By Donald M. Petersen Jr., BS, HCD(hc), FICC(h), Publisher
Brainwashing is the subtle art of getting someone to believe something that really isn't true and/or change their opinion to what you want them to believe. To accomplish this, all you need to do is exert a certain amount of influence over the subject for an extended period of time.
In this case, the subjects are the American people. The influence is bought to the tune of $30 billion a year and growing. Who's doing the brainwashing? You probably already guessed it: the drug industry.
According to a study published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine,1 the total amount spent on pharmaceutical promotion was $29.9 billion in 2005, up from only $11.4 billion in 1996. In excess of $25 billion of that was spent to influence medical doctors, hospitals, etc., and more than $4 billion was spent on direct-to-consumer advertising. This is a 330 percent increase over the same period.
Thirty billion dollars - just think about it. That's more than the annual budget expenditures by all but 10 states in the U.S. The drug companies could buy entire countries! But instead, they spend it to influence the American people.
If you wanted to spread your influence around, what could you buy? With that kind of money, you could easily buy such things as:The list is almost endless. In fact, with that much money spent every year, you could influence, if not control, the thoughts and actions of the American consumer.
- magazine publishers
- legislators
- hospital administrators
- television stations
- medical researchers
- federal regulators
- radio programs
- high-powered attorneys
- celebrity spokespeople
Don't think so? A recent study published in the August issue of Pediatrics provides the proof. In 2004, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) released a clinical practice guideline on the management of acute otitis media.2 The guideline included the "endorsement" of a wait-and-see option, rather than the immediate use of antibiotics.
The year the guideline was released, 88 percent of medical physicians believed this recommendation was reasonable. That number slipped a little to 83.3 percent by 2006. But when asked if they were using the wait-and-see option, only 15 percent of medical physicians answered in the affirmative. When asked why they didn't use the nondrug option, 83.5 percent stated that it was because the parents of the children preferred the antibiotic route. If you're a drug company, that's mission accomplished.
But wait, there's more. Another recent study demonstrated that the risk of a 7-year-old child suffering from asthma is significantly increased if they are given antibiotics in their first year.3 This turns a base hit into a home run. With one simple prescription, the drug companies have turned selling one or more courses of antibiotics to a small child with an earache into asthma medication for life!
How did they do it? They spent $25 billion a year to encourage the doctor to give the parents the choice of (if not outright recommend) drugs, and spent another $4 billion every year to convince the parents drugs were the right choice. The drug companies' only failing, in their eyes, is that they only brainwashed 83.5 percent of the medical doctors. (Looks as if they need to really target that remaining 16.5 percent and help them understand the advantages of recommending drugs over a wait-and-see approach.)
Doctors of chiropractic are the last remaining health profession whose philosophy doesn't begin with drugs. We have an obligation to tell that story, and our patients need to hear it first. That's one of the reasons they come to you. We also need to tell the rest of the world, even if we have to do it one new patient at a time. The consequences of not speaking out about the dangers of drugs are too severe.
References
DMP Jr.
All Rights Reserved, Dynamic Chiropractic, 2010.
Pharmaceutical sales reps are trained in tactics that are on par with some of the most potent brainwashing techniques used throughout the world, according to an in-depth report co-written by former Eli Lilly drug rep Shahram Ahari, and Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C..
Pharmaceutical companies spend more than $15 billion each year promoting prescription drugs in the United States.
These campaigns are designed to effectively alter prescribing behavior, to sell more of the high-profit drugs (as opposed to the most effective, and least dangerous).
Newstarget July 30, 2007
PLoS Medicine 4(4): e150, April 24, 2007
http://naturalcommunitiesmag.com/2010/05/03/psychological-warfare-techniques-used-on-your-doctor/
by Dr. Mercola
The fact that sales reps for drug companies serve no useful function other than driving up sales for their blockbuster drugs—at your expense—is no surprise. What may shock you, though, is just how insidious their sales tactics really are.
Last weekend, I saw a woman who used to work for me 13 years ago. She wound up going to a four-year naturopathic college, but prior to going to ND school she worked as a drug rep. I heard firsthand, detailed stories of the corrupt and deceitful practices they use. I am hoping I can convince her to write an article that goes into more details.
Rest assured that there is MASSIVE waste and fraud in the drug industry. In the end, you are the one paying the price twice, by emptying out your wallet and endangering your health with drugs you probably don’t need in the first place.
Drug reps are not your run-of-the-mill salespeople. They are meticulously trained to spot the weaknesses of every client. Doctors usually believe they are immune to persuasion tactics, and drug reps know just how important it is to maintain that illusion.
