Trust Your Doctor?

[Guest guest]

Here's an interesting piece from the Huffington Post:

http://tinyurl.com/phol5

by Dr. Rost

I'm a doctor, so I can say this with a straight face: Don't trust

your doctor. There's no question in my mind that today most doctors

are businessmen first and doctors second.

And you shouldn't trust your doctor anymore than you trust your

stockbroker, (if you are foolish enough to have one). Neither one

looks out for you, they primarily care about themselves.

That's the reason the individual retail investor on Wall Street is

the last one to buy a high-flying stock before it is about to tank,

and the individual patient is the last one to swallow a deadly pill,

when everyone else in the know has already stopped taking it.

Take the painkiller Vioxx, for example. I have a friend in the drug

industry who used Vioxx, but then heard about the heart problems and

stopped taking the drug. That was more than five years ago. My

friends isn't a doctor, but he heard about the damaging heart data

years before any patient became aware of this. Meanwhile regular

patients kept popping those Vioxx pills like candy. And now some of

the patients who suffered heart attacks after taking Vioxx line up

in court. My friend had information any doctor could get if they

cared enough, just like Wall Street firms have bad information about

stocks they try to sell to us, but keep to themselves.

Stockbrokers make money if they can convince you the market is going

up, then you buy and they make a commission. They don't make money

if investors pull out their money. So they always try to convince

the investors that the market is going up and up. Doctors make money

when you come to their office and they get to prescribe an expensive

drug, even though you might have been able to get a much cheaper and

equally effective over the counter remedy without ever seeing a

doctor. So they often don't tell you about those cheap options.

Yesterday, the New York Times writes, a jury in New Jersey found

that Merck had " misled the Food and Drug Administration about the

dangers of Vioxx and acted with wanton disregard for patients taking

the drug. " That's pretty strong words. And the jury awarded $9

million in punitive damages, in addition to the $4.5 million in

compensatory damages already awarded last week.

And of course, lying and cheating drug companies should be punished.

But doctors shouldn't pretend like they knew nothing. They shouldn't

hide behind drug company data and the pretty sales reps in their

offices, but they do.

The fact is that already in medical school doctors are taught about

all the ways to manipulate scientific data and not to trust drug

company information. But sometime after they leave medical school,

start meeting pretty sales reps, get little gifts, are taken to

dinner or become speakers for various drug companies, all those

warnings seem to simply vanish form their little minds. And the

patient becomes someone they can use to test the most recent, least

tested, and most expensive medicine on, without any cost to them.

My point is that if my non-doctor marketing friend knew better than

to use Vioxx five years ago, then many doctors should have known

too. They just didn't care.

In fact, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical

Association, found that requests from patients for medications have

a " profound effect " on physicians prescribing. These findings

indicated that direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing of prescription

medications also exerted significant influence on treatment

decisions.

The actors in the study who asked for a brand-name drug were two to

four times as likely to walk out with a prescription, compared to

when they didn't ask for the drug and showed the exact same

symptoms; so much for doctors' long education and scientific

judgment.

In a way, much of the medicine has turned into a racket; a monopoly

for doctors to make money off prescribing drugs that could just as

well have been bought by educated patients without his interference.

The JAMA study proves that the doc is often just a bobbing head

anyway.

So do I have any advice? Know your doctor and use a doctor who

practices medicine, not business. (I know, not an easy task to find

someone like that.) And if you see a long line of sales reps outside

his office; run, even if you know him really well.

Truth is; if I wasn't a doctor, I'd be really scared about going to

another doctor. He's not thinking of you; he's thinking of that long-

legged blonde, in a tight skirt, waiting outside your examining room.

But don't take my word for it; this is what my friend and former

sales rep and author Reidy wrote in his book " Hard Sell, "

about his life as a drug sales man: " I witnessed men undergo

complete personality makeovers in the presence of female

salespeople. The women had the most basic human response on their

side; regardless how behind schedule or how crazy the day, a male

doctor would snap to attention at a mere whiff of perfume or a

glance at a pretty girl, his instinctive desire to reproduce having

kicked into gear. "

So trust me on this. Don't trust your doctor.

Mike