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Quotes about Pharmaceutical Sales from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Reed had described the triptan drugs in ways that a pharmaceutical sales representative could not do without generating complaints. The triptans did not offer all patients the twenty-minute fix that she had described. Only a little more than half the patients taking Imitrex, a triptan sold by GlaxoSmithKline, felt relief from their pain after two hours, according to trials the company performed to get the drug approved. Even the sugar pills worked well in these studies. About a quarter of the people getting the placebo were also relieved of their pain after two hours. Dr." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"In it, coauthor Shahram Ahari—a former pharmaceutical sales rep for Eli Lilly—wrote: "It's my job to figure out what a physician's price is. For some it's dinner at the finest restaurants, for others it's enough convincing data to let them prescribe confidently, and for others it's my attention and friendship ... but at the most basic level, everything is for sale and everything is an exchange." High prescribers are identified from the Physician Masterfile database maintained by the American Medical Association, which pharmaceutical companies license for their own use." - Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S., The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth about What Treatments Work and Why (Get the book.)

"As much as we hate to admit it, the pharmaceutical sales representatives who come to our offices daily control much of what we learn in regard to new treatments. And I have yet to see a pharmaceutical sales rep show me a study on CoQlO and its effects on cardiomyopathy. There simply is no money in it. Emma's Story Emma is a delightful patient of mine in her early eighties. About four years ago, her cardiologist diagnosed her with cardiomyopathy. An ejection fraction of 20 percent severely limited Emma's life." - Ray D. Strand, What Your Doctor Doesn't Know About Nutritional Medicine May Be Killing You (Get the book.)

"As a result, most of these events had become little more than pharmaceutical sales bazaars. By paying for doctors' continuing education, the drug companies made sure physicians learned what was best for the corporate bottom line. Doctors learned how to diagnose their patients with the marketers' hottest diseases of the moment, which in 2005 were maladies like irritable bowel, restless leg syndrome, and attention deficit disorder (in adults). They also learned about the benefits of the industry's newest and most expensive medicines." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.) "Few members of the public attended these meetings, but the pharmaceutical sales representatives showed up in force. A dozen or more drug salespeople sat in on many of the meetings, watching the proceedings like the coons that had a nightly predilection for patrolling my father's chicken coop. The sales reps and the companies that employed them had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues to protect. Prescription drug costs were consuming more and more tax dollars in Iowa and every state in the country, a trend the pharmaceutical companies were working hard to extend." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"The physicians are swamped with pharmaceutical sales representatives. And the physicians get "luxurious information" about the merits of a new 43 Families USA, Pp. 5,10 44 "Profiting from Pain where Prescription Drug Dollars Go," report by Families USA, July 2202, Washington 45 Follow the Money, The Pharmaceutical Industry - the other Drug Cartel, Office of the Minnesota Attorney general, Sept 30, 2003 p. 1 product, sometimes in a great environment of course. Here billions of dollars are spent every year. Listen to the radio; watch the TV with open eyes. What do you hear and see?" - Kenneth W Thomas, Ron Gilbert, Gerd Schaller, Side Effects: The Hidden Agenda of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel (Get the book.)

"She slept peacefully even though the pharmaceutical sales representative had set her down next to the ham sandwiches and cans of pop chilling on ice. The angelic woman, a model featured in a large poster advertising the sleeping pill Ambien, served as a suggestive centerpiece as twenty Iowa women filed by the table to pick up their free lunches. The women chatted about the sudden bout of hot, humid June weather before settling into their seats to listen to the drug saleswoman tell them how they too could fall into blissful slumber." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"Pharmaceutical sales representatives are profit-driven, as are the corporations that drive them. The more doctors who can be convinced to switch from proven drugs to the current "latest and greatest," the more the greed factor is satisfied. As a Type 1 diabetic, I was forced into a position of compromising my health to satisfy Lilly's corporate greed. When rDNA human insulin was developed, my (former) doctor told me it was the best protocol and recommended that I switch. In my pursuit of a Ph.D., I had sat in many of the same classrooms as my doctor, but because he was an M.D." - Brent Hoadley, Ph.D., Too Profitable to Cure (Get the book.) "High priced, focused pharmaceutical sales reps are in place to accomplish the task. Though many of these "salesmen" have no formal medical or pharmacological training, they provide to doctors the answers and the training regarding their companies' products. If a doctor is enterprising enough to "research" the pros and cons of any drug pushed at him by a pharmaceutical rep, he can find supporting information in most medical journals." - Brent Hoadley, Ph.D., Too Profitable to Cure (Get the book.)

