Fiscal health
-
- May
- 15
It’s hard to blame the doctors, who are being squeezed to death by insurance companies, from not turning away extra revenue opportunities…But there’s a fine line between being a medical advocate of a certain drug, and merely being a sales tool.
The money that the big pharmaceutical companies spend to get doctors to prescribe their drugs is astonishing. Now three anti-anemia drugs – Aranesp and Epogen (from Amgen) and Procrit (from Johnson & Johnson) – have been pushed very successfully through a combination of generous rebates and incentives to the doctors that prescribe them, and the usual emotionally overwrought TV ad campaigns promising miraculous medical results.
While the drugs have been shown to be effective in treating severe cases of anemia, they are shown to have raised red cell counts to an unacceptably high level in patients with mild anemia and have also been observed in studies to have a detrimental effect in some cancer patients.
Obviously, I have zero medical training, but I am qualified to wonder whether pharmaceutical companies should cynically dangle money in front of doctors in order to boost fiscal health, rather than the patients’.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 11:10 am by Matt Davies.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
| 
Hi Matt:
Welcome back!
Have you seen “DAVIES by TRUTHER” yet?
check out:
http://bp3.blogger.com/_mGINv98_ccg/RkmonPH0lGI/AAAAAAAAAKA/BuRuUSjIl18/s1600-h/DAVE_by+T.jpg
(Looks like you have groupies!)
Oh, and yes, I agree…. patients are thought of as just a disposal sink, for whatever the meds factory is pumping out this month. Shame.
A_33