Drug Market

I see Prof George Jelinek from the College of Emergency Medicine is doing his nut about drug firms bribing doctors. This is an old hobby-horse of his. There is a word for the little trinkets, stationery and sponsored meetings that Drug companies so kindly provide. It is called marketing, George. The same thing that other companies use on consumers. Except that most doctors have a very strong streak of cynicism towards this marketing and tend to take drug companies with a pinch of salt. Or is it a pinch of garlic, as in vampires?

Anyway, the point is that, although drug marketing does have minor influence on prescribing habits, it is no big deal. Patient safety and cost to the patient come well before the name on the nice pen the drug rep gave you. 

Where Prof Jelinek does have a point, however, is in the massive sponsoring of drug research by drug companies. This research has been shown to tend to favour the sponsoring company either by over-interpreting favourable results or discounting unfavourable results and side effects as “anomalies”. Vioxx would be the most famous recent example – the heart side effects were seen even in the first studies, but discounted in the statistical analysis.

The only real solution for this, is for governments to step up to the plate and fund drug research directly – they can always tax the drug companies to pay for it, seeing as it is in the companies interests to do so. I would insist on at least one phase 3 government-funded trial before registering a product.

I don’t expect this to happen any time soon. The US would probably have to lead the way in this. Unfortunately, the US government is heavily lobbied by the drug companies. After all, guess who has the most amount of spare cash from their obscene profits?

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