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Rules on what drug companies can do to pay doctors to listen to their promotions are being restricted. Lavish dinners and conferences in Hawaii are considered too brazen. But that has not stopped enterprising ad agencies.
Here is an example of the latest tactic in flogging "essential" drugs to doctors. It's the online "survey". A doctor is phoned and asked to participate in an online survey. After some screening questions he or she is emailed a URL to do the survey. In this case we were offered $275 just to do the survey. But we would get paid only if we completed it and answered all the questions.
We might have suspected something because of the large amount paid for a simple survey. And our supicions were confirmed. This was a disguised ad for Caduet, made by Pfizer, a combination of a statin and a blood pressure drug. Such combinations encourage overprescribing. The implication of the "survey" was that any patient with high blood pressure should also be on a statin. This in spite of the absence of evidence for overall health benefit in primary prevention.
Clearly, Genactis is not a polling company. It's motto is "Generating Action for Success". it is a marketing company using the ruse of polling to entice doctors into reading propaganda for their client, Pfizer, thereby avoiding any publicly embarrassing events like free dinners and vacations. Very clever.
Below see some of the sequence of questions and how the surveyee is subtly lead into a drug promotion.
We will donate the $275 to the McGill Library. See the story on this by Tom Blackwell in the National Post.
Here is the email invitation. Not the slightest hint that this is a marketiing tool for Caduet.
Well we got them to admit this was really a marketing study. Now the great unanswered question is, why is it necessary to market "life-saving" drugs. Does insulin have to be marketed? If a drug is truly "life-saving" then, in this age of the Internet, it will be instantly known and it will be sold out instantly.
Notice that Pfizer's only defense is to accuse us of belongs to THINCS. Now the only way that might have occurred to them is via a fellow cardiologist who has a close connection to Pfizer and who has repeatedly used the same accusation. We have no connection to THINCS and do not appear on their membership list. THINCS (THe Iternational Network of Cholesterol Skeptics) is based on the philosophy of W.A. Price, a dentist, who wandered around the world in the 1930's looking in mouths and concluded that saturated fat had some magical property he called "activator X" which prevented all disease. Definitely not an idea with which we would wish to be associated.
If the Pfizer motto is "Life is our life's work", then we would suggest they spend their money on truly life-saving drugs and forget marketing drugs that change numbers but have no effect on total mortality in those populations to whom they direct their marketing.
