Have you ever wondered how drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing their drugs to the docs who make the prescribing decisions? To me, it always seemed a little like voodoo — give a doctor a pen and they’ll prescribe more of your medication.

Well, it turns out it’s more complicated than that. Not a lot more complicated, though, if you substitute “food” for “pen,” and throw in a healthy amount of data mining done on each doctor’s prescribing patterns. So the drug rep goes into the doctor’s office often knowing the doctor’s prescribing patterns far better than the doctor himself.

Dr. Danny Carlat has the full story, and while gift giving is a big part of it, prodigious use of data mining and small talk also seems to be important to persuading doctors to prescribe more of one drug company’s drug over another’s.

None of this would have any purpose, however, if the drugs were really as effective and side-effect free as every pharmaceutical company would have us believe.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 31 Mar 2008
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