As those following the healthcare debate are aware, President Obama has backed off his campaign promises to legalize drug reimportation and require drug companies to negotiate drug prices with Medicare. Apparently deciding that healthcare reform would be defeated if he had to fight both Big Insurance and Big Pharma, he has decided to let [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Pharmaceutical marketing'
Drug ads to be banned? Keep dreaming
August 11th, 2009 · 1 Comment
Tags: Pharmaceutical marketing
Prescription for pharma: More research, less promotion
June 18th, 2009 · No Comments
Anne Dunev at The Huffington Post recently called attention to a thought-provoking article published at the peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library of Science. Titled “The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States,” the 2008 article by Canadian academics Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin concludes:
From [...]
Tags: Pharmaceutical marketing · Prescription drugs
FDA’s silly edicts prove that DTC advertising was a bad idea all along
June 1st, 2009 · 2 Comments
Sometime back, Effect Measure posed a question many of us have pondered about direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical commercials: What’s with the side-by-side bath tubs in the Cialis ads?
Here are some of the answers given in comments –
“Cialis really gets your pipes flowing or plumbing flowing…”
“Bathtubs — because you can’t show naked, mutually aroused adults on the [...]
Tags: FDA · Pharma marketing · Pharmaceutical marketing · Prescription drugs · Prescriptions
Healthcare, prescription drugs, and the plight of the self-employed
April 29th, 2009 · 2 Comments
I recently came across a remarkable blog rant by a man named Jim Thornton, a competitive swimmer at age 56. Under a list of his latest swimming times, he shared the story of some of the struggles he’d recently been having with healthcare and prescription drug costs.
An excerpt:
Our health insurance went up [...]
Tags: Canadian drugs · Drug costs · Drug reimportation · Pharmaceutical marketing · Prescription drugs
Why is Big Pharma afraid of comparative effectiveness research?
March 28th, 2009 · 1 Comment
President Obama’s economic stimulus plan includes funding for “comparative effectiveness research,” which would study various prescription drugs, along with medical treatments and devices, to determine which perform best for the least amount of money.
As the Washington Post describes the program:
What’s best for insomnia — Lunesta, at about $6 a pill, or Zolpidem, at $2?
Should [...]
Tags: Healthcare solutions · Pharmaceutical companies · Pharmaceutical marketing
It’s time to put an end to our “prescription drug culture”
October 10th, 2008 · No Comments
I stumbled across this while reading Gawker: “Teen socialite” Peaches Geldof says the staff at the fashion magazine Nylon prefer prescription drugs over illegal drugs –
What’s the drug of choice at Nylon? “Klonopin.” Peaches was definitely the talky one. Why? “It’s just a very large prescription drug culture.”…
This confirms our highly anecdotal evidence of [...]
Tags: Healthcare100 · OxyContin · Pharma bloggers · Pharmaceutical companies · Pharmaceutical marketing · Prescription drug abuse · Prescription drugs · Purdue Pharmaceutical · Xanax
Pharma links for 10-08-08
October 8th, 2008 · No Comments
Get thee behind me, Big Pharma! (The Migraine Girl)
Big Pharma Problems (All Things Whistleblower)
Cleaning the Stables (PharmaGossip)
Pfizer’s New Focus Will Usher in a Golden Age of Pharma Social Media Marketing (Pharma Marketing Blog)
Subscribe to the eDrugSearch Blog with Bloglines:
Tags: Big Pharma · Pharma marketing
A hero to all of us — except Big Pharma
October 1st, 2008 · 1 Comment
I think the best story I read on Monday’s $425 million Cephalon settlement was the law firm Phillips & Cohen’s press release:
The government’s investigation into Cephalon Inc.’s illegal marketing practices that culminated in today’s $425,000,000 settlement and guilty plea by the pharmaceutical company began in January 2003 with a Cephalon sales representative in Ohio.
The [...]
Tags: Pharmaceutical companies · Pharmaceutical marketing
Are ALL Canadian pharmacies “rogue”? New verification service thinks so
September 5th, 2008 · 31 Comments
While reading Benjamin Gluck’s Internet Pharmacy Law blog, I came across a reference to an “Internet pharmacy verification and information service” I hadn’t yet heard of: LegitScript.
I like the professed mission of LegitScript: to improve online pharmacy safety by offering a database that allows consumers to enter a pharmacy’s name and find out whether it’s [...]
Tags: Pharmaceutical companies · Pharmaceutical marketing
Study: Big Pharma’s $3 billion in annual consumer advertising is a waste of YOUR money
September 1st, 2008 · 3 Comments
Americans are known for our short memories, so it may surprise you to know that prescription drug ads aimed at consumers are a relatively new phenomenon. They’ve only been around in present form for a little over a decade, when the FDA, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, approved the practice. Now, it’s [...]


