Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10922

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Edwards J.
Med Students Express Ambivalence to Reps, DTC
BrandweekNRx 2007 Jul 18
http://www.brandweeknrx.com/2007/07/med-students-ex.html

Full text:

In a new survey by Epocrates, the makers of handheld electronic medical info devices for doctors, med students expressed ambivalence toward drug reps, Big Pharma, and DTC.

Some highlights:

When asked, ‘What is your opinion of the pharmaceutical industry?’ the results were:
54% neutral
28% negative
17% positive

Do you think schools should limit access of pharma reps to students?
Yes 42%
No 47%

What are the potentially negative effects of DTC?
Misinformed patients 66%
Patients self diagnosing 66%
Undermining the physician 27%

Do disease awareness campaigns lead to early disease detection?
87% agreed

My take: med students are evenly split as to the benefits and evils of sample case carriers and their employers. That’s interesting as more and more med schools are shutting their doors to reps — in other words, their older more experienced teachers have decided they don’t like reps.

As for DTC, these results seem to show that students don’t like branded DTC but do like unbranded disease awareness. Don’t leap to any conclusions though — the questions on that part of the study were designed to elicit only criticism of DTC and only praise for disease awareness efforts.

We’re still waiting on the results to the counterpart questions: “What are the potentially positive effects of DTC?” and “Do disease awareness campaigns that are actually thinly veiled ads for new branded products lead to early disease detection?”