4 ms·

My point is that marketing for medicine is an almost 100% waste for society as a whole. It serves no useful purpose except to move market shares between functio

by brazzy 12y ago

My point is that marketing for medicine is an almost 100% waste for society as a whole. It serves no useful purpose except to move market shares between functionally identical products. Oh, and a considerable percentage of "research" is really marketing, since its goal is to find minor variations of existing, perfectly effective drugs whose patent protection is about to run out.

twoodfin 12y ago
My point is that marketing for medicine is an almost 100% waste for society as a whole. It serves no useful purpose except to move market shares between functionally identical products. Not true at all: Could you sit in an empty, white-walled room and tell us exactly which new drugs will be needed over the next decade and how they will appeal to doctors and different patient groups? Whether they'll be worth developing at all? How existing patients on inferior (or no) treatments will find out about them without you spending a nickel? Marketing is not just ads.
- ArtDev 12y ago
  Its also golf trip and all expense paid vacations for doctors who prescribe certain drugs. As a society, marketing more than useless. It manipulates and confuses actual knowledge.
- mikeash 12y ago
  How much of that $9.4 billion includes activities like these?
  - twoodfin 12y ago
    According to a 2009 CBO report[1], direct-to-consumer (DTC) accounted for about 1/4 of total promotional spending (not counting the retail value of free samples to doctors, which, if included, would cut the DTC fraction in half). And that apparently doesn't count aspects of "marketing" that are not related directly to promotion (though it's hard to see how CBO or anyone else would draw a clean distinction there). It was also dropping in both relative and absolute terms as the number of new drugs with broad patient appeal tailed off. Even if you think DTC is worthless or actively harmful, surely there's some value in marketing to (nominally) informed, expert doctors and insurers, unless you think marketing anything is an essentially fraudulent or worthless activity. Would Ford or their potential customers be better off without marketing? What makes drugs any different? [1] http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/105xx/doc10522/12-02-drugpromo_brief.pdf http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/105x...
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I'm a little confused. Which category in that report represents figuring out what drugs will be needed in the future and whether they're worth developing? I don't think marketing is either fraudulent nor worthless, but it is a tragedy of the commons these days. People have more than enough tools at their disposal to discover the products they want and need to buy on their own. Marketing by an individual entity is useful and necessary, but the whole field is just pointlessly rearranging the chairs. We'd all be better off if we could somehow all agree to quit it, at least the fluffy parts that convey only emotion and not information.
SilasX 12y ago
>My point is that marketing for medicine is an almost 100% waste for society as a whole. It serves no useful purpose except to move market shares between functionally identical products. If people could instantly know about which drugs are relevant to them, or doctors meticulously searched the literature for all available treatments for all patients, then alerting the world about the existence of your new drug would be a complete waste. But we don't live in that world. If pharmas really are offering identical products, that's a problem of creating unnecessary drugs, not marketing per se, and would be exposed when the relevant people make the cost benefit calculation.

by brazzy 12y ago

My point is that marketing for medicine is an almost 100% waste for society as a whole. It serves no useful purpose except to move market shares between functionally identical products. Oh, and a considerable percentage of "research" is really marketing, since its goal is to find minor variations of existing, perfectly effective drugs whose patent protection is about to run out.

twoodfin 12y ago

My point is that marketing for medicine is an almost 100% waste for society as a whole. It serves no useful purpose except to move market shares between functionally identical products. Not true at all: Could you sit in an empty, white-walled room and tell us exactly which new drugs will be needed over the next decade and how they will appeal to doctors and different patient groups? Whether they'll be worth developing at all? How existing patients on inferior (or no) treatments will find out about them without you spending a nickel? Marketing is not just ads.

ArtDev 12y ago
Its also golf trip and all expense paid vacations for doctors who prescribe certain drugs. As a society, marketing more than useless. It manipulates and confuses actual knowledge.
mikeash 12y ago
How much of that $9.4 billion includes activities like these?
- twoodfin 12y ago
  According to a 2009 CBO report[1], direct-to-consumer (DTC) accounted for about 1/4 of total promotional spending (not counting the retail value of free samples to doctors, which, if included, would cut the DTC fraction in half). And that apparently doesn't count aspects of "marketing" that are not related directly to promotion (though it's hard to see how CBO or anyone else would draw a clean distinction there). It was also dropping in both relative and absolute terms as the number of new drugs with broad patient appeal tailed off. Even if you think DTC is worthless or actively harmful, surely there's some value in marketing to (nominally) informed, expert doctors and insurers, unless you think marketing anything is an essentially fraudulent or worthless activity. Would Ford or their potential customers be better off without marketing? What makes drugs any different? [1] http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/105xx/doc10522/12-02-drugpromo_brief.pdf http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/105x...
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I'm a little confused. Which category in that report represents figuring out what drugs will be needed in the future and whether they're worth developing? I don't think marketing is either fraudulent nor worthless, but it is a tragedy of the commons these days. People have more than enough tools at their disposal to discover the products they want and need to buy on their own. Marketing by an individual entity is useful and necessary, but the whole field is just pointlessly rearranging the chairs. We'd all be better off if we could somehow all agree to quit it, at least the fluffy parts that convey only emotion and not information.

SilasX 12y ago

>My point is that marketing for medicine is an almost 100% waste for society as a whole. It serves no useful purpose except to move market shares between functionally identical products. If people could instantly know about which drugs are relevant to them, or doctors meticulously searched the literature for all available treatments for all patients, then alerting the world about the existence of your new drug would be a complete waste. But we don't live in that world. If pharmas really are offering identical products, that's a problem of creating unnecessary drugs, not marketing per se, and would be exposed when the relevant people make the cost benefit calculation.