Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17632

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: Electronic Source

Goozner M
Putting Academic Detailing in Perspective
GoozNews 2010 Apr 15
http://www.gooznews.com/node/3324

Full text:

Top Senate and House Democrats issued a press release today praising the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for earmarking $29.5 million for grants to academics to spread the word on comparative effectiveness research. Academic detailing, championed by Jerry Avorn at Harvard, is a wonderful thing. But can it really offset the combined might of the marketing arms of Big Pharma, Big Bio and Big Device (hmm, I need a better term there, especially since stents and implantable defibrillators are pretty damn small)?

Do the math. The pharmaceutical industry, it has been conservatively estimated, has at least 50,000 detailers in the field. At a minimum, each one’s annual salary, travel costs and associated support materials comes to at least $150,000 a year. That’s $7.5 billion for a small army of salespersons.

So how does $29.5 million a year stack up against that? Well, if it cost just $100,000 per academic detailer person-year (let’s assume the professoriate works cheap), then the AHRQ program should enable the deployment of an equivalent of about 300 pharmaceutical truthbearers.

50,000 for the drug industry; 300 for the truth squad. Henry V had better odds at Agincourt.