As someone who spent ten years inside the pharmaceutical industry, I can tell you one thing for sure: Big Pharma goes where the money is. And the money is with the ladies.
Chicks matter
Although women are certainly not the only targets of drug ads, winning the female audience is critical to the success of any given drug. Women are more proactive about their health, more likely to "talk to their doctor", more likely to encourage their husbands to seek medical treatment (than their husband is to seek it himself), and more likely to manage the healthcare for the entire family. It is just darned good business for pharma to set their sights on the ladies. But what is good for business -- explosive prescription sales of new drugs -- is not necessarily good for public health.
Newer is not better, Dorothy
The vast majority of the drug ads we see are for the newest and most expensive drugs available. These drugs are exceptionally profitable for the industry, but newer is definitely not better when it comes to patient safety. Few people realize that "new" means that the drug has been tried in a smaller number of patients and for a shorter period of time than drugs that have been around for years. Despite these limited studies, new meds quickly reach millions of consumers through very effective direct-to-consumer advertising.
It is often not until these drugs are consumed by the masses that potential problems (or public awareness of problems) in the form of dangerous and deadly side effects begin to arise. Patients who take "new" drugs become unknowing guinea pigs.
Dorothy Hamill spinning around the rink and driving millions to their docs for Vioxx served as a testament to this scenario. But even the Vioxx fallout has not stopped Merck's machine as they now push marketing and mandates for Gardasil, their HPV vaccine.
Reeling 'em in
Women need to know that they are being studied, targeted, and manipulated by very effective advertising that has little to do with good science. The ads and the target markets are heavily researched by internal marketing departments, branding experts and advertising companies.
In order to effectively drive sales with the important female demographic, companies first identify which issues in life women are most concerned and/or insecure about. They then develop their entire marketing campaign around those issues rather than the specific science of the drug. Big bucks go into finding the emotional hot button for any given pill or medical problem. The majority of ads feature sexy, smiling, happy people -- walking by the lake, rolling around with their children, or on a fun/hot date. We all want a little piece of that, don't we? Pharma knows how to play off of women's deepest insecurities and our biggest dreams...and it works.
The marketing of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was a perfect example. The industry capitalized on the vanity and emotional fears of women -- resulting in billions of dollars in prescription revenue for the pharmaceutical industry and questionable efficacy and damaging side effects to women worldwide.
And yet...the beat goes on
We as women are marching into our doctors' offices in record numbers demanding the latest and greatest pills we see on television. These ads paint a beautiful Norman Rockwell life on the screen. They do a wonderful job of convincing us that we too can be this happy, this sexy, this beautiful if only we would take this pill. The pharmaceutical companies are not selling us a drug; they are selling us a lifestyle.
The most severe drawbacks occur when the commercials result in us medicalizing our problems. Pharma has done a masterful job of creating illness and reasons for us to take more pills. Shyness, road rage, and even menstruation can now be treated with a drug. Thus we have begun demanding drugs we often don't need and that could have serious potential for harm and sometimes even death.
The other drawback is that these ads create a false sense of security. We subconsciously feel we can be a little more reckless with our nutrition, or activity level, or even sleep because there is now a pill to take care of all of the issues that result from not taking good care of ourselves.
I am a reasonable person. I am a mom and wife who understands that in the right context, we need prescription medication to be available. That said, I am in the minority of consumers who knows both sides of the issue. And that knowledge can be our most powerful tool when it comes to effectively managing our own health or the health of our families.
Get enough of us gals knowing and we can potentially force the hand of pharma to concentrate on producing truly superior, safer, and more cost-effective drugs rather than producing effective marketing campaigns. Because they can't sell what we won't buy.
Follow Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau on Twitter: www.twitter.com/KathleenShow
“Second, the calculation of those pharmaceutical R&D costs that have been reported all contain a factor accounting for the cost of capital. This cost element accounts for the opportunity cost of money invested in the R&D process. In other words, the funds used for R&D could have been used for other investments (opportunities) that will yield a return. Those ‘lost’ opportunities are accounted for by including the forgone returns as part of the cost of performing R&D. Including such costs is a standard accounting practice used by all of industry in computing R&D costs. In the OTA estimate, opportunity costs constitute about 65% of the total R&D cost for a typical drug.”
“It seems clear that the pharmaceutical R&D cost estimates reported above understate the true cost by not including federally funded R&D that contributed to the ultimate development of the drug.”
“These figures suggest that the cost of pharmaceutical R&D to the industry for a typical drug would increase significantly if it had to absorb all of the costs that now directly support drug development but which are funded by NIH.”
I'm glad my job is at least a little more secure. People always need health care....of course that's no guarantee, but....
Please consider:
1. Pharmaceutical companies contribute millions of dollars of free medicines to individuals. Compassionate Care. Medicines to those with AIDS in Africa, to indigent individuals in America, to humanitarian crises throughout the world. Who acknowledges this contribution? Patients who have benefited and survived.
2. If you're so outraged by pharmaceutical companies, why are you taking or asking for prescription medicines? Please take good care of yourself. And when you're a hospital patient, you may request no medicines there too.
3. If anger is to be vented at pharmaceutical companies, then consider the need for these medicines in your own life and in the lives of others. Appreciate a society based on capitalism and competition. Reconcile that these medicines cost an extraordinary amount of monies to discover, cost an extraordinary amount of time to be approved after years of trials and supplication to the FDA , and cost an extraordinary amount of effort to market and meet FDA regulations (i.e., the latest commercial for "Yaz" beginning with: The FDA has asked us to clarify....).
