Off-label drug pushing
posted Thu, 7 Apr 2011When drug companies spend billions of dollars on marketing each year, they obviously don’t have public health in mind. This excessive spending contributes to the ever-rising cost of prescription drugs.
In addition, top pharmaceutical companies have been known to use aggressive and questionable tactics to promote specific name brand drugs.
We recently wrote about the kickbacks doctors receive from big pharmaceutical companies for prescribing particular drugs. New research published this week in PLoS Medicine further illustrates this problem.
The research examines methods of off-label drug marketing (encouraging a drug’s use for conditions it wasn’t approved to treat). To be clear, it’s not entirely uncommon for doctors to prescribe drugs for “off-label” use. This is a call we trust doctors to make. But it is illegal for sales reps to market drugs to doctors for off-label purposes (since their goal is profit and not public health).
The research looked into 41 complaints and 18 unique cases of federal fraud, where off-label marketing was alleged against pharmaceutical companies. The study found that in 85% of the cases, doctors received “lavish gifts or honoraria” from drug companies.
The researchers note that it is important to develop ways to regulate off-label marketing practices. They admit that this will be a difficult task, since the only people privy to the situation are sales reps and doctors. Indeed, the only way we ever hear about such incidences of off-label marketing is when someone from inside the industry gets fed up and blows the whistle.
Read more about this study
Read the full journal article