I ran across this video a couple of days ago and thought you might enjoy it as much as I did. While it’s humorous, it shares a lot of truth about how drugs are marketed.
Here are some concerning highlights of this video:
70% of Americans take at least one prescription drug
50% take at least two
More than 4 billion prescriptions were written in 2011
$330 billion was spent on prescriptions in 2013 ($1000 dollars per person in the US)
Doctors are asking pharmaceutical reps how to treat patients
Pharmaceutical reps are undereducated and many have no medical background at all.
Drug companies keep very detailed statistics about doctor prescription patterns and use them to influence doctors’ clinical decision making.
Drug reps ask doctors to prescribe medications for non approved use,
Doctors are paid to speak as “experts” for different drugs, but the doctors who are being paid are simply using scripts provided by the pharmaceutical company.
A viewer of the video summarized it this way:
Pharmaceutical companies don’t cure diseases, they are designed to create customers. I couldn’t have said it better.