Last year pharmaceutical companies spent over $15 BILLION on physician advertising—a fancy word for bribing individual doctors. And the industry claims it’s worth every penny, which only proves that drug reps most definitely increase drug sales by influencing physicians to change their prescription habits. That is $10,000 for every doctor in the US.
But exactly how do they do it?
What makes otherwise well educated, intelligent doctors turn their backs on their Hippocratic Oath (to do no harm) and do the complete opposite (prescribe completely unnecessary drugs)?
It turns out that doctors are mostly unaware of just how extensive and detailed the drug companies’ profiling of them is. Not only are reps trained to assess their personality, practice style, and medical preferences, they’re also instructed to sniff out personal information, like the names of family members, birthdays, and family interests —as well as the physician’s professional interests and recreational pursuits.
All of this information goes into a database for future reference. When the time comes to devise an “incentive”—say a dinner, sporting event, or membership —it is custom tailored to suit the prey. It’s all about establishing personal rapport. Oftentimes, doctors mistake the reps’ cleverly disguised interest in them as personal friendship. This is exactly how it’s designed to work!
“Friendly” physicians get the buddy treatment. Samples and gifts are given, not because it’s part of the job, but because the rep “likes” them. Lunch may be brought in under the guise that the doctor actually provides “pleasant relief from all other docs out there.”
Aloof and skeptical physicians receive journal articles and extensive data that counter the documented apprehensions he or she may have.
“Mercenary” physicians (who generally don’t prescribe as many drugs) receive a clear message that the dinner they just accepted implies their willingness to prescribe a particular drug to a certain number of patients exhibiting certain symptoms. Reneging on the prescriptions-for-dinner bargain gets broadcast over the jungle drums, and suddenly reps don’t come-a-knocking with goodies anymore.
High-prescribers receive better presents, including unrestricted “educational” grants that essentially amount to cold, hard cash.
Competing-drug prescribers are deftly manipulated into understanding how the drug will work better than the competitor’s for a certain patient niche (to circumvent their reluctance to switch).
“Acquiescent” physicians who foolishly imagine that simply agreeing will get rid of the nuisance, realize all too late that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Gifts here are subtly used to enhance subconscious guilt and social pressure to reciprocate. Sales numbers show it works like a charm.
Hard-to-see physicians are actually not dissed by drug reps, because they’ve found that a good hand-delivered lunch to the office staff, followed by snooping under the guise of a friendly chitchat, can work even better than talking to the doctor to find the right hot buttons.
“Charismatic” physicians, those who are highly credentialed with an aura of integrity, are chosen as “thought leaders” to enhance and further certain drugs. These leaders are invited, and paid, as speakers to influence their peers. Depending on their level of allegiance and tact, they may be elevated through the ranks of speakers to the national circuit and beyond, gaining personal clout and fatter wallets as they go along with the program.
In recent years, physicians have become increasingly aware of—and dismayed by —the additional practice of script tracking. Health information organizations, such as IMS Health, Dendrite, Verispan, and Wolters Kluwer, buy pharmacy prescription records and resell them. Drug companies keep tabs on the return on their bribes with this data, as it tells them the prescription rate of each doctor.
Patient names are not included in these records, but physicians are easily identified through either state license number, DEA number, or a pharmacy-specific identifier, through the American Medical Association’s master database. Physicians are then ranked on a 1-to-10 scale, based on how many prescriptions they write; a “10” is every reps’ dream date.
This information also reveals how many of a doctor’s patients receive specific drugs, how many competing drugs are prescribed compared with the target drug, and how the physician’s prescribing habits change over time. It tells them if a drug is “in favor” or not, and gives them the tools to cook up a winning strategy for future manipulations.
Between 1990 and 2004, spending for prescription drugs increased five times, to a whopping $188.5 billion, and drug reps increased from 38,000 to 100,000 strong. That’s a ratio of one drug rep for every 2.5 physicians targeted for “detailing.” Talk about having a personal “Big Brother.”
The idea that reps provide some kind of valuable, informative service to physicians is total fiction, created and perpetuated by the drug industry, to keep this deadly, but profitable, scheme going.
Dr. Mercola
www.mercola.com
Shahram Ahari, who spent two years selling Prozac and Zypraxa for Eli Lily, told a Senate Aging Committee that his job involved "rewarding physicians with gifts and attention for their allegiance to your product and company despite what may be ethically appropriate."
Ahari claims that drug companies often hire former cheerleaders and ex-models, as well as former athletes and members of the military, even if they have no background in science.
