A Fight Over How Drugs Are Pitched

Before pharmaceutical company marketers call on a doctor, they do their homework. These salespeople typically pore over electronic profiles bought from data brokers, dossiers that detail the brands and amounts of drugs a particular doctor has prescribed. It is a marketing practice that some health care professionals have come to hate.

Drug makers spent about $6.3 billion on marketing visits to doctors in 2009 the last year that statistics were available. It makes sense to know the habits of the individuals who have the authority to dispense the medications and market them directly. But what about pitching the drugs to the general public who have no direct access to them?

A 2008 study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, contrary to the industry’s claim.

The authors examined the 2004 reports of IMS Health (IMS) and CAM Group (CAM), two international market research companies that provide the pharmaceutical industry with sales/marketing data and consulting services. IMS obtains its data by surveying pharmaceutical firms, while CAM surveys doctors, which explains important discrepancies in the data they provide.

The researchers used 2004 as the comparison year because it was the latest year in which information was available from both organizations.

CAM reported total promotion spending by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry as US$33.5 billion in their 2004 report, while IMS reported US$27.7 billion for the same year. The authors observed, however, important differences in figures according to each promotion category. By selectively using both sets of figures provided by IMS and CAM, in order to determine the most relevant data for each category, and adjusting for methodological differences between the ways IMS and CAM collect data, the authors arrived at US$57.5 billion for the total amount spent on pharmaceutical promotion in 2004. The industry spent approximately US$61,000 in promotion per physician during 2004, according to Gagnon.

If the NY Times article estimates 6.3 billion was spent on "educating" doctors in 2009 and Gagnon approximates promotional spending at 57.5 billion in 2004; then total spent on marketing the general public has to be in the ballpark of 50 billion.

This is pretty amazing to me. I know marketing works and so do the drug companies. For every $1 spent on marketing, $4 are made.

Does drug marketing, while effective for drug companies, create a culture where health is purely an exchange of chemicals? Should the consumer demand a prescription based upon the marketing or the discretion of a trained physician? Are physicians up to the task of studying research papers to determine if a new drug is actually better than the old one or does he/she rely upon their friendly drug representative for that information?
I know where I stand on the issue, but I am not the general public on this subject. What do you think?

Dr David Marcon
Work Smarter, Not Harder!
Cincinnati Ohio 45255
drdavidmarcon.com