Quote:
Originally Posted by $5 submissions
My wife's a former med rep. It's insane how much the marketing budgets of pharma companies are. Free trips for doctors, all sorts of swag. Would be nice if it didn't come from the "spread" between US prices and non-US prices.   |
Yeah it is crazy. I go to a specialist for my asthma and every time I go they hook me up with about 6 months worth of free medicine. Once I asked him why they always give me so much and he tells me that he has a deal with them to get a lot of samples. He said that they offer to take him on "retreats" where they would fly he and his family to somewhere great like Hawaii or Paris or some other great vacation local. He would have to spend about 3 hours listening to their sales pitch on this product and others they have coming out then he is free to do what he wants for the rest of the week. So it is a free vacation with first class airfare and top of the line accommodations. So he asks if, instead, they will give him the cost equivalent in free samples. He tells them he likes their drug and prescribes it to a lot of his patients. Since he is an allergy and asthma specialist they know he writes a ton of scripts for it. So since he doesn't take the vacation they load him up with free samples and he just gives them away because he knows how expensive it is.
I was pretty impressed. It is pretty honorable of him to pass up a free first class vacation for his family in order to get free meds for his patients.
Still. If they are willing to drop that much on him, I wonder how many doctors nationwide they offer it to? I would guess thousands a year.