decide on the drugs they take, doctors do, they should be the target, not patients. So maybe we can take things at face value, big pharma is not targeting cancer patients, instead they are targeting those who a…

When I visited the US a few years ago it seems like every TV ad break there was a "Feeling X, ask your doctor about Y". Where X was some generic condition like bloating or feeling old, and X was a brand name prescription drug.

This. Why is this the case?

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#40

Post by kalleboo »

designium wrote: post #37
smcl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you fill your date of birth on any age-protected content (websites for distilleries or breweries, for example) as 1st January 1940 or something? They could just mistakenly believe you're 81 based on that :)

But it could be similar to the case where Target was able to targets ads to women who did not even know they were pregnant. In this case, the above commenter could be doing things signaling that he may need a will soon due to diseases or life situation that he is not aware of. Or he/she has looked into content similar to those people in need. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> But it could be similar to the case where Target was able to targets ads to women who did not even know they were pregnant

In this case, she knew she was pregnant. Her family didn't.

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