Someone emailed me:

“People who are in the holistic health business should be as aggressive as pharmaceutical companies when it comes to marketing their services.”

They aren’t kidding. The most profitable businesses in the world (as determined by profit margin) are drug companies. What’s worse is they’re devastatingly effective at what they do. The PLoS Medical Journal is one of the only medical journals that doesn’t accept ad money from drug companies. Most continuing education for doctors is sponsored by the drug companies!!!

This means they don’t learn about new therapies. Or nutrition, exercise and better living helps patients. Especially not about acupuncture and OM. They just learn about drugs, drugs and more drugs.

Want to know how the drug companies market? Following The Script is an article explaining how pharmaceutical reps are taught to manipulate doctors. I have it on good authority that the methods used are communist Chinese for brainwashing - and according to my friend Jim Van Wyck, they’re the best in the world at this. (Of course, they’d call it persuasion.)

The drug companies know EXACTLY how many prescriptions each doctor wrote for each drug. They can (and do) even give docs a hard time for prescribing their competitor’s drugs. As one doc told me:

Yeah, I think the whole drug rep business is pretty disgusting and corrupt - especially when I see people everyday that cannot afford the medications they offer. I never trust anything they say. The drug companies contract with pharmacies and they know exactly how many prescriptions I write each of their product and any competitors each month. It is very creepy and honestly, I cannot believe it is legal. But big money can buy a lot.

Don’t you owe it to market yourself? You’ll never be as organized and efficient as the big pharma companies. But you can be far more effective than them. Simply educate your patients so they can make better choices.

And please, pass the above PLoS article on to doctors. Also, if you’d like to learn more about just how bad drugs are, look at Over Dose and Bitter Pills and related books on Amazon.com. At least one of these will be in your library.

Over Dose is particularly good, it will make most doctors better at their job, whether they are skeptical about drugs or not. I’m sending a copy to my own doctor when I get back from vacation.