The Osteoporosis Symposium, Research, and Pharma
According to Big Pharma is big dog at symposium, a story by Barbara Quart published in the May 28, 2007 Berkshire Eagle, a seemingly unlikely periodical for such an article, the writer attended the 7th International Osteoporosis Symposium in Washington, D.C. to educate herself about her own diagnosis of osteoporosis but learned more than she expected about the interplay between Pharma-sponsored research and marketing.
A few excerpts that readily provide the essence of the article’s content and tone follow:
The event was basically a five-day non-stop education — some might call it a fancy sales job, or even indoctrination — by MDs for MDs (also physical therapists and other health professionals). From 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., talks and panels, lots of exciting information, in grand hotel ballrooms. All meals provided — dinners especially nice, supplied by the drug companies — plus nifty perks like a handsome tote bag emblazoned with “Lilly” (maker of Forteo, scariest of the drugs), and a beautiful pen inscribed “Fosamax,” the blockbuster seller. A very different world from the pretzels and chips and cheap white wine of my own decades of university English literature meetings. I feel grateful now, thinking back, that one couldn’t be for sale in my profession.
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After I came home I thought for a while that things seemed clearer. Just about everyone who spoke or whom I spoke to seemed of one mind: this is a really bad disease, undertreated, it desperately needs to be publicized, diagnosed (give a DEXA scan to every woman over 65), and medicated, or it will wreak devastation. And I heard about several memorable instances of osteoporosis -caused spinal collapse, hip collapse, chronic horrible pain, hideous operations.
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I couldn’t however share the leadership MDs’ enthusiasm for the drugs as good, safe, effective; nor their repeated deploring of “non-compliance” (naughty patients who drop their meds). The scolding of the “non-compliant” seemed to have priority at the symposium over the exciting talks by research scientists, and no speaker dealt with why so many people go off these drugs or are reluctant, like me, to take them in the first place.
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As former New England Journal of Medicine Editor Marcia Angell, MD of Harvard Medical School and author of a book on the subject, states that drug companies are “involved intimately in every detail of the research” for new drugs, and “they design the research so that their drugs look better than they really are.” How could one ever again trust any scientific study, in however reputable a journal? What won’t I know about?
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Ms Quart’s bottom line is easy to anticipate but nonetheless poignant:
My own conclusions? I feel I must take that pill, but I will do so angrily.
In many ways, Ms Quart’s experience is an affecting example of the concept discussed in a previous post, Does Mistrust Of A Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Cause Patient Noncompliance.
It is also yet another example of the complex set of interlinked factors that have an impact on patient compliance.
