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Thursday, March 26, 2009
Boomer with Attitude / News More sleazebag tactics from Big Pharma
Posted By John Grooms on Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 11:11 AM
People are reacting with shock to reports by Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times that the popular RealAge Web site is, in effect, a front for pharmaceutical companies.
The drug companies, it turns out, use the information you provide the site to figure out which ailments you may have (before you've even talked to your doctor about them, no less) and then e-mail you to pitch the drugs they manufacture for those problems. What's truly incredible in this situation, though, is that anyone could be shocked by anything the drug industry does to jack up its profits.
As we report this week in a review of the book Our Daily Meds by Melody Petersen, in the past 25 or so years, "'Big Pharma' morphed from a research-oriented, largely public service industry into a marketing-driven money machine" that floods the airwaves with commercials, bribes medical practitioners, pays PR people to write articles in medical journals, and effectively turns cash-strapped college med schools into Big Pharma subsidiaries.
Worse yet, their overpriced drugs (Americans pay more for prescription drugs than anyone else) help drain the national treasury by artificially raising Medicaid and Medicare costs. The latest, RealAge-related revelation of exploitative tactics is, sad to say, pretty much par for Big Pharma's course.
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