small brush shouldn't fuck with big timber

Death's Door, the view from the Spanish announcers table: This comes as a surprise?

Thursday, April 26

This comes as a surprise?


There’s a new study out that say’s four out of five doctors surveyed said they let drug and device makers buy them food and drinks despite recent efforts to tighten ethics rules and avoid conflicts of interest.

According to muthafuckers in the know this is supposed to be a bad thing since doctors are supposed to be all ethical and shit. Check out this information sent to me by some of my unknown sources.


• eighty-three percent of doctors received food and drinks.
• seventy-eight percent of doctors accepted free drug samples.
• thirty-five percent of doctors were reimbursed for costs associated with professional meetings.
• twenty-eight percent of doctors pocketed consulting or lecture fees.
• seven percent of doctors took free tickets to games and other events.

Have you guy’s actually looked around your doctor’s office lately?

For whatever reasons I’ve been spending too much of my time in various doctors offices and I’ve noticed some shit.

The medical brand name thing is all over the place and your typical doctor’s office looks like fuckin NASCAR the advertising is so rampant.

The wall clock has advertising, the stool, the pens, pocket protectors, the clipboards; the calendars all have advertising for various medical companies on em.

And in the waiting room the fuckin medical salespeople usually outnumber the muthafuckers waiting to see the fuckin doctor. And people are supposed to be surprised or shocked that some doctors take a little bit on the side?


"and the monkey flipped the switch"

4 Comments:

Blogger GB, RN said...

Viagra has the best ink pens...

10:28 AM  
Blogger Xavier Onassis said...

Greg - You are absolutely correct. My ex-wife used to work at a doctor's office and she was always bringing home pens and notepads and calculators, left-overs from catered lunches, refrigerator magnets, all kinds of logo laiden crap.

Thieving bitch!

The "positive spin" on that sort of thing is "Well, the doctors are SO FOCUSED on their patients that they don't have time to stay up to date on the latest research, so this is really educating the doctors. And we bring in lunch so that we don't take time away from them caring for sick people. We might also sponsor a 'working vacation' in an exotic locale at a 5 Star hotel with a World Class golf course in a country where prostitution is legal so that we can present a seminar and the latest research findings."

The pharma industry always claims that their drugs are so expensive because of the incredible investment in PURE RESEARCH required to create new drugs.

I guranfuckingtee you that a pharmaceutical rep can make more money in a year selling drugs than a research chemist can make creating drugs, and the drug companies spend WAY THE FUCK MORE on promoting and selling their drugs than they do on developing and manufacturing them.

Would you like me to back up my claims with some hard facts? I'd love to!

But, I don't actually have any.

And I'm too lazy to go research it and see if I'm right.

But I'm like 99.99999% sure that most of what I said is pretty close to being relatively factual.

OK, 98.88%.

6:08 PM  
Blogger Satyavati devi dasi said...

You got this dead on. When I worked in the office we had catered lunches at least twice a week and sometimes more. And I don't mean from Unca Toothless's Pig Pickins, either. The reps would call and ask us who we wanted to cater it.

I remember one day one of the doctors said he wouldn't see a particular rep unless she went out and got us all chocolate shakes from Kohl's. She went.

I have a billion things with drug names on them.

The reason drugs are so frickin expensive is not because you're paying for the research, the clinical trials, the drug itself that comes only from an exotic Indonesian plant that blooms once every three years on a quarter moon in March, or the costs of the government patents.

You're paying for sticky pads, pens, clocks, water globes with sand that spells out a drug name, portfolios, bookbags and articulated models of joints.

And that, as they say, is the American way.

5:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's been going on a while, too. My mom was a nurse. Every note to school when I was a kid was written on some damn notepad advertising some drug. One of the details that pleased me most about moving out on my own was that I was free to have a fridge that was not plastered with drug names on the magnets holding up the notes. They give nurses stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, and equipment to check blood sugar, whatever that's called. No wonder drugs are so pricey.

1:09 PM  

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