"Doctors routinely get visits from pharmaceutical sales reps. These sales reps do not tell doctors how to cure and prevent disease. These sales reps have very sophisticated presentations that are designed to tell doctors how they can increase their profits. These pharmaceutical sales reps tell doctors how they can make more money by prescribing more drugs. These presentations have almost zero information on the safety or effectiveness of these drugs. The concern is not the patient; the emphasis is how doctors can make more money. • Doctors receive cash bonuses to prescribe drugs." - Kevin Trudeau, Natural Cures They Don't Want You to Know About (Get the book.)

"One of the most popular on-line courses from the Learning Annex is entitled "Three Days to a pharmaceutical sales Job Interview!" In the workbook for the course, a former pharma sales representative named Lisa Lane, presents the work diary of Corey Nahman, also a sales rep. Although obviously sanitized for mass consumption, it gives a peep into what doctors encounter daily: 7:45 a.m. Attend grand rounds at the hospital early in the morning to meet my customers for coffee and a bagel and some friendly lobbying. I might work the room, making pseudo-appointments for later in the day. 10 a.m." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

"Pharmaceutical sales reps will typically jump from one drug company to another with the hopes of landing the opportunity to push blockbuster drugs that offer long-term, guaranteed income potential. One of the many ways drug reps achieve their sales targets is with samples passed from the drug company to the sales reps to the physicians and on to their patients to see what works. Physicians quite often use these samples to treat symptoms that the drug was never intended for." - Craig Pepin-Donat, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie (Get the book.)

"And I have yet to see a pharmaceutical sales rep show me a study on CoQlO and its effects on cardiomyopathy. There simply is no money in it. Emma's Story Emma is a delightful patient of mine in her early eighties. About four years ago, her cardiologist diagnosed her with cardiomyopathy. An ejection fraction of 20 percent severely limited Emma's life. Her cardiologist prescribed several medications, including Cardarone, which she took to control her irregular heart rhythm. However, this medicine made her very sick, and she was soon unable to eat." - Ray D. Strand, What Your Doctor Doesn't Know About Nutritional Medicine May Be Killing You (Get the book.)

"While the global economy tottered, healthcare systems were strained, and medical insurance claims skyrocketed, but pharmaceutical sales boomed. Manufacturers of face masks, hand sanitizers, and emergency supplies couldn't keep pace with demand. An influenza pandemic would be far worse. It could cost 800 billion, crush many small economies, cripple some countries for decades to come, and all but collapse global trade. SARS was the first new virus of the twenty-first century. Though many mysteries remain, we learned that timely warning can avert widespread infection." - J. E. Williams, Beating the Flu: The Natural Prescription for Surviving Pandemic Influenza and Bird Flu (Get the book.)

"Thirty years later, annual pharmaceutical sales have soared to roughly $180 billion and the average prescription costs $56.4 Some of the most popular brand-name medicines, like Lipitor (atorvastatin), Nexium (esomepra-zole), Plavix (clopidogrel), and Prevacid (lansoprazole), can easily cost more than $120 a month. If you think that's a lot, hold on to your hat. People with cancer or rare medical conditions are at the mercy of an industry that has lost all sense of decency. At the time of this writing, Herceptin (trastuzumab), a drug for breast cancer patients, costs $3,200 per month." - Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D., Best Choices From the People's Pharmacy (Get the book.)

