Monday, November 13, 2006

GAP between doctors and research scientists

11/06
"BRIDGE THE GAP" between academics and doctors


"These days, prescription drug ads bombard the consumer at every turn. Even so, the $4 billion spent annually on direct-to-consumer advertising - enabled by federal legislation in 1997 - plales by comparison to what drug companies spend on marketing to doctors. According to the Amundsen Group, a pharmaceutical-industry consulting firm, drug manufacturers spend more than $12 billion a year on salespeople's salaries and benefits. That also includes managers' salaries - but not the other costs associated with the sales pitches, such as drug samples and the free meals provided to doctors.
"It's hard to compete with numbers like that, but physician Jerry Avorn is trying. A professor of Harvard Medical School, Avorn pioneered what he calls the 'unsales' approach: offering doctors solid science to augment, and in some cases refute, what the drug salespeople represent. Avorn's Alosa Foundation - named after a genus of fish that swim upstream - prepares literature and trains representatives to make unsales pitches. The drug industry calls their rep's office visiting 'detailing,' so Avorn calls his rep's visits 'academic detailing.' He aims to bridge the gap between doctors and research scientists who seem, he says, 'to have a good handle on the evidence,' but aren't very good communicators.

Elizabeth Gudrais, "Unsales" Pitches, Harvard Magazine, nov-Dec, 2006, p. 20

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