Naked Medicine

3 of my predictions appeared here:

Industry consultant and entrepreneur Jane Chin (@janechin) goes even further, alleging that next year PhRMA will appoint its first ever ‘Chief Tweeting Officer.’

Jane Chin (@janechin) thinks social media will spur new approaches to customer care and technology, as “cutting edge pharma …companies will experiment with a blend of continuing medical education and cloud-based user-generated content for CME 2.0.”

Jane Chin (@janechin) emphasizes sound strategic judgment and an eye on the needs of a targeted audience for specific, relevant content by warning that “pharma will realize, once again too late, that data dumping fails both in real life and in social media.” [Thanks @skypen!]

I’ve heard the argument, so have you.

“Those evil pharma companies aren’t interested in prevention! They want people to get sick and stay sick because that’s how they make their money! On the drugs!”

Recently I had railed against the pharma companies that are capitalizing on increasing trends of people using certain prescription drugs as “lifestyle drugs” – not to mention appearing on the Wall Street Journal this past Friday to rail against pharma companies that abuse the role of medical science liaisons, so I have my own pet peeves and criticisms with pharma. What irks me is when a criticism about any industry is not based on a fundamental flaw in that industry, but is simply born of politicking sensationalizing this-is-how-I-get-more-readers/viewers tactic.

Most of these people have taken a basic science class at some point in their lives and learned about a phenomenon called “entropy”. How things in a system tend to go toward disorder, and to halt this “natural” occurrence from occurring, you have to add in a great deal of energy, and even that won’t ultimately stop the inevitable.

Kind of like the idea of life and death, which is relevant to the assessment of this dimension of our hostility towards the pharmaceutical industry.

Obviously, pharma companies want you to stay alive, preferably as long as possible. This is not so they can capitalize on you dying (a dead person is no longer a customer)! The pharmaceutical industry is a business that capitalizes on your DESIRE to PROLONG YOUR LIFE AND MINIMIZE PHYSICAL PAIN AND SUFFERING. If you aren’t interested in prolonging life and minimizing physical pain and suffering, the pharma industry ain’t gonna benefit from YOU since you’re not a customer to begin with!

Let’s say you are sick from complications of heart disease.

Pharma companies that are in the heart disease business is not responsible for PREVENTING YOU from getting heart disease. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE for making sure you do what you’re supposed to do to reduce your risk of getting heart disease, unless somehow you have signed the claim to your physical existence over to another person who is legally responsible for your physical survival and health.

Your family doctor may have a responsibility to educate you on mitigating the risks of getting heart disease, so those who want to rant about prevention may want to point their antennae to the medical profession, but ultimately YOU are STILL RESPONSIBLE for the behaviors and actions YOU TAKE that lead to the result of heart disease or no-heart disease. Your doctors can be the best doctors they can be and even give you a diet and exercise regimen that will lower your cholesterol, reduce your blood pressure, and take down your diabetes risk factors a few notches – but if you DON’T DO WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO, then you will end up with the health consequences. Actually, this is EXACTLY what happens in many obesity and heart disease cases today. Doctors themselves will admit that many of their patients won’t heed their advice, and most will lack the discipline required to stick with a rigorous healthy lifestyle to make a lifesaving change.

Are we saying that it’s the pharma industry’s job to PREVENT us from assuming behaviors that will put our health at risk? If there’s a pill for stopping us from risky behaviors, and pharma makes it commercially available, then we’ll simply turn around and say “now pharma wants to control our thoughts and actions!” (I think we already have those kind of pills, and there are activists and lawyers jumping on that bandwagon.)

Seriously, if you take care of your body, do everything healthy like you’re inundated by all media outlets to do (don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t go out in the sun without wearing sunscreen, eat more fruits and vegetables, exercise at least 30 minutes a day, etc…), then you’re probably not going to need all those pharmaceuticals until the inevitable process of aging occurs, where your cells can’t care less what you’ve done because they’re all getting old and breaking down as a natural part of the decline of “life” in your physical human existence.

I’m posting this from one of Steve Woodruff’s blog posts that I shared via my Facebook profile, which turned into a full blown debate between me, Dmitriy Kruglyak, and Yvette – one of my FB friends.

Jane Chin’s Profile

Jane Chin
I’m pro-pharma, but I’m NOT happy w/ female sexual dysfunction disease mongering I expect to see from pharmacos! http://ow.ly/4xQH

Dmitriy Kruglyak at 8:18am April 30
Where do you draw the line between “disease mongering” and “disease awareness”?

Jane Chin at 8:21am April 30
When the ‘awareness” generated makes patients who otherwise are not candidates for the drug pressure docs to write the Rx.

