trow125 January 8, 2015 Share January 8, 2015 The LWT Twitter feed announced this morning that the first show of the new season will air on Feb. 8. Link to comment
Lantern7 February 9, 2015 Share February 9, 2015 Once again, John Oliver does what Jon Stewart and Steph- . . . errm . . . Larry Wilmore cannot do on a regular basis: shine a spotlight on a massive problem each week, and shine it long enough to spot every rat and cockroach present. "Thought leaders"?!? Really, Big Pharma?!? Also had a giggle at the president of Ecuador escalating beef with people online. 4 Link to comment
ApathyMonger February 9, 2015 Share February 9, 2015 Brian Huskey! Loved the shot of him being pushed on the swing. Link to comment
attica February 9, 2015 Share February 9, 2015 Back in the day when I worked in health care, the 'drug dealers'* would try to woo me hoping I would ease their way to wooing the docs. I didn't have that kind of job, but there was no reason to tell them that! Sadly, the swag back then was pretty meager, compared to what Ollie described. Like note pads and pens meager. *Excuse me, Pharmaceutical Representative! They were always kind of prickly about that, heh. Which, naturally, only made me more resolved to refer to them as drug dealers. 2 Link to comment
Victor the Crab February 9, 2015 Share February 9, 2015 Once again, John Oliver does what Jon Stewart and Steph- . . . errm . . . Larry Wilmore cannot do on a regular basis: shine a spotlight on a massive problem each week, and shine it long enough to spot every rat and cockroach present. To be fair here, while the others have to do four half hour shows a week, Ollie only does those once a week, which gives his writers and researchers plenty of time to delve into the week's main topic. I wouldn't be surprised if, given the three months they were off, they were looking deep into more topics to cover for the earlier part of the year. Radio Shack had been around since the early 1920s? Holy fuck, but that's old. 3 Link to comment
peeayebee February 9, 2015 Share February 9, 2015 Did anyone else go to OpenPaymentsData.CMS.gov to check on their doctor? I just did. Her total payments came to a little over $325. They are all food and beverage, the most expensive one being $109 from AstraZeneca. There was another from AstraZeneca for $4.99. Pretty interesting. 1 Link to comment
attica February 9, 2015 Share February 9, 2015 Heh: Mine was 99¢. I have no idea how such a thing gets calculated. Maybe prorated over the whole practice? Interesting! Link to comment
Hanahope February 9, 2015 Share February 9, 2015 Considering I've been overweight almost all my life, I'm almost surprised more of my doctors haven't recommended I try this drug and that drug. Funny that they all seemed to recommend diet and exercise. Guess I've gotten good doctors. 3 Link to comment
Athena February 9, 2015 Share February 9, 2015 I use to work in telemarketing conducting surveys. Once during the day shift, we called American Doctors who had previously agreed to participate. They were asked how often or when they prescribed a certain major COPD medication. The interview took about less than half an hour and the doctors who completed were paid a three digital figure for their time. Most of the doctors agreed but actually didn't have time to do the survey, but those that did went through it very quick and we told them they'd get their cheque in X time. The Scrubs joke was funny and true. The show had many accurate jokes about the medical profession. A friend of mine is an intern and I corroborated her experiences with specialization stereotypes (Dermos are beautiful Queen Bees etc.) with the show, and it was largely true in her opinion. She's an internist like JD and they are known for their neuroticisms. Link to comment
maraleia February 9, 2015 Share February 9, 2015 Official episode description per HBO Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars marketing drugs to doctors. We have a few issues with that. Link to comment
Eliza422 February 10, 2015 Share February 10, 2015 So I wonder what a reasonable number for a doctor is. I checked my doctor and she's had $270 over 8/2013 theough 11/2013...all but one are for food, from 11$ to 20$. I don't really have any context for what would be an appropriate number! I'm not naive enough to expect it to be 0. Link to comment
peeayebee February 10, 2015 Share February 10, 2015 Yeah, me too. I suppose $4.99 for a lunch isn't bad, and I assume that the large food bills are for the whole doctor's staff. Eliza422, what was the one item for your doctor that wasn't for food? Link to comment
dcalley February 10, 2015 Share February 10, 2015 (edited) When I used to inspect physican's offices for an insurance company's network I'd run into those lunch spreads and the reps who brought them. Some docs were embarrassed by them and others offered to feed me too. For the embarrassed, why don't they just refuse them entry? Is it because the embarrassed doctors were outvoted by colleagues? I would expect that it wouldn't be the healthiest diet if you were eating free food provided on a somewhat large scale five days a week. Not to mention the feelings of disgust and guilt you might live with. I caught the bit about pharmacies sending the drug companies data and found myself on this depressing page: California Medical Privacy Fact Sheet C4: Your Prescriptions and Your Privacy. "Prescription data mining is the business of using de-identified prescription data to generate reports about doctors’ prescribing practices, and it is a big business. In 2010, companies engaged in the business together generated $9 billion total income by selling thousands of market research reports each costing thousands of dollars." I feel like taking some Repressitol after watching that. Ask your doctor! Edited February 10, 2015 by dcalley 2 Link to comment
