Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15392
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
Herper M.
A Doctor, Not A Nascar Driver
Forbes.com 2009 Mar 31
http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/31/acc-conference-pharmacuticals-advertising-business-healthcare-drug-ads.html
Abstract:
Why the American College of Cardiology conference sacrificed $500,000 to do away with drug ads.
Full text:
At a giant meeting of more than 20,000 cardiologists, nurses and industry types, something’s missing: the ads.
It used to be that you could identify convention-goers by the drug advertisements that were plastered on their bags full of scientific abstracts, on the badges they wore around their necks and on the lanyards from which the badges hung.
Doctors looked “kind of like a Nascar driver,” says Jack Lewin, the chief executive of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), which runs the meeting. “Things have changed,” he says.
The ACC says it sacrificed nearly half a million dollars by getting rid of these ads. Last year, Pfizer paid $175,000 to get its cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor on the convention bags and another $70,000 to plaster Lipitor on the lanyards. Merck and Schering-Plough paid $50,000 to get their rival cholesterol drug, Vytorin, on the data cards that were affixed to every convention-goers badge.
Also missing is a CD that contained digital versions of all the scientific abstracts presented at the meeting; that was also paid for by sponsors in the past. The ACC says that has generated lots of complaints from doctors.
“None of us are invulnerable to advertising-related biases,” says Lewin. “I don’t think we should be walking around with advertisements on our backs.”
Also missing are the fancy pens, heart-shaped stress balls and other tchotchkes that used to be used by salespeople on an industry showroom section of the meeting. Lewin, an internist, says his kids used to love coming to conventions so they could wander the expo floor and get free stuff. But these tiny gifts were banned by the drug industry trade group, PhRMA, last year.
There’s also a feeling that drug companies are backing off from their marketing push because they just don’t have as much to sell. Lipitor loses patent protection in two years, and very little data on brand new drugs made news at this year’s ACC meeting.
Taking the place of the drug companies on the exhibit floor are the giant firms that make fancy imaging technologies. This is actually a bigger contributor to rising health costs than drugs, and imaging tech can represent a fifth of a cardiology practice’s revenue. And these companies are finding new ways to get docs to stop and take note.
At the GE Healthcare booth, bare-chested men lay on tables undergoing EKGs while attractive women ran on stress-test treadmills. At the Philips booth, there was a big, eye-catching ambulance, apparently for demonstrating new defibrillator technology.
Lewin may still get criticized for not going far enough. The American Psychiatric Association recently decided to ban industry-sponsored symposiums, dinner and breakfast lectures near a medical meeting at which science is usually presented in a way that could help warm the market for a particular product. For instance, a company developing a drug to raise HDL, the good cholesterol, might hold a lecture about the importance of HDL.
Some critics would like groups like the ACC to give up industry money entirely. But Lewin protests that it is proper for industry to pay some of the costs of educating doctors given the huge sums of money companies make selling drugs and devices. He says the ACC is considering dropping asking companies to contribute into pools of money that will pay for an area, to add further protection from industry influence.
Meanwhile, lots of convention-goers are flying home without any cool pens to give to their kids.
