“Marketing to Doctors,” John Oliver, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
This eye-opening video reveals how pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars every year marketing drugs to you and your doctors.
A study in 2013 found that 9 out of 10 of the top ten drug manufacturers spent more on marketing than they did on research and development (R&D). Big Pharma spends nearly $4 billion per year marketing drugs to consumers through direct advertising. All of the ads end with the same catchy phrase, “Ask your doctor.” The industry spends nearly $24 billion each year marketing to doctors (with free lunches and dinners, speaking fees, free samples, and other incentives) to encourage them to prescribe their drugs. Then, they monitor the sales and use that information to exert more pressure on doctors.
According to a study by the Mayo Clinic, 70 percent of Americans take at least one prescription drug and more than half of Americans take two. There were more than 4 billion prescriptions written in 2011. In 2013, spending on prescription drugs grew 3 percent, totaling more than $329 billion.
Related Articles:
- Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us, BCC News & Views.
- Life-Saving Drugs, Lethal Prices, by Gayle Sulik on Psychology Today.
Related Books:
- Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease by Alan Cassels (D&M Publishing, 2012) — Takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears.
- Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America by Norton M. Hadler (The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008) – Reviewing the data behind many widely accepted practices in modern American medicine, Hadler concludes that most come up too short on benefit and too high on risk.
- Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee (Bloomsbury, 2007) – Medical journalist Brownlee shows that technology and drugs are misused and overused as billions per year are spent on unnecessary tests and drugs and on specialists who are rewarded more for recommending certain procedures over other more appropriate ones.
