Insider Exposes Big Pharma Marketing Sins of Omission

     Pharmacist Lydia Green spent thirty years as an advertising professional writing marketing copy for Big Pharma. Today, after realizing the distortions she was for so long paid to contrive in order to boost pharmaceutical profits, she runs RxBalance, a site devoted to telling the truth about pharmaceutical products.

     Today the Mad in America website posted a lengthy article by her which exposes the many tricks of the marketing trade she was involved in to maximize Big Pharma profits of Risperdal while minimizing its  dangerous long term effects on consumers. She gives a point by point list of the unethical distortions  Johnson and Johnson employed her agency to use to make Risperdal its biggest selling antipsychotic.

     To do that she had to redefined schizophrenia, rewrite the safety  parameters for antipsychotics, and then manipulate the Risperdal narrative for behind-the-scenes medical thought leaders, academic  authorities, and finally the NAMI principals who could increase the chances of Medicare and Medicaid funding Risperdal  prescriptions.

     It’s a scary tale.

     It’s a tale that should be heard. 

     In a short TEDx talk that Lydia Green gave four years ago, she lists the three cardinal strategies Big Pharma marketers use to establish and expand a drug’s viability. First, they exaggerate the benefits of the drug, second, they inflate the size of its potential market, and third, they minimize the risks associated with the drug. Cherry picking which scientific and often pseudo-scientific “data” to use and which to leave out to paint the most positive picture of the drug is the skill a savvy Big Pharma marketer develops.

     Green labels these activities sins of omission – not commission – and points out that because these distortions of the truth come from absences of data, not inclusions of it, marketing manipulations are not easily visible to the general public. Antidepressants and antipsychotics are made desirable, and the 43 million Americans who take them every year do so because the dangerous side effects and risks of suicide from severe withdrawal symptoms are not made known.

     Big Pharma advertising does not include these facts and, worse yet, because of its behind-the-scenes  marketing efforts — also containing these sins of data omission — the doctors who are prescribing them fail to inform their patients of the true risks.

     Lydia Green is helping to open consumers’ eyes to the Big Pharma wool that’s been pulled over them for so long, but unfortunately 43 million pairs of eyes is an awful lot of eyes to uncover. It’s too bad she waited thirty years.

     Even twenty years ago the dangerous side effects of Risperdal were already coming to light: there were serious metabolic side effects and the drug was increasingly associated with significant weight gain, diabetes, and, in adolescent boys, gynecomastia, breast development. Independent research from Canada and America’s National Institute of Mental Health showed that Risperdal was not nearly as effective as Big Pharma had originally claimed.

     Not only has Risperdal not been doing anybody all that much good, it has been causing severe, long term health conditions for them, as well.