Marketing to MDs—The Easy Sell

How did psychiatrists and drug companies succeed in convincing millions of medical doctors to prescribe their powerful psychoactive drugs to a hundred million people?

Indoctrinating physicians begins at medical conferences—conferences frequently paid for by drug companies.

Respectable journals also publish studies written by drug company ghostwriters, falsely credited to prominent psychiatrists who are paid to put their names on it.

The drug industry now spends $22 billion a year marketing to doctors to increase prescriptions—an astonishing 90% of its marketing budget.

As a result, medical professionals worldwide are handing out psychotropic drugs, assured that they are safe and necessary by the “experts” in the field—psychiatrists.

But early on, psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical companies realized that promoting to doctors was not enough.

How could they reach their target demographic—the end user—and drive them into doctor’s offices to demand these drugs?