Bipolar Chat and Forum * Big Pharma: Generous Freebies or Underhanded Bribes?

Doctors are human, just like us, and they respond to incentives just like everyone else.

I think the smarter a person thinks they are, the more "above the influence" they think they are, and the more likely they are to make mistakes. They're less likely to solicit other opinions and more likely to assume their answer is the right answer. It takes a truly wise person to step back and see if what they're doing is the best possible path.

I've done work in computer and network security, and there's a branch some call "social networking", figuring out people and how to exploit their weaknesses the same as exploiting weaknesses in any other security system. There's been lots of research in human psychology, and how successful scams work. Scammers say you can't scam an honest person, but humans are also more likely to accept ideas that are believed to come from their own thoughts rather than suggestions from another person. Meaning one way to get someone to go along with the scam is to lead them into coming to the idea on their own, without recognizing that you prodded them in the direction you wanted them to go into in the first place.

The whole point of that long rambling exposition is to point out that advertising and drug reps do a lot of the same things. You may not have thought your antsy legs were a problem, but then you saw a commercial about this new drug for restless leg syndrome, and suddenly you need to ask your doctor for a prescription. Your doctor was more than happy prescribing a certain drug that she's prescribed for years, but suddenly she's got some new research (handed off by a drug rep) that shows this new drug has a lot of the same benefits with fewer of the side effects and the doctor thinks maybe the newer drug is better.

Something to keep in mind when reading about what drug reps do, or watching advertisements for this or that symptom that might not have been such a big deal prior to seeing the advertisement.

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