Former Drug Sales Rep Tells All - Articles

Ahari claims that he's even heard stories about sales reps helping to pay the cost of a doctor's swimming pool, or taking a doctor to a nightclub where a hostess was paid to keep him company.

For this work, sales reps often earned more than researchers. On top of a base salary of $50,000 for starting reps, Ahari says, "there were four quarterly bonuses, an annual bonus, stock options, a car, 401K, great health benefits, and a $60,000 expense account."

Sources:

• ABC News March 12, 2008

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

Shahram Ahari must be one of the drug companies’ worst nightmares; he is one of the few who has witnessed the corruption firsthand, and then moved on to speak out about it. By now, it’s old news that drug companies use extreme sales tactics to influence doctors’ prescribing habits, but to hear the extent of just how far things go -- buying doctors’ swimming pools or using sexual innuendos to make sales -- is still shocking. "The nature of this business is gift-giving," Ahari said, and indeed it seems that in the world of pharmaceuticals, everything has a price. Your Doctor Probably Has a Relationship With a Drug Rep It is the rare physician who refuses to meet with drug sales reps. In fact, as of April 2007, the percentage was just 7 percent of U.S. doctors. Even I met with drug reps until the year 2000, at which time I just refused to see any. Before that I was actually a paid speaker for the drug companies. They would fly me to various physician education events around the country and pay me a VERY generous stipend to lecture to these groups. That was more than two decades ago, before I was able to remove myself from their very powerful brainwashing techniques -- and I was finally able to understand the truth of what they were doing. So there is a very good chance that the doctor you see right now is being subjected to similar intense sales tactics like the ones Ahari describes. According to one study published in The New England Journal of Medicine: 94 percent of doctors have some type of relationship with the drug industry 80 percent of doctors commonly accept free food and drug samples One-third of doctors were reimbursed by the drug industry for going to professional meetings or continuing education classes 28 percent of doctors have been paid for consulting, giving lectures, or signing their patients up for clinical trials

Former Drug Sales Rep Tells All - Articles