Reply #70: You attacked doctors and Pharma.

[knitter4democracy]

You called doctors "bought and paid for" and posted this:
"Big business and physicians alike are involved in a massive charade. Representatives of the drug companies claim repeatedly that marketing serves an essential function in the health-care delivery system by helping to educate doctors so they can prescribe drugs more appropriately. At the same time, they press their drug salesmen to push the newest (and usually the most expensive) products, and their surrogate intermediaries, the medical education companies, are advertising their services as 'persuasive' education."

My argument is that there are good doctors out there saving lives. There's no charade there--they're doing their damndest to keep people from dying. I have yet to meet a doctor that would ever trust a drug rep, and I'd bet that I know more doctors than you do.

You blame Pharma for making drugs that make people sick. Hell, I'm one of them--that ibuprofen gave me an ulcer. I should sue or at least be super angry, according to your post, right? Instead, I knew it was one of the risks, balanced that risk with my need for pain control, and understood that I might get hurt by the drug. Thankfully, we caught it before it got too bad, but then, we knew it was a possibility and so were careful to check me for it early. In your cartoons that you chose to put in your post, you would blame Pharma for what happened to me and the drug reps for making my doctors prescribe me the drugs I needed (Prevacid, Versed, ibuprofen, etc.): I choose to be thankful that I made it through a year of hideous pain alive and that I'm alive because of doctors today.

You post against off-label uses for drugs. Two of the drugs I'm on are off-label. They're the first things that have worked at all for one of my conditions. The drug reps didn't tell my husband to come up with that combination--his knowledge of how the drugs work on a molecular level (you know, that stuff he learned in med school) made him consider the theory and then talk with my doctor about it and then have her work out a dosing system. Off-label treatments for kidney cancer are the only ones that since have shown any promise of any decent success at all. Wow, those off-label uses are horrible! They're keeping people alive!

I live with a wonderful doctor who hates drug reps to the core of his being and does everything he can to avoid them. I hear every day how awful Pharma is and how much he hates the drug ads on tv and in his medical journals. He would never take the word of a drug rep for anything and instead spends a lot of time reading the latest research and working on how to keep his patients healthier. Calling him "bought and paid for" and "living a charade" is more than a little offensive.