The Rise Of Marketing-Based Medicine (via Pharmalot) : Neuron Culture

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I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find clips here.) Right now I'm writing my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which explores the hypothesis that the genetic roots some of our worst problems and traits — depresison, hyperaggression, violence, antisocial behavior — can also give rise to resilience, cooperation, empathy, and contentment. The book expands on my December 2009 Atlantic article exploring these ideas. I've also written three books, including Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career — an elemental dispute running some 75 years.

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The Rise Of Marketing-Based Medicine (via Pharmalot)

Posted on: January 31, 2010 2:14 PM, by David Dobbs

The Rise Of Marketing-Based Medicine
64 Comments
By Ed Silverman // January 28th, 2010 // 7:57 am

You've heard of evidence-based medicine. Well, a new paper summarizes a panoply of practices employed over the past two decades or so - ghostwriting, suppressing or spinning data, disease mongering and managing side effect perceptions among docs - that the authors call marketing-based medicine. And they rely on internal documents from litigation - such as the much-publicized lawsuits over antipsychotics and antidepressants - to illustrate their point.

A stunning must-read from Ed Silverman on a must-read paper. The comments following Ed's post are also rich.
I imagine there will be blowback and some vigorous challenges to the facts and stats in the paper. But the industry emails quoted are themselves devastating, and suggest how successfully the marketing forces within the industry won out over those who wanted to make drugs that clearly worked, rather than aggressively sell drugs that either didn't work that well or worked for some but carried nasty side-effects that were downplayed.
Pharma, biotech, and medicine itself will be years digging out of the credibility hole this sort of thing put them in.

Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

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Comments

My favorite side effect from the drug commercials (I forget which drug, unfortunately) is "skeletal pain."
Ow. My skeleton hurts.
If you can't develop new treatments for old diseases, just invent new diseases for your old treatments.

Posted by: feralboy12 | January 31, 2010 2:56 PM