Double Dipping Doctors & A Hilarious Video

Marketing to doctors.

We all know that the pharmaceutical industry is a financial behemoth.  One can barely watch a set of commercials without watching a commercial for a drug that might cause a myriad of side effects.

John Oliver’s show does a 17 minute segment on Marketing to Doctors. Check out his segment here.

I encourage you to watch at least the last 2 minutes of the clip starting at 15:20.  I thought it was hilarious because I can relate.  That’s because I remember being a medical student and then a resident and being encouraged to attend many drug sponsored dinner talks at some rather luxurious restaurants.  The featured physician speakers, who were my mentors at the time, later shared that they usually received somewhere between $1,000 and $5,000 for each 40 minute talk.  All to push some drug.  The drug reps were quite eager to have a budding young doctor (me back then) learn to push whatever drug sales through the roof too.

Quite biased and quite sad.  While John Oliver’s clip certainly exaggerates the situation, the video still rings quite true for many physicians out there.

Now to be fair and ridicule the natural supplement industry, John Oliver also did a clip on Dr Oz and natural weight loss supplements.  While not nearly as bad as the pharmaceutical industry, the natural supplement industry is pretty fraudulent in my opinion also. Here’s the clip on Dr. Oz and Nutritional Supplements.

A couple other interesting facts:

Did you know that some doctors are paid to advise and promote the drugs that they research?  A ProPublica analysis shows that more than 1,300 practitioners nationwide received more than $90 million in research grants while at the same time receiving nearly $13 million for speaking engagements and another $4 million for consulting.

Major conflict of interest!


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