How many more skeletons in the closet?

Apr/16/2008 05:41 Filed in: Pharma Business
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How can people make such dumb decisions? The latest award for stupidity goes to Merck who wrote drug studies and then put prestigious physician names on the research reports. Forget the stupidity of the issue shouldn't someone's ethics alarm have gone off? Another reason why the pharmaceutical industry should not be subject to exclusion of litigation via FDA approval.



Merck said that they indeed hire outside medical writers before handing them over to physicians whose names appear on the reports but they denied that the authors do little research or don't agree with the studies conclusions. Given the missteps of the pharma industry are we supposed to believe that?


Another brick of trust is taken from the wall of pharmaceutical DTC ads. All this information, whether true or not, is painting a picture of the pharma industry as a greedy corporation that only cares about profits above patients health. With each new story it will be harder for DTC ads to work as consumers and patients become more and more skeptical. Savvy DTC marketers are aware of this, but there are too many DTC marketers who continue to ignore informed and educated consumers who use the Internet to search for health information before making their medication decisions.


Last summer I was contacting thought leaders to write generic content on diabetes for my website. More than once I had some distinguished physicians tell me to "just write the article and I'll review it and put my name on it". I refused to do this because I personally felt it was not right. The only changes we will make to content written for our website are because of legal and regulatory issues or to try and simply the language as to make it easier to understand.


About three months ago someone wrote me via my Linked in account and ask me if business ethics could be "learned" . My response to that is "no"; we know what is right and wrong and we should not learn from others as what is acceptable to one person may not be acceptable to another.

How many more stories are coming to out of the closet about past pharma practices? I thought maybe we had hit bottom but just then a story like this comes along and makes me laugh out loud and wonder how many more times the industry can step in dog droppings.
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