Pharmaceutical companies are spending billions of dollars
to ensure doctors like their most-advertised drugs, research suggests.
In a unique collaborative paper in PLoS Medicine, a team of physicians researching drug marketing reveals the specific strategies drug agents use to manipulate doctors to sell drugs.
What tactics drug agents use to manipulate doctors depends heavily on the physician's personality, the authors say.
Friendly and outgoing doctors are easy to influence, while repeat offenders can use friendship to request favors in the form of prescriptions.
When a doctor refuses to meet a representative, his staff flatters him and dine with him and act as ambassadors for the representative's embassy.
Good details are dynamic, and good repeat offenders adapt their messages to the physician's personality, personality type, and personal preferences, as well as the patient's preferences.
A friendly doctor facilitates the representative's work because he can use friendship to request favors in the form of prescriptions.
The doctor regards the relationship as a straightforward, good prescription exchange, and they deal with each other matter-of-factly.
The pharmaceutical industry's marketing efforts
vary depending on the recipient
The pharmaceutical industry's marketing efforts vary depending on the recipient, but they are not all aimed at the same type of patient, such as patients with specific diseases.
The main marketing approach is to use sales representatives to meet with healthcare professionals and discuss specific medicines that may benefit some types of patients.
Such meetings often referred to as "visits," are planned and arranged in such a way that individual field staff visits several doctors per working day.
SA says the idea that repeat offenders provide essential services to doctors and patients is a fiction.
This influence is based on rationing, which gives a subset of doctors access to high-quality, low-cost, and often expensive medicines.
Pharmaceutical companies are spending billions of dollars to ensure doctors like their most-advertised drugs, research suggests.
If this detail were an education service, it would provide a better understanding of what affects market share, not just the price of a medicine.
Cardiologists and other specialists write relatively few prescriptions, but they are targeted because GPs have perpetuated specialized prescriptions over the years, losing market share.
A training guide states that individual market and stock reports from physicians are tailored to the current habits of prescribers and used to determine which products are currently favorable to physicians in order to develop strategies to turn prescriptions into Merck prescriptions.
Rep uses prescription data to see how many of their patients receive a particular drug, how many prescriptions are written by physicians for targeted or competing drugs, and how physicians' prescription habits have changed over time.
Field staff often confuse education with sales,
and the evidence shows that
this can lead to doctors over-prescribing.
At the moment, pharmaceutical sales staff are the only way for doctors to find out about the latest medicines on the market.
The pharmaceutical industry argues that such disclosure would discourage doctors from engaging in a relationship they believe educates them about their new drugs.
But the prescription value of doctors is being investigated, and pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Pfizer value their relationships with doctors.
There is evidence that physicians' prescription patterns can be heavily influenced by biased information often published by sales representatives.
Field staff often confuse education with sales, and the evidence shows that this can lead to doctors over-prescribing.
Drug agents sell their products to buyers and boost drug sales by influencing doctors, but they do so in finely titrated doses of heroin.
This article, which grew out of my research as a physician in pharmaceutical marketing at AFB, reveals strategies that employees use to manipulate doctors' "prescriptions".
When I had dinner with a doctor, I had dinner with him for the first time, and when I told him or her about my research, he or she was anesthetized.
"Reps cultivate these relationships and make them more effective in their role as sales representatives," said Dr. Michael D. Schmitt, director of the Georgetown University Medical Center project that focuses on pharmaceutical marketing practices.
But these close, often personal relationships can be problematic when it comes to packaging products or advising doctors on which devices to use for a particular procedure.
In many cases, representatives and doctors alike note that surgeons do not always have the expertise to manage the procedure on their own.
Even sales representatives told the researchers that they felt uncomfortable when their companies urged them to sell newer, more expensive products, even though existing products had more comprehensive efficacy data.
At a practice called Prescription Datamining, drug representatives arrive at doctors' offices with data on their patients" prescription histories.
Since the 1990s, pharmacies have offered such data to pharmaceutical companies for sale, but pass it on to their drug representatives, who can retrieve it on a laptop in the car before visiting the doctor.
Doctors who end up prescribing the drugs of repeat offenders will be richly rewarded, and doctors who break the law by prescribing them will be punished.
The authors say pharmaceutical companies are buying data on doctors' prescription habits to identify prescribers who are open to the influence of drug repeaters.
But many doctors are not even aware that the data on their prescription habits can be bought by the pharmaceutical company.
When confronted by a doctor who prefers to use a prescription for a drug that he or she prescribes to himself or herself, the first thing to understand is "why you're taking this medicine instead," mine says.
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