That's advertising.
You mentioned 20% of their revenue is R&D - do you have a source, ideally listing what the other 80% goes to? That's a lot of unaccounted revenue, especially given how many drugs were shown to be dirt cheap to manufacture.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine was doing post-doctoral work researching and developing cancer drugs. He now works on a pharmaceutical sales team as a scientific liaison.
"Advertising" a drug involves a lot more than running TV commercials - it also includes former scientists making the current research digestible for doctors who don't have the time or specialized knowledge to do that in between seeing patients.
The notion that every practicing doctor has enough free time - or is even smart enough - to keep up on the latest pharmaceuticals, is ridiculous.
It's not a one-and-done thing with learning about drugs.
Look into AIDS medications for example and pills are often a mix of 2+ existing drugs that work well together. And again, GP's rarely have to worry about the new Cancer drugs etc.
That's part of the doctor's job, if they can't keep up with new medical/pharma literature then they need to find a different job. Further, most doctors know taking a ton of info from a pharma rep is just asking to be misinformed. A lot of pharma sales reps have no science background and many lie about approved populations and other aspects of a drug (just see the many, many lawsuits out there).
Do you know any doctors? Have you talked to them about how they spend their days? Most want to maximize the time they spend with patients. Any way they can keep up to date on the latest technology is helpful.
Well the solution to your problem is not to inundate them with misleading or false information from someone whose entire base of scientific knowledge comes from employer-led seminars. The solution would be to train more doctors, so they have more time with patients AND can be more effective physicians.
You forgot to add that the scientific information is limited to the FDA approved label.
Bribes?
How do doctors in other countries with functional medical systems deal with this problem? Health outcomes across the developed world are very similar.
> That's advertising.
It's also keeping physicians up to date on the current science, applicability, and best practices of their products. I think it's a good thing for sales reps and MSLs to inform or remind physicians that there are alternatives to writing a script for Epipens, for example.
> You mentioned 20% of their revenue is R&D - do you have a source, ideally listing what the other 80% goes to? That's a lot of unaccounted revenue, especially given how many drugs were shown to be dirt cheap to manufacture.
Many drugs are cheap to make, but that neglects the astronomical development and regulatory costs.
You can't expect to get unbiased, quality advice from someone with such a strong incentive. The right way for doctors to stay up to date is for doctors to stay up to date! They need to read a damn book or journal article once in a while and takes responsibility for their own professional development. If doctors aren't doing that, regulators need to suspend their licenses.
MSLs have advanced degrees in medicine or biomedical research. It's preferred that the traditional sales reps now have bachelor's degrees in the sciences and it is expected that, within the narrow scope of their product's science, they be well-informed regardless of prior academic background. It's preferred because they are more effective reps.
> You can't expect to get unbiased, quality advice from someone with such a strong incentive. The right way for doctors to stay up to date is for doctors to stay up to date! They need to read a damn book or journal article once in a while and takes responsibility for their own professional development. If doctors aren't doing that, regulators need to suspend their licenses.
Continuing medical education is a requirement to maintain licensure. I don't think I get your point here.
You should never trust a salesmen to give you advice, because the advice inevitably is, "you need this thing I happen to be selling today."
There are many very cheap ways of keeping physicians up-to date, such as a conference presentation of the drug, followed by a Q&A session, with a recording freely available online.
> Many drugs are cheap to make, but that neglects the astronomical development and regulatory costs.
Which are covered in the already mentioned 20% that goes to R&D (source pending). Are you purposefully ignoring information you dislike?
Because most doctors are happy to spend hours watching recordings of drug presentations.
For better or worse, doctors are just people and if you want them to understand the benefits of your new drug, it will fall to you to convince them. Most doctors are not going to thoroughly study every new drug.
And yet somehow I am supposed to be overjoyed at spending hours watching conference talks, reading blog posts and documentation, and doing other things to evaluate new tech and learn new languages/libraries that are not my direct job just to keep up to date on my rapidly-changing industry?
Welcome to the 21st century doctors. I would unpack and play the worlds tiniest violin for you, but I have a few more confreaks youtube videos to plough through right now.
Also, just FYI doctors already have to do continuing education to maintain a license, which cuts into the time they can spend researching new drugs.
How could that information be delivered to doctors without unduly influencing them or overwhelming them with junk info?
The only thing I can think is to make it mandatory continued education. But even that is iffy. Part of the problem is that there's just not that much additional data on new drugs. By definition the FDA thinks the drug is safe (relatively) and effective so what's the education going to look like and who's going to put it together?
5 minutes of face time with a busy physician and supplying them with a useful article targeted to their specific needs can be far more effective.
> Which are covered in the already mentioned 20% that goes to R&D (source pending). Are you purposefully ignoring information you dislike?
The dev part was an honest error while I was editing, and I don't think the accusation is called for. Regulatory costs, and I think of quality also being in that group, is not an R&D cost and is substantial.
What is also amazing is that it is easy to get doctor level data on your drugs market share in their prescription patterns. So you can target very effectively. Then it's all discipline of frequency and hitting the right docs.
Why do you think so many drug reps are blonde girls? Because the doctors will make time to see 'em.
And what is doubly amazing is how effective this brute force sales technique is. I have graphs of visit frequency vs market share and it is DEADLY effective if you get it right. (Of course there are diminishing returns. Drug reps will game their visit stats by overvisiting friendly docs. So you can't give them credit for those visits.)
Source: I'm a healthcare sales management consultant