Accidental Blogger

(Thanks to Ruchira for the idea and links)

‘Give us this day our daily meds’ has become the new grace all over the U.S. thanks to the agressive approach to sales and marketing of designer drugs by Big Pharma. While a huge amount of money has gone into finding cures for obscure conditions, the pharmaceutical industry’s investment is recouped a thousand-fold or more by simply persuading more people that they might suffer from the condition and therefore need drug XYZ to pre-emptively treat it.

Gone are the days of the snake-oil salesman climbing up on a crate to advertise his wares to small groups or quaint ads in papers with circulation and reach of a few thousand citizens.
We now have celebrities asking us smilingly on TV whether we should be considering, now that we have turned 40/50/60, whether we can prevent osteoporosis by ingesting this or that pill. Or  the ‘radioactive moths of death’ flitting around to bestow the kiss of death-like sleep on people who ‘just can’t seem to sleep without waking through the night’.Or jolly little pastel balloons filled with water bouncing around London and Paris, with a burst balloon symbolizing ‘overactive bladder syndrome’. Or couples in tasteful embraces being interrupted during tender moments which are nevertheless easily postponed, due to the qualities of whatever ‘erectile dysfunction’ drug the ad is hawking.  Some of these ads come with a voice over rapping out the disclaimer in a monotone sure to lull the viewer into sleep (probably better than the sleep pill being hawked.)

(Moth of death photo from maxintosh’s flickr photostream)

This underlines the point that ‘Marketing, not research, is now the core of the drug industry‘ ( and almost all other consumer industries-as we have seen with books and authors recently.).

From the Washington Post review of a new book on the pharmaceutical industry "Our Daily Meds":

Take the selling of Zantac, an anti-ulcer drug that came on the market in 1983 and paved the way for the blockbuster drugs that followed. First, Glaxo priced its new drug above its competitor, Tagamet — a bold move, Melody Petersen writes in Our Daily Meds, that "like an underweight boxer trying to fool the prizefighter with his swagger . . . implied that Zantac was better." In reality, Zantac was a "me-too" drug, chemically almost identical to Tagamet and no more effective.

But it was the second half of Glaxo’s strategy that was truly dazzling. Rather than plowing the revenue from Zantac back into R&D, as was then customary in the drug business, the company decided to invest in marketing the daylights out of its drug. Glaxo funded studies intended to show Zantac’s superiority. It hired a battalion of sales reps, who flogged the drug relentlessly to doctors. Most brilliant of all, the company pioneered a ploy now used routinely in pharmaceutical marketing: It "condition branded" Zantac.

The net result was a sales bonanza for Glaxo as the demand for Zantac shot up. Other companies followed suit, inundating us in a flood of these ad campaigns.

In another example from this Houston Chronicle article:

One of the best examples is "osteopenia," a diagnosis that millions of women my age are given every year. Osteopenia is supposedly the precursor to osteoporosis, the gradual loss of bone that happens to most of us as we age. Advanced osteoporosis can make women vulnerable to hip fracture, a serious event when you’re old and frail because it often heralds a series of complications, such as pneumonia, that can ultimately lead to death. Millions of women are treated for osteoporosis with drugs that can slow bone loss, thus reducing the risk of hip fracture. Or so the logic goes.

The problem is, osteoporosis and osteopenia aren’t really diseases. Before the 1990s, doctors decided that you had osteoporosis if you were elderly and you broke a bone. When the pharmaceutical company Merck came up with its anti-bone-loss drug Fosamax, it wanted a broader market than just elderly fracture patients. The solution? The company helped fund a panel of medical experts to create diagnostic criteria for osteoporosis so that a diagnosis could be made before the patient actually broke a bone.

Voila — 30 percent of post-menopausal women suddenly had a disease that needed to be treated early in order to prevent a problem — hip fracture — that wouldn’t occur for many years, if ever.

OK, this does it. I’m going to get a bunch of doctors to declare compulsive blogging as ‘ Acute Blogging Syndrome’, come up with a designer drug to treat it and a marketing campaign to match (" Do you suffer from constant urges to ‘blog’, even at night… You could be suffering from ABS or acute blogging syndrome… Now you can treat it with one single pill ABStrex. Call your doctor and see if ABStrex is right for you… You should not take ABStrex if you have back aches, liver problems, heart problems, carpal tunnel or asthma. Certain medications may react adversely with ABStrex. You should not take ABStrex if you are pregnant or nursing or bottlefeeding…." .
Then ‘I’ll have made enough billions to pay for inviting all members of the Congress to all-expense paid parties on my private island, ferried aboard my private yacht to persuade them to nix a bill designed to curtail the ability of Big Pharma to limit the lawsuits which will be launched after finding out 5 years down the line that ABStrex leads to strokes and heart failure.