4. Name the medicines "NOT discovered or created" by an American pharmaceutical company.
A bit of perspective and critical thought. Be well.
garlic
arnica
eucalyptus
passionflower
osha
crucifixion thorn
mirabilis
apple mint
mesquite
etc.
etc.
Sure no problem….This drug would ultimately become the number one selling drug in the United States for over 10 years. Manufactured by Hoffman La Roche, a Swiss Company, Valium (diazepam) is still to this day one of the most widely prescribed medication in the world……
I'm a doctor in private practice. It's still possible for me to autocratically operate as I see fit. So patient interests get placed higher than their requests.
The ones that can tell I'm on their side, stay. The ones that can't, leave.
She spent hours poring over the PDR to find the best medication for a particular patient's combination of medical malady and personal issues that could form a good or bad drug experience. She always took into account any allergies or tendencies a patient had and would not prescribe a new drug just because it was new. It had to be better, genuinely better not just a tenth of a percent better, than what it purportedly replaced. I remember her saying that many times the costlier newer drugs weren't enough better to warrant her prescribing them for her patients to have to pay for.
Toward the end of their lives in a progressive community, she prescribed a psychiatric drug for my stepdad that she thought would be best for his dementia, telling the nursing home that 1 tablet morning and evening should suffice, but 1 could be added at lunchtime if deemed necessary. Instead of adding the 1 tablet, the house doc, a GP (my mother was a psychiatrist), prescribed something different entirely, taking him off what my mother had prescribed. The reaction was extremely marked, and he was unmanageable during medical appointments the first day on the new drug. He was like a totally different person.
That same nursing home, run by a religious group, also allowed the GP to bill Medicare for a visit by my folks every week. In the 5 months my mother was in the nursing home area before she died, she saw the house doc twice. They also paid no attention whatsoever to her oncologist's request for care to a massive bruise on her head caused by a fall and subsequent open wound. and I did the care in the evening when I visited after being told by a disgusted night nurse what to do. They also would not alter her diet al all to include high-calorie foods needed because her tumor was as the lower end of the esophagus and made eating painful. So I made high calorie snacks for her. They also pushed Ensure pudding, which had milk in it (Ensure liquid did not), and that irritated her lactose intolerance.
Currently, many doctors get most of their "information" through sales calls from pharmaceutical reps. Their patients may well get whatever yesterday's rep, often armed with a short skirt and lunch, hyped. And patients come in asking for some tablet to cure some disease described in a magazine ad - some doctors comply.
Some Republicans, of course, have attacked the proposed central repository of information as Democrats telling doctors how patients can be treated. Nothing could be further from the truth - the agency is a resource and the treating doctors make the decisions with their patients, of course. Be sure that pharma lobbyists are gearing up to keep the industry is the best source of (mis)information.
Any healthcare reform must include a repository of the best information gleaned from both government (NIH, National Cancer Institute, FDA, CDC, etc.) and industry. I have written my representatives to urge them to include it in the reform package.
Also, the studies that doctors rely on are paid for by pharma , then written up by ghost writers with financial ties to the industry and ultimately published in journals that rely on pharma advertising. (See ‘Marcia Angell’) Physicians also rely on treatment guidelines that are determined by folks who are on pharma payroll. But guess who is also on the payroll? The FDA which takes payment from the pharmaceutical industry to process approvals. (See ‘David Graham’ for more on this.)
And for the record, this is not a rant against doctors, but rather a system that is a mess. The solutions must come from savvy patients, change within the medical community, and a government/FDA that puts the public interest first.
Indeed, but the majority of those funds come from the taxpayers, and the research is performed primarily by the NIH, not the pharma companies. No, more of their money goes to the marketing budget than to R & D--but if you do/did work for a Pharma company, then you know this.
Jeez, you lobbyists are so lame with your passive lead-in and low-key apologist rhetoric.
Take a different tack if you want to be believeable.
Insights like this are not rocket science, yet we still teach the opposite in schools everywhere in America. Capitalism supposedly spurs growth and innovation. So why don't we have cars that get 100 mpg all over the road? Or non-addictive sleep aids, ultra efficient lights, electric motors, or cheap, safe nuclear power?
We run in a system that innovates only when the maintenance of a product or service becomes more expensive than a replacement, and less profitable. Only when societal outrage, or lack of income sets in do we take charge and innovate our way out. Many times, it is far too late, and much more expensive in treasure and blood than it would have been had we left the profit margins out of the equation.
Not to say these companies should not make money, but measuring the return on pharmaceutical investment in the almighty dollar alone has proven to be not only inefficient, but deadly.
Senator Bernie Sanders tracked the history of drug funding in a senate speech a few years ago. Basically, he said taxpayers pay for govenment reserach, provide grants for pharma research AND pay at the pharmacy counter. In effect, we're all paying three times for each pill we swallow.
And YES the idea of consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals has backfired. It's intent was to give patients information to discuss options with doctors. Remember, it took state laws to required physicans to discuss lumpectomy as an option for a woman needing breast surgery. The medical industry has proven over and over again that it's only interest is in garnering profits and will steer patients to the most expensive, often unneeded, tests , treatments and medications available.
This is an important article and I hope you continue to let people know the facts behind the pharmaceutical industry's drug development and marketing policies.