Pharmalot… Pharmalittle… Relaxing Reading
5 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // December 28th, 2007 // 9:19 am
As we ready ourselves for another day of relaxation with the short people, we thought it may be helpful to pass along a few items as you wind down the work week or continue your own vacation. Whatever your plans, we hope you enjoy…..
James Orlowski may not be the only doctor in the Tampa Bay, Florida, area who has given sales reps the boot. But he’s the only regional doc listed in the online directory of No Free Lunch, an organization opposed to accepting freebies from pharma, The St. Petersburg Times writes. Orlowski tells the paper that when he was a med student at Case Western Reserve University 33 years ago, no one discussed the ethics of accepting drug company gifts, and freebies like medical instruments and textbooks were hard to resist. “Then I saw research that showed these gifts have tremendous influence on prescribing practices, though physicians always deny it,” Orlowski says. “There’s no way I was going to let a drug company gift influence my decisionmaking.”
From peasant doctor to ceo of a fledgling biotech, Hu Fang’s rise parallels China’s economic transformation. At age 19, he was a “barefoot doctor,” ordered by the government to the frigid, mountainous province of Heilongjiang in northern China from his home near Shanghai, Bloomberg News writes. He was one of thousands of students sent to the countryside in the 1960s with little training and few supplies to care for the poorest Chinese. Now 57, Hu runs Shanghai Sunway Biotech, one of only two companies in the world to sell a gene-therapy treatmens. Hu’s career reflects the rise of China’s drug industry from marketers of herbal treatments to research-based companies exploiting advances that have fueled health-care breakthroughs in the U.S. and Europe. He is also benefiting from intellectual property laws that are less restrictive than in the West, lower costs and different regulations for human testing.
Ohio Supreme Court Upholds Damages Law (Associated Press)
Schering-Plough Warns R&D Costs Will Rise (Yahoo/Associated Press)
Mylan Gets OK To Ship Generic Zyrtec (Reuters)
Par Pharma Halts Study On Lung-Infection Drug For HIV (Yahoo/AP)
Endo Buys Rights To Alexza’s Inhailed Painkiller (Bloomberg News)
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Ernest Ryan
Wow, Pharmalot is really on the ball. I was just signing on to send you this great story on Dr. James Orlowski covered in-depth in the St.Pete Times at
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/12/27/Business/Doctor_combats_pull_oshtml#rants
but you already have it much of it posted. Fabulous.
Dan
Regarding the Dr. Orlowski post:
Pharma marketing motto: First give, and then take. It’s not so much pens and papers, per se, but samples are the number one influencer of prescribing habits, clearly. But there a number of other ‘gifting’ methods used by the pharma industry that are not quite as visibile to the patients in particular or as impactful to coerce obligation from a prescriber such as a pen with the name of a med on it, for example. Consulting arrangements, TVs for doctors’ offices, etc. Seeding trials. Comparatively speaking, pharma industry items such as pen or paper appear rather mild compared with other tacit inducements implemented often by the pharma industry intended to ‘partner’ thier organization with the physician, which does not always have the patients’ interests entirely in mind when implementing such marketing tactics and clearly the patients are largely unaware of such inducements given to and accepted by thier doctors on a regular basis.
ol cranky
don’t forget that some companies, through their MSLs, have been pressured the drug development teams to not only use high prescribers as investigators on clinical trials (regardless of experience or quality of the site and/or even poor performance on previous trials) but have also been known to pressure the teams to have more favorable clinical trial agreements as well. It’s not industry standard, but it does happen often enough.
Hank
I’ve often wondered how many pts have ever had the courage (not necessarily wisdom) to ask their docs about such arrangements in the context of an rx’ing recommendation.
Uwe Reinhardt, who teaches health policy at Princeton and is anything but “shy,” has written that he himself would not have the wherewithal to do it.