Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12187

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: Journal Article

Venkataraman S, Stremersch S.
The Debate on Influencing Doctors' Decisions: Are Drug Characteristics the Missing Link?
Management Science 2007 Nov; 53:(11):1688-1701
http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/53/11/1688

Abstract:

Decision making by physicians on patients’ treatment has come under increased public scrutiny. In fact, there is a fair amount of debate on the effects of marketing actions of pharmaceutical firms toward physicians and their impact on physician prescription behavior. While some scholars find a strong and positive influence of marketing actions, some find only moderate effects, and others even find negative effects. Debate is also mounting on the role of other influencers (such as patient requests) in physician decision making, both on prescriptions and sample dispensing. The authors argue that one factor that may tip the balance in this debate is the role of drug characteristics, such as a drug’s effectiveness and a drug’s side effects.

Using a unique data set, they show that marketing efforts-operationalized as detailing and symposium meetings of firms to physicians-and patient requests do affect physician decision making differentially across brands. Moreover, they find that the responsiveness of physicians’ decision making to marketing efforts and patient requests depends upon the drug’s effectiveness and side effects. This paper presents clear guidelines for public policy and managerial practice and envisions that the study of the role of drug characteristics, such as effectiveness and side effects, may lead to valuable insights in this surging public debate.

svenka2@emory.edu
stefan.stremersch@duke.edu

Keywords:
physician decision making; marketing effort; patient request; drug effectiveness; side effect; drug prescription; sampling; sample dispensing; detailing; pharmaceuticals; public policy

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909