I may wish it was Belgium, but it’s still SE Texas. I just heard a long rumble that I thought must be a plane flying over until I notice the color of the light and the darkness to the west. That caused me to pull up the radar loop (how did we live before instant access to weather radar?) and what it is showing is I am going to get very wet on the drive to work.
That’s me just to the left of Galveston Bay and to the right of the dark red rain clouds.
While I have been aware of, and disapproving of, the marketing of the drug companies, this story from the Washington Post today is extremely troubling. Tied to the stories floating around about the payments doctors are given for prescribing certain drugs, it paints a picture that I find inconsistent with our ideals here in America. It also explains the reason more of our per capita income goes to pay for, what turns out to be, second rate health care.
Many doctors object to drugmakers’ common practice of contracting with data-mining companies to track exactly which medicines physicians prescribe and in what quantities — information marketers and salespeople use to fine-tune their efforts. The industry defends the practice as a way of better educating physicians about new drugs.
This sounds like the same justification they use for the marketing prescription drugs, educating the public so they know what to question their physicians. If this is the case…Why do they never educate the public about the drugs that aren’t protected by patents? It would seem to me that the education excuse would only work if we weren’t being educated just about the most profitable drugs in their portfolios.
Since at least the early 1990s, drug companies have used the data to identify doctors who write the most prescriptions and go after them the way publishers court people who subscribe to lots of magazines. They zero in on physicians who prescribe a competitors’ drug and target them with campaigns touting their own products. Salespeople chart the changes in a doctor’s prescribing patterns to see whether their visits and offers of free meals and gifts are having the desired effect.
You would think, that with all of the data they are tracking, the law of averages would tend to trend in my favor so that every drug my multiple doctors prescribe would not be at the top of my insurance company’s drug co-pay list. Not…
Source: Doctors, Legislators Resist Drugmakers’ Prying Eyes – washingtonpost.com
Gotta run get wet…Have a great day.