ALenore February 10, 2015 Share February 10, 2015 Sadly, the swag back then was pretty meager, compared to what Ollie described. Like note pads and pens meager. I read an interesting article a few years ago on this subject by a doctor. He didn't take anything from drug companies except the occasional pen or notepad. He was confident that these wouldn't effect what he prescribed at all. But then he decided to test himself, and he went back and did an audit of all the drugs he'd prescribed over the past year, and found out that he'd prescribed considerably more of the companies from which he'd gotten notepads and paper. This wasn't done consciously. He then tossed out all the stuff with the brand names, since he realized it was probably subconsciously influencing what he prescribed. I checked out my doctor on that website, he's gotten $148 in the past year, something like 8 or 9 meals at from $10 to $14 a piece, nothing much. Link to comment
Azgard12 February 10, 2015 Share February 10, 2015 My former doctor (who is quite good, just a long distance away now) has double what I make in a year on the site. Yikes. Link to comment
Mindymoo February 10, 2015 Share February 10, 2015 My internal medicine doctor was on the website and received around $80, all in food comps that were between $12-$15. I guess that's not so bad. What I'm surprised about is that my old psychiatrist isn't on there at all, but that only covered five months. See, stuff would happen in her office that was very suspect. For example, one day she had a huge poster for Abilify up in her waiting room. I went in for my appointment, and lo and behold, guess what she prescribed for me: Abilify. I went home and researched the drug and flat out refused to get it filled. She has since lost her practice and moved back to India, but that was long after I stopped being her patient. She was a really, really shitty doctor. My mom's a nurse, and the drug reps would take her and all of the other nurses and doctors out to restaurants when she worked in radiology on a pretty regular basis. And it was always at nice restaurants, like fancy steakhouses and whatnot that were on the river. She still has loads of pens and notepads that advertise various drugs on them around the house. So they even schmooze nurses for some reason. Link to comment
Eliza422 February 11, 2015 Share February 11, 2015 Yeah, me too. I suppose $4.99 for a lunch isn't bad, and I assume that the large food bills are for the whole doctor's staff. Eliza422, what was the one item for your doctor that wasn't for food? It was for education...but again, a very small amount . Link to comment
attica February 11, 2015 Share February 11, 2015 Yeah, the drug companies are big on sponsoring Continuing Medical Education conferences (CMEs), usually in resort locales. Sit through a lecture, see some slides, go golf. If they hire you to present, collect a pretty honorarium. 1 Link to comment
Chaos Theory February 11, 2015 Share February 11, 2015 My mother was right, I should have been a doctor. So much swag. 2 Link to comment
Jamoche February 15, 2015 Share February 15, 2015 "Prescription data mining is the business of using de-identified prescription data to generate reports about doctors’ prescribing practices, and it is a big business. It's also, according to a coworker with a chronic pain condition, a PITA for doctors who specialize in that, because of course those doctors need to prescribe pain meds, but the system that's supposed to detect doctors selling to addicts pings on those doctors instead. So he has to go through all sorts of hoops to get a GP to do the actual prescribing. 3 Link to comment
Victor the Crab September 22, 2015 Share September 22, 2015 I'd like to think this seems the perfect place to put this, so in any case, I do hope, next episode, Ollie goes after this motherfucking piece of scum, who deserves a long drawn painful death!!! 3 Link to comment
OneWhoLurks June 21, 2016 Share June 21, 2016 Quote Big Pharma and the doctors who eat their free lunches often argue that industry-sponsored meals help facilitate discussion of cutting-edge therapies. Doctors are busy people, and it’s hard to catch them for a conversation about a new drug without offering to take them out to lunch. Besides, physicians argue, the couple of bucks spent on a sandwich and a drink or two isn’t exactly bribery material. And yet, several studies have found that doctors are more likely to prescribe specific drugs after they’ve had lunch with Big Pharma. Now, that could be because they were won over by the reps’ compelling claims—but given how often free lunch seems to affect doctors’ prescribing patterns, that’s hard to believe. Take another recent study of 334,000 physicians, which controlled for a variety of outside factors, and still found that doctors who accept less than $1,000 per year from pharmaceutical companies write about 20 more prescriptions for the advertised drugs each year. And the more Big Pharma pays, the more they prescribe. That same study found that when payments exceeded $1,000 per year, the doctors wrote up to 60 additional prescriptions. These free lunches became easier to track when ProPublica started keeping tabs on pharmaceutical payments to physicians with the Dollars For Docs tool. Dollars for Docs includes nearly $3.5 billion in payments, implicating more than 680,000 physicians with ties to Big Pharma. When you consider the fact that there are only about 800,000 active doctors in the United States, that number is staggering. How Big Pharma Wines And Dines Docs Into Prescribing Pills Link to comment
OneWhoLurks June 29, 2017 Share June 29, 2017 Quote Before the Affordable Care Act created a public database of payments made to physicians from pharmaceutical companies, Massachusetts made that information legally available on doctors within its borders. Research from the University of Michigan shows that when this law was put in place, the number of prescriptions physicians wrote dropped significantly. The research was conducted by doctoral student Tong Guo along with Professors Puneet Manchanda and S. Sriram. Together they took a look at how public policy can shape the pharmaceutical industry. Doctors Write Fewer Prescriptions When Laws Reveal How Much Money Drug Companies Give Them Link to comment
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