Dmitriy Kruglyak at 8:23am April 30
Ah, but who gets to decide “who are the candidates” and what qualifies as “pressure”? Especially if we are talking DTC, rather than Rx. Are there hard and fast rules?

Jane Chin at 8:25am April 30
that’s why I don’t think DTC is responsible for niche diseases. Pressure=if you don’t write it, I’ll go to another doctor who will.

Dmitriy Kruglyak at 8:27am April 30
Hmmm, seems to me “if you don’t write it, I’ll go to another doctor who will” can come from any kind of patient empowerment, not just driven by Rx advertising.

Jane Chin at 8:28am April 30
Yes it can, but true patient empowerment IS NOT “take this pill, fix your problem” when the problem is not always solved by “a” pill.

Dmitriy Kruglyak at 8:47am April 30
Patients just want to do what they want to do. People have, are and will always look for quick fixes. That’s human nature.

Jane Chin at 8:51am April 30
I know this is human nature, and one capitalized by advertising. But where health and human life are concerned, the ethical standards should be higher.

Dmitriy Kruglyak at 8:53am April 30
Seems to me advertising is simply fulfilling demand

Jane Chin at 9:02am April 30
No, advertising is meant to CREATE demand. Even better when advertising increases the market from perception-based v. needs-based demand. Read the rest of this entry »

Like all marketing campaigns, the aim of any pharma advertisement is to get you to think that you need a certain product or a service. I understand that all pharma companies will say that they want to educate patients on the condition first and foremost, but I guarantee that when pharma companies are forking over multimillion dollar checks to ad agencies, they’re looking for more product sales as a return on investment (ROI).

This is not a “bad” thing – this is business. Let’s say you’re an inventor and you created a program that would improve the amount of sassing teenagers give to their parents. Would you pay an agency half of your annual paycheck so that parents can be educated about the prevalence of sassing by teenagers? NO! You want parents to buy your program so you can make back at least the money you spent on the ad, plus more so you can pay your mortgage and keep your family fed!

Well, pharma’s like that. I know for some it is incredible to believe, but pharma companies are not alive in themselves, as if there is a force called “the pharma company” making decisions. Pharma companies are made up of hundreds of thousands of people who have to feed themselves and their families and put a roof over their heads. (Many of them are parents and most of them probably wish that you did invent a program that improves teen sassing of parents.)

So the key is not to spend your energy hating companies and talking trash about how misleading some commercials are or how annoying you find that a computer graphic bee is selling you asthma medication or how a group of red-towel clad women looking like they think they’re better than you want to sell you a hormone replacement drug.

As consumers, the key is to see through BS!

And the best way to see through any “BS” – whether it is from pharma or any other industry – is to know the difference between:

- what you NEED

- what you WANT

- what you are led to THINK you NEED

This last item – what you are led to think you need – is the crux of how ads work. Ads lead you think you need something, and usually tap into our animal instincts, or tap into our more “evolved” desires like convenience.

Example:

- buy this car and you’ll attract sexy partners (taps into animal instinct)

- take this pill (taps into convenience in some cases where diet, exercise, life style change is much harder)

Therefore, a question consumers can ask themselves whenever they are confronted with an agent of influence is,

“Is this what I REALLY need? Or is this what I want? Or is this what I am tempted to think I need?”

You can apply these questions to 99% of the junk ads you see on television these days, aside from pharma ads.

By Jane Chin, Ph.D.

In theory, engaging social media in pharmacovigilance is attractive, if not sensible.

In practice, engaging social media in pharmacovigilance will be fraught with such high noise-to-signal ratio that both pharma companies and regulatory agencies may struggle to embrace it.

Let’s look at how pharmacovigilance has fared from the field perspective. We (used to) have over 100,000 sales reps in the field, who are exposed to adverse events signals every single day, I’d even surmise at least once a day.

All company employees in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry are legally obligated to report an adverse event within 24 hours of receipt from the field or through other communication channels.

Yet today adverse events reporting – sans Web 2.0 – has been bogged down with bureaucracy, and physicians who are willing to spend the time and effort to report AEs directly to the FDA are enormously frustrated with the red tape and hurdles they face. It soon became a lose-lose proposition for doctors whose continuing livelihood has come to depend on patients/day type of clinical practice management.

Will Web 2.0 perhaps simplify the process and reduce red tape? I believe the potential is there.

The question is – HOW? At least, from the regulatory / federal government side.

From the commercial side, the question for pharmaceutical companies becomes – WHY ON EARTH…?

There are so many layers of medical history and patient health context that must be addressed when an adverse event arises – were there confounding factors? was the patient compliant? – that stripping the context away makes the content dangerously misleading when interpreting the safety of a drug.