DermHelpCentral

PhRMA Rules

JAMA Dermatol (formerly the Archived of Dermatology) is sent free to all dermatologists in the U.S.  Each issue comes in a clear wrapper and an envelope advertising new drugs is affixed to the front page.  A recent advert was for Rhofade, a topical cream that reduces the erythema associated with rosacea.  Its effect lasts ~ 12 hours.  Rhofade costs over $500 for a 30 gram tube with a GoodRX coupon.  Sadly, the American Academy of Dermatology has allowed itself to be co-opted by industry.

Save Money on Your Medications

I saw a patient today with no drug insurance today who needed a cream for skin lesions. His pharmacy quoted him a price of $297. I had told him about GoodRx and he went to their website. The price there varied between $103 and $214. He wound up getting it for $154 at Walmart.

There are two websites that can help patients without drug coverage save significant sums on generic medications.

We wrote about Good Rx in 2013. The new kid on the block is BlinkHealth.

For more background on these see “Entrepreneurs Pull Back Curtain on Drug Prices” (NY Times, February 9, 2016).

Excerpts:

A few entrepreneurs are aiming to fundamentally change the way people buy drugs, bringing the industry into the digital age by disclosing the lowest prices for generic prescriptions to allow comparison-shopping.

The spotlight on drug prices could not come at a better time for at least two online ventures. One company, GoodRx, collects drug prices at pharmacies around the country and connects consumers to coupons to help them pay. Another, Blink Health, takes the process a step further by allowing customers to pay for their drugs online, then pick up the prescription at nearly any pharmacy.

Many uninsured consumers do not know that the price pharmacies charge them is far higher than the rate that insurers pay the pharmacies for the same drug, health care experts said. And even insured customers are not always getting the best deal. Many people have insurance plans that require them to pay a flat rate of $10 or higher for generic drugs, even though the rate the insurers pay the pharmacy is often less.

Becoming familiar with GoodRx and BlinkHealth can save you, a family member or BFF a considerable amount on generic prescriptions.  If you need a drug that presents a significant expense, it would be wise to check both of these sites for the cheapest price.

Martin Skrell's Amazing Pharmacy

Recently, the 32 years old hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli bought Turing Pharmaceuticals and raised the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill.  This ignited a s*** storm in the media; but strangely the same thing has been happening for the past few years with other drugs.  A comic strip in the Sunday, September 27^th NY Times is a great spoof.

Who's My Doctor?

Osler wrote: “The practice of medicine is an art not a trade, a calling not a business.”  However, many physicians (and other providers) have figured out how to game the system for financial gain.  Insights into this can be found at two databases.  One lists payments to over 800,000 U.S. providers by Medicare and the other documents payments from 17 drug companies to physicians.  In many cases, you can find your physician in these databases.

How Much Medicare Pays for Your Doctor’s Care
Use this form to find a doctor or other medical professional among the more than 800,000 health care providers that received payments in 2012 from Medicare Part B, which covers doctor visits, tests and other treatments. Payments may also cover overhead, such as staff salaries and drug costs. In some cases, when doctors work as salaried employees of group practices, the payments that show up under their names go to their institutions. Related Articles: Sliver of Medicare Doctors Get Big Share of Payouts.

 

Dollars for Docs:  How Drug Companies Money Reaches Physicians
In recent years, drug companies have started releasing details of the payments they make to doctors and other health professionals for promotional talks, research and consulting. As of 2013, 17 companies published the information, most because of legal settlements. Use this tool to search for payments. Read more about the data.

 

 

 

Cholesterol Comic Guide

This wise comic strip appeared in the NY Times Sunday Review on November 17, 2013.  It's a great inroduction to the statin story.  You will need to click on strip to be able to read it.

 

New Cholesterol Guidelines

New guidelines have been issued by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology for the management of hypercholesterolemia.  However, this may be yet another marketing gambit by the manufacturers of statins and their paid professional goons.

John Abramson and Rita Redberg explain this in a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece:
[The new guidelines} "may sound like good news for patients, and it would be — if statins actually offered meaningful protection from our No. 1 killer, heart disease; if they helped people live longer or better; and if they had minimal adverse side effects. However, none of these are the case."

See: Don't Give Patients More Statins.
or access Word file: Download Don’t Give More Patients Statins

Medicine for the 99%

"Can we incentivize pharmaceutical companies to produce much-needed drugs? In a Talk at TEDxCanberra, Thomas Pogge proposes a $6 billion plan to revolutionize the way medications are developed and sold.

Drug Company Scams

The biggest introduction of a generic drug in pharmaceutical history is being met with tough business strategies by Pfizer and pharmacy benefit companies, according to recent letters to pharmacists.  A pharmacy group and an independent expert say the tactic will benefit Pfizer and benefit managers at the expense of employers and taxpayers, who may end up paying more than they should for the drug.  Lipitor is the best-selling drug ever, accounting for $106 billion sales over the last decade, or almost one-quarter of Pfizer’s total. Pfizer has told analysts it is preparing for the loss of Lipitor’s patent with a variety of business moves to preserve market share.

Big drug companies will go to extraordinary ends to protect their market share.  Who suffers?  The public, of course.  See: Plan Would Delay Sales of Generic Lipitor.

This article is important because it discusses and exposes a common PhRMA ploy to maximize their profits at the expense of patients and the government.

Prescription Data Mining

Pharmaceutical companies buy doctors’ prescribing records from pharmacies and use the information to target their marketing to physicians. This practice negatively affects:
    Public Health
    Cost
    Privacy
To read more about this see:  Download Rx Data Mining Fact  

Bogus Drug Trials

The pharmaceutical industry, in a cynical attempt to sell more drugs, has come up with yet another mechanism to push prescriptions:  the "seeding trial."   Pfizer recently used these trials to promote gabapentin (Neurontin) and increase prescribing among investigators.  PhRMA's Marketing departments are extensively involved in the planning and implementation of "seeding trials."  This is just another way that PhRMA strives to increase sales.  Unsurprisingly, patients both die and suffer in these bogus trials.

This practice is exposed in a recent article in the Archives of Internal Medicine (A Narrative Account ot the Neurontin STEPS Trial) and a fine Op-Ed piece in the NY Times (see  Download Useless Studies, Carl Elliott  ).

The business of PhRMA is business; and this is just one of the many ways that drugs are pushed in the U.S and elsewhere.

Definition from Wikipedia: "A seeding trial or marketing trial is a form of marketing, conducted in the name of research, designed to target product sampling towards selected consumers. In medicine, seeding trials are clinical trials or research studies where the primary objective is to introduce the concept of a particular medical intervention—such as a pharmaceutical drug or medical device—to physicians, rather than to test a scientific hypothesis.