I’m not really a Doctor…
Remember the old TV ad’ with guy from the day-time soap saying “I’m not really a Doctor, I just play one on TV.”
Those were more innocent times, I cannot imagine the various actors playing doctors in today’s drug adverts bothering to warn us. In response, of course, we have grown more cynical about advertising in general and prescription drug advertising in particular.
But what if the guy really is a Doctor… Can you believe him then? I guess not… Or, at the very least, you better find out who is slipping money into his pocket.
The New York Times had a piece today entitled Generic Smear Campaign (May 9th 2006 by DANIEL CARLAT) which describes how doctors are no longer simply being paid to tout the benefits of various drugs… They are actually being paid to discredit or smear competitors’ drugs. Specifically, they are being paid to trash lower-cost, safer, generic drugs.
The article describes how three pharmaceutical companies (Sepracor, Sanofi-Aventis, and Takeda) have been paying university-affiliated psychiatrists to publish articles trashing a generic drug called trazodone. According to the New York Times piece, trazadone has been around for 25 years, has a good safety record, and costs as little as 10 cents a pill. In contrast the products from Sepracor, Sanofi-Aventis, and Takeda cost as much as $3 a pill. But every time a doctor prescribes the 10 cent trazadone pill it is a lost $3 sale for one of these pharmaceutical giants. Hence the disinformation campaign. And they are apparently having no problems finding psychiatrists willing to pocket their ethics along with some cash.
This all comes at the same time as Wyeth, another large pharmaceutical company, is pressuring the FDA to clamp down on the prescribing of bio-identical hormone replacement therapies (HRT) claiming they pose significant health risks to the women taking them. Of course, Wyeth’s touching concern with women’s heath has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the women are turning to the bio-identical HRT after a major 2002 health study found that Wyeth’s synthetic HRT increased a woman’s risk of heart attack, breast cancer, and stroke.
As a WashingtonPost.com article (Firm Seeks Crackdown on Custom Made Drugs by By ANDREW BRIDGES, The Associated Press April 21, 2006) put it:
Those findings hit Wyeth hard. Sales of the company’s Prempro and Premphase, which combine estrogen and progestin, and its Premarin, an estrogen-only pill, fell to $880 million in 2004 from $2.07 billion in 2001, the year before the Women’s Health Initiative released its hormone-replacement results. Compounding pharmacists and their backers allege that Wyeth seeks to stifle competition by calling in the FDA.
And, of course, with GW’s guys running the FDA, they may well succeed.
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