The Truth about Pharmaceutical Reps

Sales is considered the most difficult career path to be on with many sales reps burning out around 5 years (if they do not make it to the upper successful track). As a person that has over 10 years of sales experience I can relate and understand what it can do to your soul.

Let's not mistake inside and outside sales. Inside sales typically depend on people coming to you, spending most of your time indoors if you will, whereas outside sales involves you actually going out and creating business relations between yourself and any companies you can get your feet to.

The pharmaceutical indudstry makes money off of the hurt, sick, and/or dying. It's a fair conclusion because if no one was hurt, or sick, or close to dying, there is no business for those in the pharmaceutical industry.

One can argue that the industry makes leaps and bounds to develop drugs that aid people, and that there's always a new drug because they're always developing a new "upgrade" that is more potent or efficient than the last version.

But this blog isn't about the industry but rather the reps that go out and inform the clinics and hospitals of their new drug.

Sales reps are just sales people. Their goal is to sell and move market shares towards their company. To clarify consider this, every single Pharm company in the world contributes to the world's drugs 100 î.cummlative. So each company has a certain percentage; for example if we have 2 companies in the world it would be 50/50, four companies would be 25/25/25/25, etc.

By moving market shares, you bring more business to your company but less to some other company. It doesn't matter which company you are taking money away from, as long as you're raking it in you're good.

Also, sales reps have goals that must show growth each year or quarter. That means if you made $200 bucks the same time last year you're supposed to making more than that today. If you really think about it, the only way to go is up unless you want the boot.

Sales reps are good at selling but very poor at understanding. When a new product comes out the sales rep is educated/lectured by a person that feeds them *only* positive attributes of the drug. They briefly go over side effects but focus is on making the product glow with perks.

Even if the information was wrong, the sales rep will use that information to buzz along to each company and attempt to "wow" the doctor(s) on how great their product is and how they should prescribe it to their patients.

What many sales reps do is that they sell based on someone information that was fed to them, not on their own intuition. However, they recited and pracice so much before heading into the field that they pretty much *learn* to *believe* what they know. Sales reps are told that they must believe in their product before they can sell it.

Unless the news make TV news, the cases where a drug kills or hurts a person will not make headlines unless it was something that the news industry thought it was interesting enough. How many times do you remember hearing that a drug caused someome to be infertile, dead, or worse off? This then leads to the question, why wasn't death or infertility listed as a side effect?

Many drugs go through much testing before it can be confirmed what all the side effects were however some of the results to some of these tests are thrown out, for reasons such as it was submitted late, accidently misplaced or lost, or had some sort of anomaly that made the test result to be thrown out. The most troubling is if the number is small; for example out of 1,000 patients 3 people died. The number is so low that it doesn't register as data that needs to be accepted. Also, some drugs do not show any side effects until years later. Sometimes, data may be thrown out because it looks too unordinary to be correct.

The result of overlooking these side effects can be life changing:

Fentanyl: Following it's release in January 2005, Fentanyl (a painkiller) resulted in over 130 deaths before it was linked and detected. http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060615/METRO/606150398

Vioxx: The famous Scandal that involved the company, Merck, purposely burying the negative evidence and was linked to possibly 27,000 heart attacks since it's release. http://www.newstarget.com/002155.html and http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192603/

It's important to understand that prescribed drugs do not treat diseases, they only cover the symptoms. Can you really prove that a drug cured your disease...especially when it suddenly reappears some time later?"

back when I was constantly coughing a couple of months back, the coughing was persistent for at least a week. So I go in to see my physician and after answering a bunch of questions he says he's not quite sure what it could be...if it's just a cold or strep. So he prescribes me some antibiotics just on the safe side and see him back on MOnday if the "symptoms" persist.

They do and so I return. Since he's realized that it can't be a strep, he says that I probably caught two different cold viruses, one after another. So he says he wants to prescribe me a cough syrup that is better than the over-the-counter stuff. I declined, annoyed that doctors go by educated guesses based on the symptoms they learned in college. I told him I'll buy my own cough syrup that's cheaper. He says that that might not solve my problem. Needless to say, after a week or two my coughing went away.

One might say that it's not the sales rep's responsibility for drug safety and all they're doing is selling and carrying however wouldn't you say that the sales reps, with their hype techniques and their sure confidence behind the product, are purposely lying  to get their product purchased?

Additional reading: http://www.newstarget.com/009278.html