Matthew Mintz is disturbed by a letter from CVS pharmacy, making overt recommendations of a brand name Merck diabetes drug:
Though today it was only a letter promoting a drug attached to a patient who might potentially need it, what’s next? Will I be receiving promotional calls from my local CVS pharmacy which seems like a professional to professional communication, but is really a disguised sales pitch? Will the retail pharmacist get a pop-up message when a patient is refilling a certain medication to ask their doctor to prescribe another? We are a free market society, and drug companies have a right to market their products, but the letter I received today is just plain wrong.
Pharmacies recommending switching to generic medications is fine, but it is to the patient’s detriment to start promoting expensive brand name medications.
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- Pharmacies in physician offices
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Medical clinics owned by pharmacies and staffed by pharmacy employees–the ultimate in conflict of interest, patient information disseminated to insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies without patient consent, data mining of pharmaceutical info by drug companies, constantly shifting generic sources—all good reasons to return to the old practice of physician dispensing to maintain quality and privacy.
we already get letters from the pharmacy asking us to switch drugs, why don’t the patients call for this?
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