IFPMA institutes new pharma marketing rules

The "dumbing down" of the American physician has taken another step forward as they are forced to goose-step their way toward uniformity of practice, thought, and expertise. The PC police are out in full force to protect the people from evil and stupid doctors who only prescribe medications if they were bribed or they found it on formulary.

Anne,
last year one of my duties was as Compliance Officer for a large physician entity. I waged a valiant battle to ban the big pharma reps from continuing their aggregious marketing practices, many of which flew in the face of the IFPMA's guidelines. I was unsuccessful in getting them to divulge their reports which track prescription activity and volume, BY DOCTOR. It is well known that they use this data to target individual doc's with marketing and stepped-up pressure, often to the doc's ancillary and support staff (e.g., lunches, gift certificates and other tactics). The pharma's claimed they didn't own the data warehouse for prescription activity; that they contract out to 3rd party companies to manage this. I called the national compliance/legal dept's. of several pharma's and was given a complete runaround. Have other providers found this the case? Why can't providers have access to their own prescription volume reports? A shocking fact is that many "experienced" drug reps make considerably more than the doctors themselves -- certainly more than PCP's. Have any skeptic spend a day in a large MD office and watch the game in action!