81–90 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.
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The vast majority got their start in academic settings. Most of the R&D money (in particular the expensive phase 3 clinical trials) is spent by pharmaceutical companies.
Yes, so the actual innovation occured in academic settings, as was the query.
Well no not at all. Innovation is both the process itself + the supporting requirements necessary to make it work on a massive scale. We cannot minimize the cost of investment in making sure treatments are effective and non-harmfulu in the general population. That is a critical part of medical innovation.
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.
Make all drugs legal, but mandate they have boring text/information-only labels, put the more dangerous ones behind the counter in smaller quantities, and let the only thing influencing their purchase be doctor recommendations/prescriptions or personal research. It should apply evenly from ibuprofen to allergy pills to marijuana to cocaine to alcohol.
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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…
Depending on the country, the “companies” that you mention have a different legal status than an enterprise / business kind of company. I think my point was clear: not only management consultants are the ones who seek to make money out of their business.
And of course to belabor your point, if private hospitals and bakeries and carmakers are all in to make a better world, up to that standard of idealism, consultants are there too.
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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?
There are 20-some people running...I wouldn't call them a presidential candidate yet...more like presidential hopefuls. And because big pharma seems to always win.
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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. 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 manageme…
Not my experience at all. If you show value to the client and you build a trust relationship then you enter into a relational mode that is fruitful for both sides, and you skip/streamline all the tedious commercial topics (RFPs, competitors, beauty contests, the purchasing department demanding a 3% discount...). On the other hand, if you want to milk the cow dry then you end up on a very transactional relationship and you need to start cold selling from scratch after every project, which takes a lot of effort, time and energy.
In any case, again, the conflict of helping the client vs. overselling is hardly a consultant-specific topic; I’d say the smaller the shop, and the closer the ownership to the sales team, the more pressure there will be, in general. Case in point: the actual doctors that overprescribe opioids!
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This may come as a shock to you, but marketing pharmaceuticals is really no different than marketing other products. It really comes down to educating consumers about your product. Doctors as decision makers are not some monolithic block of individuals who are super educated about every product on the market and every piece of data. Just developing awareness of new drugs is a huge job. I'd say less than 5% of doctors…
>> This may come as a shock to you, but marketing pharmaceuticals is really no different than marketing other products. Really? You don't see the difference between marketing, say, a car or a smartphone, and marketing a drug that treats a life-threatening condition? Perhaps you should think about this subject a bit more deeply. >> I'd say less than 5% of doctors are cutting edge enough that they require no additional…
Chronic pain (and a whole host of other issues) aren't life threatening. Until the mid 20th century people just lived with chronic pain and tons of other things. Look at the kinds of TV ads you see, they're for drugs that minimize the symptoms of some some negative, but not life threatening thing. These are not essential products. They're luxuries of modern life that we consider to be nearly essential. Depending on one's specific situation having a smartphone or car may actually be more "essential" to daily life than having one's condition treated.
As an aside, drugs that actually save lives don't seem to get marketed much.
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>All companies exist to provide profits to their owners. 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 manageme…
> 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. Not my experience at all. If you show value to the client and you bui…
This is greatly at empirical odds with the near ubiquitous distrust for consultants among almost everyone who has worked with them.
And there is certainly no shortage of willingness to repeatedly cold sell in order to advance one's own career in consulting.
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.
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?
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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…
How about we periodically publish a big book that lists all approved drugs, their uses and side effects, and send it to every residence in the country like we (used to?) do with phone books.
Of course the problem is the reliability of the evidence. I recently had to decide whether I wanted to go on a course of some fairly severe drugs with nasty side effects.
The original papers didn't make a lot of sense. The statistical conclusions seemed to be - if not nonsense, then certainly not very consistent.
My doctor said "Well, these are new drugs, so we're still learning about them." I didn't find that reassuring.
The real problem is that big statistical studies don't say much about why side effects happen. There seems to have been far too little research into understanding why/how side effects happen at all, and whether or not it's possible to screen for them.
That would probably require a level of personalised medical screening and dose control that big pharma isn't interested in providing.