Corporate Needs You to Find the Differences Between This Picture and This Picture
(media.communities.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (24)
sorted by:
Somewhat related: a while back I was reading some books on the opioid epidemic in the US. While the Sacklers are rightly blamed for it, they've been scapegoated for it - the fact that they effectively bribed doctors to do 'studies' and to prescribe their so called medicine has been ignored.
In fact, those doctors called critics of opioids who pointed to their danger 'opiophobes'. Sound familiar? It's the exact playbook used today for literally anything.
You cannot criticize anything that makes them money.
When I was in school, the official teaching was that there's no maximum dosage of opioids you can give to a patient.
You could increase the dose until either the pain stops or they stop breathing.
Whichever comes first.
This is why Caveat Emptor applies to all $ transactions, especially buying the services of an MD.
Despite the deference the culture tells us we are to give to MDs and despite the unethical actions of the Oxycontin corporation and its customers, we are ultimately responsible for what we put in our mouths or shoot into our veins.
Doctors have whored for Big Pharma since forever, and there's a reason they refer to the sales reps as "pushers".
While they may have made the old-school perks illegal - things like vacation vouchers and stuff earned on a kind of points system for every prescription written for a particular drug - there's always been ways around any anti-payola laws.
Buying loyalty is the oldest play in the book, and other species do it, too.
Oh, and you also had the sleazy-ass pharmacists, too. Funny how the names I've seen and heard involved seem to originate from a certain subcontinent.
The pharma marketing culture now is a lot less about bribing rank-and-file community doctors and more about buying off and making whores of the "influencer" doctors who write the guidelines and give speeches at the conferences.