During their five-week training class, Ahari says he was taught sales tactics such as:
Ahari claims that he‘s even heard stories about sales reps helping to pay the cost of a doctor‘s swimming pool, or taking a doctor to a nightclub where a hostess was paid to keep him company.
For this work, sales reps often earned more than researchers. On top of a base salary of $50,000 for starting reps, Ahari says, "there were four quarterly bonuses, an annual bonus, stock options, a car, 401K, great health benefits, and a $60,000 expense account."
Shahram Ahari must be one of the drug companies’ worst nightmares; he is one of the few who has witnessed the corruption firsthand, and then moved on to speak out about it.
By now, it’s old news that drug companies use extreme sales tactics to influence doctors’ prescribing habits, but to hear the extent of just how far things go -- buying doctors’ swimming pools or using sexual innuendos to make sales -- is still shocking.
"The nature of this business is gift-giving," Ahari said, and indeed it seems that in the world of pharmaceuticals, everything has a price.
It is the rare physician who refuses to meet with drug sales reps. In fact, as of April 2007, the percentage was just 7 percent of U.S. doctors.
Even I met with drug reps until the year 2000, at which time I just refused to see any. Before that I was actually a paid speaker for the drug companies. They would fly me to various physician education events around the country and pay me a VERY generous stipend to lecture to these groups. That was more than two decades ago, before I was able to remove myself from their very powerful brainwashing techniques -- and I was finally able to understand the truth of what they were doing.
So there is a very good chance that the doctor you see right now is
being subjected to similar intense sales tactics like the ones Ahari
describes. According to one study published in
The New England Journal of Medicine:
94 percent of doctors have some type of relationship with the drug industry
80 percent of doctors commonly accept free food and drug samples
One-third of doctors were reimbursed by the drug industry for going to professional meetings or continuing education classes
28 percent of doctors have been paid for consulting, giving lectures, or signing their patients up for clinical trials
Drug reps can be very sneaky. According to a report in PLoS Medicine co-authored by Ahari:
Physicians who refuse to see reps are detailed by proxy; their staff is dined and flattered in hopes that they will act as emissaries for a rep's messages.”
Clearly these are no ordinary sales meetings; this is psychological warfare.
Pharmaceutical sales reps are trained in tactics that are on par with some of the most potent brainwashing techniques used throughout the world, according to the PLoS report. Said Ahari:
“It's my job to figure out what
a physician's price is. For some it's dinner at the finest
restaurants, for others it's enough convincing data to let them
prescribe confidently and for others it's my attention and
friendship ... but at the most basic level, everything is for
sale and everything is an exchange.”
Drug reps must target doctors because it is only through a physician that a consumer can purchase their product. Although in the United States they have also ramped up their direct-to-consumer ads on television and in magazines, their real “meat and potatoes” comes from their marketing directly to physicians.
This is why drug companies spend $4 billion each year on direct-to-consumer ads in the United States, but $16 billion to influence physicians. That is $10,000 for every single doctor in the United States.
Most doctors don’t even stand a chance against a seemingly innocent drug sales rep. They appear friendly, eager to please, and knowledgeable about their product, and most physicians think there is no harm in accepting a free sample here, or a free lunch there.
Well, studies have shown that those free samples and lunches DO impact doctors' prescribing habits. So you can imagine what a more lavish gift -- like a free vacation, “consulting fee” or even companionship -- can do.
What they don’t get to see is the well-oiled machine that is controlling these reps, and ultimately the physicians as well, like marionettes.
From the instant a drug rep enters your office, the ambush is
underway. Says Ahari:
“A photo on a desk presents an
opportunity to inquire about family members and memorize
whatever tidbits are offered … these are usually typed into a
database after the encounter. Reps scour a doctor's office for
objects -- a tennis racquet, Russian novels, seventies rock
music, fashion magazines, travel mementos, or cultural or
religious symbols -- that can be used to establish a personal
connection with the doctor.”
In their PLoS Medicine report, Ahari and Adriane Fugh-Berman, an associate professor in the department of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center, even put together this chart of the specific tactics used to manipulate physicians.
Your doctor may have the best intentions in the world, but if they are being visited by drug reps, there is a strong likelihood they have been influenced by highly skilled, multinational, self-serving corporate interests and their opinions about prescription drugs are likely highly biased as a result. This can certainly happen even at a subconscious level, and the end result is a higher tendency to prescribe the drugs that have been marketed to them.
This is why I remind you often, taking ownership for your own health by leading a healthy lifestyle, and only resorting to drugs as a last option, is the key to surviving, and thriving, in the 21st century.