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Patients are not customers for drugs and drug companies, therefore drug companies should not advertise to patients. Patients are to be given therapies, to be h

by tpm 6y ago

Patients are not customers for drugs and drug companies, therefore drug companies should not advertise to patients. Patients are to be given therapies, to be helped and in the best cases cured. Not to be sold drugs seen in advertisements. Medicine is not a free-market economy sector in Europe. Doctors should educate themselves about new therapies and use them when appropriate.

arcticbull 6y ago
Not sure why you're getting downvoted as this is the real answer. In countries other than America, healthcare is not for profit. It's not to maximize gains, it's to maximize care and allocate available resources for the public good. Doctors are the ones who prescribe. Imagine: doctors don't even know what a drug costs, and nether do patients. The customers are government health systems, who study the value of a drug, negotiate prices and make it available iff the negotiated price is less than the value it provides. Its true facts that in Europe, healthcare is not a free market. This is how Canada works too. Patients receive care as needed and don't need to be advertised to because they're not the customers.
- com2kid 6y ago
  Because patients ARE the customer. Drug companies constantly work to make drugs easier to take (long acting forms, or even once a month injections) and have fewer side effects. ADHD meds are a great example. In America long lasting ADHD meds with fewer side effects were available for literal decades before they were available in certain EU countries. Modern drug delivery systems that can slowly dose a medicine over 12 hours (!!!) are the direct result of pharmaceutical companies working to improve QoL for the patient. The doctor, and especially the healthcare system, don't consider the patient's UX to be of that much importance. This is analogous to having the CTO make a software purchase VS giving user's input. Should the IT directors and CTO have a majority of the say? Of course. But the end users must be considered or you end up with painful to use software.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > Because patients ARE the customer. Drug companies constantly work to make drugs easier to take (long acting forms, or even once a month injections) and have fewer side effects. Patients aren't the customer in Europe because they're not buying the drugs. They're consumers, end-users even, but they're not buying them so they're not the customers. Frankly the same is true at any US HMO. The reduction in side-effects is considered by the health system when making purchasing decisions (as side-effects cost the health system money and reduce its ability to provide care on a fixed budget). And yeah, at a company, the CIO is the decision maker, and the company is the customer. The employees are the end-users. That's why at a big company, employees may not always get to use the tools they want; they're not customers, and they're not making the purchasing decisions. In both cases, the end-users and their needs are considered, but ultimately, it's not their names on the invoice and they're not the customers.
    - com2kid 6y ago
      > In both cases, the end-users and their needs are considered, but ultimately, it's not their names on the invoice and they're not the customers. And sub-optimal results thus occur. What happens with crappy drugs that technically work is that patient adherence is bad and the government + doctors say "well those poor people with mental disorders are just incapable of following the rigorous treatment protocol that we know works." (and you literally end up with people dying on the street) Maybe now and then some innovation happens to try and improve adherence, but progress is slow. You can see this in the glacial pace that drugs in certain areas of the the mental health space have progressed. For mental health disorders where the patient is making a decision on the drug, each decade sees tons of innovation. Meanwhile for drugs that are "assigned" to a patient, progress is much slower and an untold number of people have suffered as a result. I'm not saying free market healthcare is a panacea or that people should be able to pick any drug they want, but medicine should be designed to make people's lives easier. And letting drug companies advertise "this drug is like the current drug you are taking but has 1/2 the side effects and won't cause your hair to fall out so ask your doctor today!" isn't the worst thing in the world. It means patients will demand their health insurance covers the drug, and it means patients will force their doctor to read up on the drug. Without the patient being a forcing function there is literally zero motive (beyond altruism) for those two things to happen.
- wolco 6y ago
  Doctors in Canada know the cost. They get frew trips for prescribing certain brands. Doctors become the customers and sales reps will go directly to them. But what is covered or not covered are decisions made by governments. Those decisions sometimes forces bad medical practices. On the extreme end a doctor in Toronto was giving a drug to force the baby out of mothers before the due date always on the weekend so he could get overtime. Minor examples are being sent for slightly related tests meds because they are covered vs a more expensive test that would work better but is restricted (the ultra sound vs mri)

