71–80 of 160 posts
The marketing of medicine in inherently unethical because it seeks to override doctors and consumers information-based evaluations, and instead make a choice based on emotional propaganda. The harm caused by any given medical advertisement is directly proportional to its effectiveness. Every pharmaceutical sales rep is an immoral cancer on our society.
For better or for worse, consulting companies exist to: 1) Enrich their partners 2) Lend credibility to their clients Consulting firms are hired based on an "appeal to authority" fallacy. Companies don't want to make hard/unpopular decisions, so they outsource them to consultants. Data point: management consulting is one of the industries that is hit hardest by a recession. [0] If consultants truly provided value, th…
Overly cynical. All companies exist to provide profits to their owners. Your argument about the datapoint can also be argued for lending: credit disappears when it’s most needed. It must be completely and utterly useless, then. Or perhaps when a crisis strikes, if you want to minimize spending, you first eliminate consultant bills, instead of, idk, firing internal employees? Part of the value of a consultant is that…
No. This is very mistaken. There are many more stakeholders that companies have than their owners. For example, their customers. For example. Private Hospitals do not exist to make money. They can make money. But they exist to provide healthcare to sick people. As a side effect they pay their employees and make money for their owners; but if they fail to provide healthcare then they cease to exist. On the other hand, if they fail to make money they are often taken over and continue with new owners.
Companies exist to serve a function in our society, they depend on our society and they are part of it. They are not cash machines.
For better or for worse, consulting companies exist to: 1) Enrich their partners 2) Lend credibility to their clients Consulting firms are hired based on an "appeal to authority" fallacy. Companies don't want to make hard/unpopular decisions, so they outsource them to consultants. Data point: management consulting is one of the industries that is hit hardest by a recession. [0] If consultants truly provided value, th…
Overly cynical. All companies exist to provide profits to their owners. Your argument about the datapoint can also be argued for lending: credit disappears when it’s most needed. It must be completely and utterly useless, then. Or perhaps when a crisis strikes, if you want to minimize spending, you first eliminate consultant bills, instead of, idk, firing internal employees? Part of the value of a consultant is that…
Management consultants nearly always have a conflict of interest though (i.e. the preoccupation of consultants is almost always "sell, sell, sell" rather than "help the client make money") due to the nature of their work and their short-term contact-based engagements mean they rarely have to stick around and deal with the messes that they create.
Large management consulting firms IME tend to hire (or develop maybe) people who are smart and ambitious but highly conformist and reluctant to challenge authority. Combined with nature of the work I described above (and ofc existing to make owners /partners rich), this is sort of a perfect storm for lots of "semi-unintentional" unethical behavior and sometimes fully intentional unethical behavior.
Fwiw, from what I observed this dynamic actually makes the consulting work environment terribly exploitative and miserable for non-partner consultants but consultants tend not be the personality types who would leave consulting (and the prestige/"potential to become a partner") over it --unsurprisingly, else the industry wouldn't exist as it does now.
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>Every pharmaceutical sales rep is an immoral cancer on our society. This seems like one of the most cleanly horizontally divided opinions in all of the US - where nearly everybody agrees loudly and strongly with it except the wealthy and powerful. I wish a presidential candidate would have the balls to echo this severe but obviously popular thought and fix the fucking system with extreme prejudice.
There are at least two currently-running candidates who do seem have the balls to directly confront the pharma industry! Why do you think there aren't?
And because big pharma seems to always win.
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The problem here is that pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments have a deep conflict of interest. They're incentivized to encourage doctors to use the drug that makes their company the most profit, not the drug that is best for the patient. And there is plenty of research demonstrating that this is exactly what they do, and that doctors are indeed swayed by it, because, as you say, they don't have the time t…
Maybe an alternative to drug marketing would be to have an independent national or international group (e.g. NIH or CDC) inform doctors about new drugs based on their prior prescriptions, and to present the preregistered clinical trials at medical conferences just like any other research result to reach the rest.
The government isn’t going to get away with hiring entire teams based on looks and then have a marketing line item for free fancy lunches for people that are definitely not starving.
Choosing Wisely is a broad approach that is somewhat like you described.
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Overly cynical. All companies exist to provide profits to their owners. Your argument about the datapoint can also be argued for lending: credit disappears when it’s most needed. It must be completely and utterly useless, then. Or perhaps when a crisis strikes, if you want to minimize spending, you first eliminate consultant bills, instead of, idk, firing internal employees? Part of the value of a consultant is that…
>All companies exist to provide profits to their owners. No. This is very mistaken. There are many more stakeholders that companies have than their owners. For example, their customers. For example. Private Hospitals do not exist to make money. They can make money. But they exist to provide healthcare to sick people. As a side effect they pay their employees and make money for their owners; but if they fail to provid…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe an alternative to drug marketing would be to have an independent national or international group (e.g. NIH or CDC) inform doctors about new drugs based on their prior prescriptions, and to present the preregistered clinical trials at medical conferences just like any other research result to reach the rest.
At the same time, when a breakthrough happens like with Gilead’s hep c drug, a single governing body is far less likely to educate and inform doctors that a major disease can basically be cured even if all the evidence points this to be the case. Think about how long it took the food pyramid to be changed despite all the evidence that you should be eating six loafs of bread each day.
There will be those that don’t change their practice ever once they graduate (seen a few).
Things get more complex when you have dozens of treatments for a condition with no clear winner.
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The problem here is that pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments have a deep conflict of interest. They're incentivized to encourage doctors to use the drug that makes their company the most profit, not the drug that is best for the patient. And there is plenty of research demonstrating that this is exactly what they do, and that doctors are indeed swayed by it, because, as you say, they don't have the time t…
My counter to your comment, and my own personal experience, is that doctors are fully aware of the manufacturers conflict of interest. They know that the drug companies will present everything in the best possible light. Other things that exist to counter this bias are competitors, who will provide a different perspective and most importantly, the FDA that regulates all pharmaceutical promotion for accuracy and will…
If memory serves me right, the theory is that it makes you overestimate your ability to stay objective and unaffected, so you're effectively lowering your guard, or something along those lines.
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Ad supporters will sometimes say that ads are meant to get the word out about a product so people know its an option. How can we prove that this is false or that the benefits are smaller than the drawbacks?
I would like to see a compromise where new drugs are allowed to be advertised to the public for say 1 year following their release then never again. People need agency in their own medical choices, and knowing there is a drug for your medical condition is very empowering. Especially as we talk more and more about moving to a single-payer system, it's important to make sure patients have the power to question their do…
There's no way the only possible method of resulting in having informed patients is to put them directly in the middle of a struggle between big companies and doctors. I'd argue that putting doctors in a position of power is terrible (whether single-payer or not), but giving pharma companies' marketing departments the freedom to manipulate people with advertising is also terrible. Two wrongs do not make a right - adversarial systems are poor designs.