You can't gift doctors a paid vacation, there are rules and laws already in place. Also, MSLs are not simply "salepeople". They often require a PhD so their job description is more about "spreading knowledge" than "advertising" a drug.
Like it or not, having an expert in the hospital who know everything there is about a specific drug is a lot more effective than requiring every doctor to read about every new drugs. By your argument, this type of job should be removed and doctors are responsible for finding out about new drug themselves.
Maybe that is better, maybe not. But the first thing that would happen is adoption rate of new treatment would drop and people who would otherwise recover may die because their doctors were too busy trying to treat people instead of reading journals.
They don't call it a vacation, they call it a conference.
An hour or two of "information sessions", with a big goody bag, and 2 or 3 days of fine dining, tours, and golf; all held in a plush 5 star hotel at $500 / night or more with all travel included.
> there are rules and laws already in place
What rules there are are not enforced. The regulatory office is flooded [0]:
"With the risks clear, Schwartz and Woloshin took a look at regulatory activity by the Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. They found a lackluster response to the skyrocketing medical marketing across the board. In fact, the FDA’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion, which regulates consumer and professional promotional material, actually saw a decrease in regulatory activity. Though submissions increased from 34,182 in 1997 to *97,252* in 2016, violation letters dropped from 156 to *11* in those respective years. The finding “suggests the possibility of less oversight,” the authors conclude, possibly because FDA reviewers may be “overwhelmed by the massive increase in promotional submissions.”
Emphasis added.
> Like it or not, having an expert in the hospital who know everything there is about a specific drug is a lot more effective than requiring every doctor to read about every new drugs.
Do you think unbiased third party sources can't perform this role? And having an expert in every hospital is not what we're talking about [0].
If you think these companies are spending twenty thousand dollars per doctor per year just to better educate them and get better outcomes, I don't know what to tell you. That's a lil naive bud.
To take just one example of many: Remember Purdue? Remember how they told doctors that their new form of opiates (Oxycontin) was non-addictive and so much safer? ... Remember how few doctors made noise about this, compared to the massive number who swallowed it whole and prescribes the shit like candy? Remember how those brave doctors were ruthlessly and relentlessly smeared, and how Purdue got away with all this despite there being mountains of evidence for so, so long?
> the first thing that would happen is adoption rate of new treatment would drop and people who would otherwise recover may die
To me that just sounds like scare mongering and an imagination deficit. There's better ways of doing this, and no excuse for the current system.
Like it or not, having an expert in the hospital who know everything there is about a specific drug is a lot more effective than requiring every doctor to read about every new drugs. By your argument, this type of job should be removed and doctors are responsible for finding out about new drug themselves.
Maybe that is better, maybe not. But the first thing that would happen is adoption rate of new treatment would drop and people who would otherwise recover may die because their doctors were too busy trying to treat people instead of reading journals.