You Must Be on Drugs

My good friend Mark used to shill for a big pharmaceutical company. He never liked the work much, but he was a good salesman and it paid his bills. He finally had to quit because he felt the tactics being suggested to him and the pressure being applied were too much. He would shake his head and say we are an overmedicated culture.

I thought of him as I read a review of Melody Petersen's "Our Daily Meds," a provocative new book that provides some teeth to my friend Mark's claim. By her reckoning, Americans increased their spending on prescription drugs by 17 times from 1980-2003. She notes the way the elderly are overprescribed, taking drugs that counter the reactions of each other in an endless spiral.

It's an open secret within our profession. The doctors I work for are very scrupulous about this issue, and display a strong conscience. One of the older members of our practice loves to tell the story of how he went on a drug company junket early in his career, and how everyone grumbled because it wasn't in a sunny climate. Apparently, they didn't care about the drugs or their effects so much as they did the cloudy weather.

My friend Mark felt that people were being encouraged to take medication for a variety of marginal ailments. He thought the more health-conscious our culture became, the more they were willing to seek out any panacea for what supposedly ailed them. In his mind, it obscured the real sickness out there and fostered a drug-dependent consumer culture.

Which, for him, meant boom times. But something in him wasn't up to the task. The more success he achieved--and he had a six-figure income, which wasn't bad considering he never graduated high school--the more empty he felt inside. Finally, he'd had enough. No one thing precipitated his decision, but rather it was the accumulation of a career's worth of anxiety.

The review of Melody Petersen's new book notes a very simple litmus test for whether or not a doctor has been courted by a pharmaceutical company: are their pens and tissue boxes covered with drug ads? (I was never more glad that we purchased our own pens and tissues!)

Have any of you heard of Ms. Petersen's new book? What is your experience with pharmaceutical companies? Do you think prescription drugs are out of control? As always, I would love to hear from you.