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David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, nature, and culture.

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ddsunnysb.jpg Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.

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BOOKS by David Dobbs



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Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”

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The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.

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The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.

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Big Pharma, the play -- I'm not making this up

Category: Brains and mindsCulture of scienceMedical & Science PolicyMedicineNota BenePublic health
Posted on: April 17, 2007 11:21 AM, by David Dobbs

From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one.

As the PLOS Biology review notes,

Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry's one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21 billion in 2002. Berry explores the fallout of this expanded marketing blitz through the eyes of its masterminds, unwitting (and complicit) abettors, and victims through her portrayal of an advertising executive, a physician, and women and children who are prescribed heavily marketed antidepressants.

A primary target of the pharmaceutical industry, physicians receive not just advertising materials but office visits from drug representatives. Berry's physician, depicted as a pawn of the pharmaceutical industry, gratefully accepts the free drug samples, the free lunches, and the pharmaceutical industry–sponsored trips to tropical islands. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry woos physicians with educational dinners, honoraria for participating in conference calls, consulting fees for participating in speakers' bureaus, research funding, and payments to write scientific publications. And physicians act as agents of the pharmaceutical industry in many ways, such as giving talks that favor a company's product, participating in clinical trials that increase physicians' exposure to a new drugs or new indications for old drugs, and publishing research articles that are financed and, in fact, written by pharmaceutical company employees [1].

It's an ugly picture, and despite all the attention it's received, most Americans are unaware how deeply American medicine is influenced by Big Pharma's marketing efforts.

A play about this is certainly no wierder than advertisements about drugs. Just more unexpected.

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