Shitty Pharmaceutical Capitalist Industry

[Karl Marx's Camel]

Top European pharmaceutical firms are using unscrupulous marketing practices to promote their products, a consumer report says.
The Consumers International lobby group accused drugmakers of using the methods to get doctors to prescribe products and persuade consumers they need them.

It said there was a "shocking" lack of publicity about where the $60bn (£33bn) annual marketing spend went. "
...

Richard Lloyd, the group's director general, said: "The pharmaceutical industry spends nearly twice as much on marketing as it does on research and development, yet consumers know next to nothing about where this money is going.

BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5116312.stm)

[Mujer Libre]

I have personal experience in this from clinical placements with GPs. Drug company reps pop in during the day and give them stuff, freebies as well as carefully prepared 'statistics.' Everything's as glossy as can be. They try to sweet talk the doctor at this point. Then at lunch more reps turn up with a free lunch, or cakes or something.

The doctors I was with pretended to listen to them, then grilled them on the effectiveness of the drug- while enjoying the rep's squirming. Of course, these are the kind of doctors who volunteer to have students in their practices, so I'm guessing they'd have a slightl better way of looking at the world than lots of others, who are almost certainly influences by marketing. :(

I was in a Medical Humanities lecture that talked about this stuff- and apparently lots of money is spent on advertising in medical journals like Lancet- which is EXTREMELY expensive, as well as on reps.

Really disturbing, considering that patients have little to no say in what they're prescribed. It also explains why generics aren't prescribed as often as they can be.