Shahram Ahari, who spent two years selling Prozac and Zypraxa for Eli Lily, told a Senate Aging Committee that his job involved "rewarding physicians with gifts and attention for their allegiance to your product and company despite what may be ethically appropriate."
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It is the rare physician who refuses to meet with drug sales reps. In fact, as of April 2007, the percentage was just 7 percent of U.S. doctors.
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So there is a very good chance that the doctor you see right now is being subjected to similar intense sales tactics like the ones Ahari describes. According to one study published in The New England Journal of Medicine:
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So there is a very good chance that the doctor you see right now is being subjected to similar intense sales tactics like the ones Ahari describes. According to one study published in The New England Journal of Medicine:
- 94 percent of doctors have some type of relationship with the drug industry
- 80 percent of doctors commonly accept free food and drug samples
- One-third of doctors were reimbursed by the drug industry for going to professional meetings or continuing education classes
- 28 percent of doctors have been paid for consulting, giving lectures, or signing their patients up for clinical trials
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Pharmaceutical sales reps are trained in tactics that are on par with some of the most potent brainwashing techniques used throughout the world, according to the PLoS report. Said Ahari:
Drug reps must target doctors because it is only through a physician that a consumer can purchase their product. Although in the United States they have also ramped up their direct-to-consumer ads on television and in magazines, their real "meat and potatoes" comes from their marketing directly to physicians.
This is why drug companies spend $4 billion each year on direct-to-consumer ads in the United States, but $16 billion to influence physicians. That is $10,000 for every single doctor in the United States.
"It's my job to figure out what a physician's price is. For some it's dinner at the finest restaurants, for others it's enough convincing data to let them prescribe confidently and for others it's my attention and friendship ... but at the most basic level, everything is for sale and everything is an exchange."
Drug reps must target doctors because it is only through a physician that a consumer can purchase their product. Although in the United States they have also ramped up their direct-to-consumer ads on television and in magazines, their real "meat and potatoes" comes from their marketing directly to physicians.
This is why drug companies spend $4 billion each year on direct-to-consumer ads in the United States, but $16 billion to influence physicians. That is $10,000 for every single doctor in the United States.
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