The Drug Marketing Machine

 

Why are medical doctors allowing themselves to act as part of the marketing machine of the pharmaceutical industry?

“The most effective marketing is the marketing you’re not aware of,” says Dr. Peter Rost, a one-time pharmaceutical company marketing executive who has become an Internet-based industry watchdog.

“If you see an ad, you know it’s marketing. But if a friend or your doctor talks to you about a drug, you don’t.”

In 2006, drug-makers spent almost $5 billion to reach out to consumers with direct advertising. That was nothing compared to the estimated $19 billion annually that the world’s pharmaceutical companies spend to woo doctors. Pharmaceutical companies sponsor teaching programs and research at universities across the country. They give money to all sorts of patient advocacy groups and they hire public relations firms to spin out patient success stories.

According to the LA Times, “Each day in the United States, an army of roughly 100,000 pharmaceutical company sales reps storms the waiting rooms and offices of the nation’s 311,000 office-based physicians. Called “detailers” — and earning, on average, $81,700 per year — they are the smiling, well-dressed men and women often seen in a physicians’ waiting room toting a cavernous briefcase and making small-talk with the receptionists. Their ranks have more than doubled in the last 10 years.”

(See the recent LA Times articles from which a lot of this article was taken.)

The crazy thing about this is that when it comes to drugs for treating so-called mental illness, none of the psychiatrists or medical doctors nor the pharmaceutical companies actually know what causes “mental illness” and cannot point to one drug that actually cures it. There is no test, no bacteria or germ that can be pointed to that causes any mental illness.

In describing the sad state of affairs in the field of diagnosis in psychiatry in his bestselling book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, L. Ron Hubbard made the following observations which are as pertinent today as they were 67 years ago:

“Hitherto, there have been almost unlimited classification. Further, there has been no optimum standard. As one researches in the field of psychiatric texts, he finds wide disagreement in classification and continual complaint that classification is very complex and lacking in usefulness. Without an optimum goal of conduct or mental state and without knowledge of the cause of aberration, catalogs of descriptions alone were possible and these were so involved and contradictory that it was nearly impossible to sharply assign to a psychotic or neurotic any classification which will lead to an understanding of his case. The main disability in this classification system was that the classification did not lead to a cure, for there was no standard treatment and there was no optimum state to indicate when treatment was at end. And as there was no cure for aberration or psychosomatic illness, there could be no classification which would indicate the direction which was to be taken or what could be expected of a case.”

Psychiatry is still in this state and thus the best they feel they can do is to drug their patients, so perhaps they are drugged up enough to not be able to think about their problems. General practitioners have fallen into the same trap.