Medical Detox Programs in a stress-free environment

‘Priming the Pre-Visit Patient’ is the latest marketing idea presumably designed to push us all along the road towards Big Pharma’s dream of a pharmaceutically-controlled future society.

I don’t know what ‘Priming the Pre-Visit Patient’ is exactly, but I already don’t like it.

On Feb. 5, 2009, if one is so inclined, one can join a Webcast that reveals ‘Understanding and Priming the Pre-Visit Patient’ to a breathlessly-awaiting, brand-enslaved, drug-marketing world.

Here’s the blurb describing it. Try not to up-chuck while reading:

‘The point at which a patient plans and schedules a visit to their doctor represents a significant window of opportunity for promoting treatment options and maximizing the growth of specific brands. Experts in patient engagement and marketing from the pharmaceutical, agency and media fields discuss pharma’s role in priming the pre-visit patient for a more beneficial dialogue with their physician.’

Don’t you love ‘ . . . priming the pre-visit patient for a more beneficial dialogue with their physician’?

Beneficial for whom? The doctor or the patient? No way. For Big Pharma? Absolutely.

I don’t know how they plan to accomplish it, but ‘Priming the Pre-Visit Patient’ is just more brand-name brainwashing — like DTC, but on steroids, judging by the sound of it.

Just when we’re starting to have some success banning the ‘data mining’ of our prescribing habits, along comes this intrusion into our lives — more marketing manipulation of medical decision making, more pressure on physicians to prescribe this or that brand name drug — basically, more pharma marketing intrusion into the practice of medicine.

Oh where oh where is the FDA we once knew and respected and trusted? Maybe Obama’s new man at the agency, whoever that’s going to be, will take a long, hard look at pre-visit patient priming along with DTC and all the rest of Big Pharma’s unwelcome intrusions into our dialogs with our physicians.

Not only does the agency pay scant attention to conflicts of doctors conducting clinical drug and device trials, it says doing so to protect patients is “not worth the effort”.

The New York Times reports that the FDA “does almost nothing to police the financial conflicts of doctors who conduct clinical trials of drugs and medical devices in human subjects.”

The story says that agency officials told an investigation by the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services that “trying to protect patients from such conflicts was not worth the effort.”

The agency has required drug and device companies to disclose financial conflicts of doctors overseeing patient care in clinical trials since 1999. Companies are required to collect this information before the start of any trial and to consult with the FDA. to resolve serious conflicts. But the IG investigation found that the agency has done almost nothing to enforce the rules, or to use the information generated.

In fact, Karen Riley, an FDA spokeswoman, said the agency opposed reviewing doctors’ financial conflicts before trials because they represented just one possible source of bias.

A similar IG investigation at the National Institutes of Health last year found a parallel situation, where NIH does almost nothing to police financial conflicts of university professors who receive federal money. And NIH officials also said they don’t want to start doing so, in spite of the legal requirements to do so.

It seems to this observer that neither the FDA nor the NIH considers financial conflicts of interest a factor affecting the ultimate health and safety of the public. Yet in case after case over the past few years, at the federal level and in almost every state of the union, public officials are up in arms about the obvious biases caused by financial conflicts of interest.

We’re looking at yet another prime illustration of how our federal government, over the past decade or two, has abandoned its responsibilities and turned the FDA and NIH over to new owners — Big Pharma and the device makers.

There must have been a note on the FDA’s door one night back in the ‘90s saying: “Will the last person out please turn off the lights, and leave the key with Big Pharma.” And it appears that the FDA complied.

Four key changes in the marketplace, government and finance during 2008 will have a profound impact on Big Pharma this year.

Industry expert Mark Senak, author of the widely regarded blog Eye On FDA, cites four key changes the occurred during 2008 that offer “immense possibilities for change” in the pharmaceutical market, and the way business is done, in the new year.

In his recent blog titled, What’s in Store for the Pharmaceutical Industry in the New Year, Senak describes the recent changes he’s seen coming, and details how these might play out over the next 12 months.

For example, there will very likely be:

• A years-long moratorium on Direct-To-Consumer advertising

• New regs allowing importation of drugs by consumers

• Greater government leeway for negotiating Medicare Part D pricing

• A big increase in demand for generic drugs because of the recession

• Loss of market share for brand-name drugs that don’t fill unique roles

• More use, and more creative use, of digital communications and the Internet

• A strong continuation of “risk over benefit” as the driving force behind reform and pricing issues

• Pressure from Congress for Big Pharma and device makers to provide timely adverse event information

The points above are only some of Senak’s predictions, and are presented here without the details he provides.

But as we look them over, they do seem somewhat encouraging from the viewpoint of a public consumer.

But what the new Obama administration brings to the table on this aspect of health care, and especially what impact that will have on the administration of the FDA, and how far any of these reforms go towards improving public benefit and safety, remain to be seen.