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Most pharmaceutical reps give physicians and their office staffs lunches because they want the physician as well as the office nurses to understand the medication and to prescribe it correctly so that they don't make any unsafe mistakes regarding your care. We have lunches so that we don't need to take time out of their busy day, why? so that they can spend more time with their patients and not be distracted by us.
Oh come on.... pharmaceutical reps are sales people. They give lunches to make personal contact with potential buyers in the hope that they can eventually get the doctors to prescribe their drugs. All sales people work this way. To suggest that they have altruistic motivations is ridiculous. If you really believe otherwise, I have some swamp land..err I mean waterfront lots, in Florida which I would be happy to sell you. I have personal control over a fairly large budget for Information Technology at my institution. I get lunches all the time. Nobody cares what's best for my institution. All of them claim that their equipment is the best.
The real problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they fund their own research into the efficacy of their drugs. This is an intrinsic conflict of interest. Many new drugs that come to market are claimed to be far better than anything else out there, whereas if fact their published data shows only a marginal improvement,if any. And remember, the people that published the study were funded by the pharmaceutical company.
D.
Of course pharmaceutical reps want the physician to prescribe the drug that they represent. But you cannot compare selling meds and selling software. Like I said before, the reason why physicians get free lunches....that is the only time they will give a rep more then 15 seconds to talk about a med. And then what happens when the physician prescribes a new med without being fully informed and then an adverse event happens to the patient...they try to blame the rep for not telling them. And yes, the PI (Package Insert) is on every advertising material to protect us from this backlash....but sometimes in court it is not good enough. And you think we really fund our own research? That would be ILLEGAL. Read a real clinical trial and look into how they are actually run, and how the physicians who monitor the trials are chosen. The physicians in charge of the clinical trials are unbiased and not paid by pharmaceutical companies. Those would be major violations of the FDA. The people who publish the study are not paid by the pharmaceutical companies...once again that would be ILLEGAL.
I think what has happened over many decades of free government funded medical services is that everyone expects a free handout for medical care. People want the pharmceutical companies to spend millions and millions on researching new lifesaving medications and new medications that fix a lifetime of poor lifestyle choices. But nobody wants to pay for these R&D costs....everyone wants a free handout and feels like they deserve a free handout.
I do think we should all have access to basic healthcare. If we can afford a multi-billion dollar war, then we can help those here at home with basic healthcare. And yes I think it is wrong that somebody can get the same med in Canada for a lot less then they can here. The real culprits for high healthcare costs are MALPRATICE ATTORNEYS AND MEDICAID AND MEDICARE RECIPIANTS WHO ABUSE THE SYSTEM. However, the finger pointing has turned to the pharmceutical companies. It costs a lot of money to produce medications, test their stability, retest, and retest, just to make sure that the meds are within the stringent requirements of the FDA. Of course this is all for the consumers safety. Maybe the FDA could lessen the safety requirements and then maybe the prices would go way down.
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