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How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

themarkup.org

161–170 of 173 posts

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am open about being in recovery for alcoholism on FB but they still show me ads for hard liquor. Or perhaps you see the ads because you are open about your recovery. If the relapse rate is high, you will be blanketed with such ads. FB's targeting AI is pretty good. Even people recovering from alcoholism were being targeted, the advertisers might not even know it.

I hadn't considered that. That would be evil, so I need to pay more attention to when this happens and try to understand it better.

I believe if you look in your ads settings, you can disable ads about alcohol products explicitly.

Take a look and good luck man.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#162
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.

In the US, it's legal to advertise drugs directly to patients. There's not a lot of places in the world where it happens, I'm assuming Scandinavia is one of them.

I (in the US) get drug ads online for drugs I've never heard of, that give no clue whatsoever what it does or what condition it treats.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#163
post #11
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…

Why on earth should the patient choose whichever drug put money into advertising, rather than the one their doctor deems the most suitable? How could that possibly be beneficial? edit: reading further down the article, there is an advert for an antipsychotic medication which offers a $15 discount on your copay. This particular medication has serious discontinuation effects, it's not something you can just stop taking…

There are some aspects to the supply and demand of drugs, particularly psych drugs, that I'm not sure are described in econ 101 or popularly known.

Let's say the most common, first prescribed drug for your condition is available in a generic, for $0.30/month. That's not entirely hypothetical, that really happens.

A naive person would say "ok, if the generic is so cheap, then the brand name can't be much more, can it?" - free market competition, the FDA ensures they're all equivalent, blah blah blah.

However, I noticed that in recent years, the alternatives to the dirt cheap first-line option are way more expensive and going up. So I thought about why.

It occurred to me, that a simplistic view of competition ignores the fact that the different options are not exactly in competition at all. Because everyone tries the cheap one first, and then if they have problems or it's ineffective, they try another.

This means that fundamentally the drugs which are supposed to be in competition are not in competition practically speaking. If you have a drug that is not the first option, then you might as well charge $1000/month because everyone who is a possible customer already by definition has given up on the cheap one.

And even worse, in order to justify (for example) $1000/month, you don't have to have something better, just different enough to give people a little hope. They proliferate, but it's not progress.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#164
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do doctors prescribe brands in America? Here they’ll prescribe you with the working substance, and unless it’s still patented (which most of them aren’t) then you’ll just get offered the cheapest brand at the pharmacy by default. I guess commercials would still work if you branded yourself hard enough, but our culture is more like the Velcro thing, where when people ask for a “panodil” or a “pinex” they don’t really…

They often prescribe brands in the sense that they will literally write the brand name in their own hand on the prescription, and that is technically literally exactly the prescription. However, the pharmacy can substitute a perfectly equivalent drug on its own recognizance based on the doctor's prescription, but the distinction seems to technically exist. (The pharmacist position takes a lot of study and licensing a…

Pretty sure insurance companies have it down to a science to cover all cheap generics over brand name and through you through bureaucratic hell with pre authorization forms until you are beaten into submission to take the cheap version (more $$$ for insurance company)

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#165
post #112
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few new drugs get invented each year and most are either slight modifications to existing drugs or highly specialized. Doctors can easily keep up with zero advertising needed. Drug companies advertise to convince doctors that drug X is better than it actually is. Which is obviously bad for patients who are better served by an objective approach to prescription drugs.

I’ve interacted with a lot of doctors in my job and no, most doctors aren’t that aware. You’ll get the doctors involved in research who know all about the drugs years before they are approved, but those are a handful. Like most people who have jobs you focus on the here-and-now and while “yeah I’d love to read up on that new drug, but I don’t have time”. I worked on one drug where we had to go to and tell them to sto…

The last part is shocking to say the least. It’s hard as a patient to imagine a doctor, seen as medical authority figures, have such a passive approach to the latest drug efficacy w.r.t. their prescribed treatments. That’s why teaching hospitals have more modern technology and pulse on the cutting edge.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#166
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Great that your country stamped this out, but I am afraid you are the minority. Pharmaceutical industry is the most corrupt after politics and army and almost no doctor is immune to bad influence. Straight up denial is actually harmful in getting the truth out there and fixing the problem.

You aren’t saying anything substantial here. The world renowned scientists coming up with the discoveries that allow us to live long lives should not be bucketed with the MBA goons trying to mark up insulin shots and corner the market with medical patents they acquired.

What industry do you work in where those at the top of the companies aren’t maximizing their ROI and profit seeking? That COVID shot in your arm ID from the scientists that worked feverishly to invent it, and should be celebrated like the ones that solves medical mysteries across all different disease classes. R&D is not free period.

Why not have the government subsidize medical costs, why punish the inventor who have huge R&D overhead? The corruption you talk about starts and ends with the government.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#167
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…

Have you heard the expression, "A solution in search of a problem"? Because that what this is. Multinational billion-dollar corporations using their marketing dollars to convince people that their pill is the solution to all of your problems. This should be illegal.

It either is or it isn’t, at the end of the day a Doctor was taught what to prescribe at med school and you can’t demand they prescribe you anything unless you are a drug seeker and will be blacklisted quickly if it’s controlled substances.

Go look at peer reviewed studies and clinical trials data to make an informed decision on medical treatment options.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#168
post #38
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…

So one company running wild without government intervention selling a controlled highly addictive narcotic negates all medical discoveries by big pharma since the dawn of time including the record breaking speed of making a COVID vaccine? Yeah okay…

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#169

"How Big Auto finds users with car troubles on Facebook" "How Big Lighting finds users with blown bulbs on Facebook" "How Big Chocolate finds users with cravings on Facebook"

Alcohol companies too are allowed and actively targeting people, kills your liver, no one bats an eye.. what gives?

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How anyone finds users that will buy their products on Facebook: serve ads, report revenue, and let FB figure out how the fuck to optimize it without you doing a goddamn thing. Frankly that's all that digital marketing should be (a button PMs press, not a division at every company), I'd rather one or two highly regulated and excruciatingly scrutinized companies manage all the details than millions of small shitty one…

Regulation is pretty simple, ban collecting information on users behaviour for advertising. If advertising is forced back into being based on the content you are currently viewing or the site you are currently on or the key words you typed into the search bar ... this levels the playing field for all advertisers and ends the adtech arms race.

And location data tracking
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