by tpm 6y ago

arcticbull 6y ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted as this is the real answer. In countries other than America, healthcare is not for profit. It's not to maximize gains, it's to maximize care and allocate available resources for the public good. Doctors are the ones who prescribe. Imagine: doctors don't even know what a drug costs, and nether do patients. The customers are government health systems, who study the value of a drug, negotiate prices and make it available iff the negotiated price is less than the value it provides. Its true facts that in Europe, healthcare is not a free market. This is how Canada works too. Patients receive care as needed and don't need to be advertised to because they're not the customers.

com2kid 6y ago
Because patients ARE the customer. Drug companies constantly work to make drugs easier to take (long acting forms, or even once a month injections) and have fewer side effects. ADHD meds are a great example. In America long lasting ADHD meds with fewer side effects were available for literal decades before they were available in certain EU countries. Modern drug delivery systems that can slowly dose a medicine over 12 hours (!!!) are the direct result of pharmaceutical companies working to improve QoL for the patient. The doctor, and especially the healthcare system, don't consider the patient's UX to be of that much importance. This is analogous to having the CTO make a software purchase VS giving user's input. Should the IT directors and CTO have a majority of the say? Of course. But the end users must be considered or you end up with painful to use software.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > Because patients ARE the customer. Drug companies constantly work to make drugs easier to take (long acting forms, or even once a month injections) and have fewer side effects. Patients aren't the customer in Europe because they're not buying the drugs. They're consumers, end-users even, but they're not buying them so they're not the customers. Frankly the same is true at any US HMO. The reduction in side-effects is considered by the health system when making purchasing decisions (as side-effects cost the health system money and reduce its ability to provide care on a fixed budget). And yeah, at a company, the CIO is the decision maker, and the company is the customer. The employees are the end-users. That's why at a big company, employees may not always get to use the tools they want; they're not customers, and they're not making the purchasing decisions. In both cases, the end-users and their needs are considered, but ultimately, it's not their names on the invoice and they're not the customers.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    > In both cases, the end-users and their needs are considered, but ultimately, it's not their names on the invoice and they're not the customers. And sub-optimal results thus occur. What happens with crappy drugs that technically work is that patient adherence is bad and the government + doctors say "well those poor people with mental disorders are just incapable of following the rigorous treatment protocol that we know works." (and you literally end up with people dying on the street) Maybe now and then some innovation happens to try and improve adherence, but progress is slow. You can see this in the glacial pace that drugs in certain areas of the the mental health space have progressed. For mental health disorders where the patient is making a decision on the drug, each decade sees tons of innovation. Meanwhile for drugs that are "assigned" to a patient, progress is much slower and an untold number of people have suffered as a result. I'm not saying free market healthcare is a panacea or that people should be able to pick any drug they want, but medicine should be designed to make people's lives easier. And letting drug companies advertise "this drug is like the current drug you are taking but has 1/2 the side effects and won't cause your hair to fall out so ask your doctor today!" isn't the worst thing in the world. It means patients will demand their health insurance covers the drug, and it means patients will force their doctor to read up on the drug. Without the patient being a forcing function there is literally zero motive (beyond altruism) for those two things to happen.
wolco 6y ago
Doctors in Canada know the cost. They get frew trips for prescribing certain brands. Doctors become the customers and sales reps will go directly to them. But what is covered or not covered are decisions made by governments. Those decisions sometimes forces bad medical practices. On the extreme end a doctor in Toronto was giving a drug to force the baby out of mothers before the due date always on the weekend so he could get overtime. Minor examples are being sent for slightly related tests meds because they are covered vs a more expensive test that would work better but is restricted (the ultra sound vs mri)