"Physicians were most commonly introduced to new drugs through pharmaceutical sales representatives, and pharmaceutical companies were the greatest influence on their decisions of which drugs to prescribe. Almost three-quarters of the doctors regarded drug company representatives as an efficient way to obtain new drug information. While the doctors claimed to be generally wary of the drug industry's objectives, they tended to believe that its information would be selective but accurate." - Anthony Colpo, The Great Cholesterol Con: Why Everything You've been Told About Cholesterol, Diet and Heart Disease is Wrong (Get the book.)

"The question in my mind was simple: Since everyone knew this basic fact of pharmaceutical sales and marketing, why the memo? I knew that Darren was the epitome of integrity, so I didn't believe for a second that he would do anything wrong, but he had taken responsibility for my area only recently. Who knew what had been the practice before he came on? Or what people might stillhzve been doing? I would get many opportunities during the coming years to reflect on these initial concerns. More Discoveries My worries increased as my first months with Pharmacia passed." - Peter Rost, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman (Get the book.) "On the message board Cafe Pharma, created for pharmaceutical sales reps, comments on Pfizer's board ranged from, "The guys got a set of brass balls. I'll give him that. . ." to "He's awesome—finally one person who will tell Hank to stick it," and "He's a self promoter. All his statements are for the greater glory of himself." Yet another wrote, "This guy is a disgrace, he doesn't get paid to do the stuff he's doing. If reps aren't allowed to speak to the media on issues, why should this dork." The fact that I had a competitive salary also didn't pass unnoticed." - Peter Rost, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman (Get the book.)

"This increase is driven by the aggressive marketing of pharmaceutical sales reps who are carefully trained to sidestep FDA regulations against promoting off-label uses! The drug companies are breaking the law and it's happening in doctors' offices and at medical conferences every day! Prozac is just one of the drugs being touted for everything from weight loss to pain management. In one year, 500,000 Prozac prescriptions were written for off-label reasons." - Dr. David W. Tanton; Ph.D., A Drug-Free Approach To Healthcare, Revised Edition (Get the book.) "WARNING! Drug Companies Illegally Push "Innovative Treatments" That Kill! Drug company sales reps are secretly selling your doctor a bill of goods and the result could seriously harm your health or even kill you. I'm talking about the deliberate misuse of prescription drugs by doctors who are prescribing those drugs for off-label uses. Unapproved prescriptions are soaring. Between the summer of 2002 and the summer of 2003, over 115 million such prescriptions were written. That's double the number from just five years earlier." - Dr. David W. Tanton; Ph.D., A Drug-Free Approach To Healthcare, Revised Edition (Get the book.)

"Invariably, it will have been purchased for them by a pharmaceutical sales rep, utilizing this "free lunch" tactic in an effort to win an audience. So what do these sales reps actually teach doctors? They teach only those things that will help them sell their patented drugs! Remember, this is just the system at work. The Space Between. Something that has truly amazed me is the enormous gulf that exists between what researchers have discovered, and what doctors actually know and practice. Valid scientific findings, known now for decades, still remain virtually unknown to most doctors." - Pat Sullivan, Wellness Piece by Piece: How a Successful Entrepreneur Discovered the Pieces to His Chronic Health Puzzle (Get the book.)

"These pharmaceutical sales reps tell doctors how they can make more money by prescribing more drugs. These presentations have almost zero information on the safety or effectiveness of these drugs. The concern is not the patient; the emphasis is how doctors can make more money. • Doctors receive cash bonuses to prescribe drugs. • The Wall Street Journal reports that professors take payments to express certain views. • Doctors on government advisory panels make recommendations for drugs while being paid huge amounts of money by the manufacturers of those same drugs." - Kevin Trudeau, Natural Cures They Don't Want You to Know About (Get the book.)

"Since the U.S. would have a much higher price differential, let's be more realistic than the HHS and assume about 20 percent usage in the U.S. The math, then, is quite simple. We would save 40 percent of the drug cost on 20 percent of the market, which would result in an 8 percent savings (not 1 or 2 percent). Our drug spending is more than $200 billion, so this would result in savings of more than $16 billion. No wonder the drug companies were nervous. The HHS report was so misleading that I wrote a third op-ed about this situation, published in New Jersey's Star-Ledger." - Peter Rost, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman (Get the book.)

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