By: Shannon Brownlee

Shannon Brownlee — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 01:16:28 +0000

Doctors should indeed shoulder some of the blame for the Vioxx fiasco, but probably not your community internist or even your rheumatologist. Rather, resposibility for the over-prescribing of Vioxx also lies at least in part with the academic physicians who served as unofficial company spokesmen and women for Merck, and for Pfizer, and for other pharmaceutical companies who use “KOLs” or Key Opinion Leaders, as they are known on Madison Avenue, to market their blockbuster drugs to physicians. These KOLs are generally highly regarded academic physicians who are paid consulting fees and speakers fees by the companies, and who in turn talk up their benefactors’ drugs at CME conferences, medical meetings, and to medical students. This is the soft-money side of pharmaceutical marketing, the quiet manipulation of expert opinion, which ultimately carries great weight with community doctors and affects their prescribing patterns. The trouble is, the practice of accepting industry largesse has become so commonplace and so acceptable that academics don’t really know that they are being used by pharma — or maybe don’t want to know.

By: ali

ali — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 22:36:22 +0000

i feel like i’m approaching a dead horse with a stick, but don’t doctors share the responisibility for the “some twenty million Americans” with vioxx prescriptions (those with the ability to safely take aspirin or ibuprofen, that is)? maybe i don’t understand the prescription process – is it that patients are demanding drugs as consumers, and doctors are just the gatekeepers to their consumption? wouldn’t a doctor have the ability (responsibility) to say “what you have would be better treated with tried-and-true x” – rather than filling a prescription for the latest shiny package with the cool name?

Comments on: The New Yorker comments on the Vioxx lawsuits

By: Shannon Brownlee

By: ali