Marketing to Doctors: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
LastWeekTonight1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2015–2017
commentary · general · 2015–2017 on HN
A Last Week Tonight segment on how pharmaceutical companies spend billions marketing drugs to doctors. It uses comedy to lay out the industry's questionable practices.
HN uses it as a reference in threads about pharma payments, medical corruption, and declining trust in healthcare.
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5 comments from Hacker News
Both honestly and sadly, I think nobody is actually legitimately surprised by this. The pharmaceutical industry is a profit machine that will do anything to ensure that it remains profitable. If anyone hasn't seen John Oliver's latest video, it's on the whole marketing to doctors thing and touches upon the pharmaceutical industry and I highly recommend watching it: ▶ this video - he sums it up perfectly.
Is this really news? John Oliver ran a piece on the topic and the industry's many other dubious practices over 2 years ago, and I'm quite sure he wasn't the first to try to raise awareness. ▶ this video
There's a part of me that wants to agree completely...and there is another part that has concerns about the messenger. The end result of that would be that the gatekeeper to knowing about these drugs or devices are the doctor's themselves meaning those companies just have to work harder to advertise to the doctors to recommend their drug/device. From Last Week Tonight w/ John Oliver: ▶ this video
> Anti-vaccine movement comes from declining levels of trust in authorities. I'll just leave this relevant episode of [Last Week Tonight]( ▶ this video ). While anti-vaxxers are clearly wrong let's acknowledge that health care, at least in the US, has been partially corrupted. The thought that medical workers might be offering unsound advice in this one area when it's known they behaved unethically in that other area suddenly does not appear so unreasonable.
I think many sex workers with personal standards would be insulted by your comparison with physicians, who seem to be happy to take money (not your money, I guess) to push drugs that may or may not actually help you[0]. [0] ▶ this video