Our Daily Meds
Mar/30/2008 11:46 Filed in: Pharma
Business
Ms Peterson writes that drug companies push medicines that they know don't work and that they invent disease conditions such as PMDD, overactive bladder or compulsive shopping disorder so that labels on medications can be expanded to treat such conditions. While the credibility gap on pharma data becoming wider and wider I guess you could say she is party true here but the reality of today's consumers is that they would rather take a pill to treat a condition than make changes to their lifestyles.
Let's face it it's easier to take a prescription for Lipitor than it is to give up red meat or fried foods. We have become an aging nation that doesn't have the time to exercise or eat right. Hell we have to worry about just holding onto our jobs and putting enough away for the kids college fund and now you want to take away the last pleasure we have, the occasional burger or New York steak? So I'll have high cholesterol, I'll take Lipitor and if my high cholesterol leads to ED I'll ask for Viagra or Cialis.
Ms Petersen uses, as one of her examples, Sarafem which was Prozac repackaged to treat PMDD. I was on the Sarafem team at Lilly and we had had an area of the website where woman could share their personal experiences and let me tell you more than 90% of the comments we received were positive. Some women had said that their PMDD was effecting their relationships while others said that they hated anyone who had to live with them during their PMDD sessions. We made physicians aware of the what women were going through and advised a prescription to Sarafem as a treatment option. Do you think that many women would have sought help if we marketed it under the Prozac brand name?
Well Ms Petersen it's pharmas job to come up with products that fill a need and guess what, if we have to create a market then we will but in order for that market to be there people have to raise their hands and say "yes I have this and yes I need a treatment".
Physicians also have to take some responsibility here. There was a time when you knew your physician very well and were on a first name basis. When he, or she, didn't need to look at your charts to see what meds you were on and talked to you personally about losing weight and getting more exercise. Now if you spend more than 15 minutes with your doctor you're a minority.
The bottom line is that if the public can take a pill rather than making a major change in lifestyle they will. Any marketer knows that getting someone to change their lifestyle is more difficult than selling them a simple solution. So the pharma companies are responsible for consumers behavior and filling a need? Perhaps what they are guilty of is trying too hard to get that next blockbuster which has led to some really bad decisions by managers. The recent Zyprexa trial in Alaska clearly indicates that Lilly was worried about losing sales of Zyprexa and as thus chose to ignore some data that clearly should have been added to warnings on the label.
The pharma industry on the whole has added a lot to society and extended the lives of millions of people. Just 30 years a diagnosis of HIV would have been a death sentence but because of the drugs on the market many people with HIV are leading healthy and normal lives. The pharma industry is just in a self-induced funk right now because of the bad decisions of a few executives. To condemn a whole industry and say that they have "invented" diseases maybe going to far besides whoever said that the pharma industry had "slick marketing"?
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