Michael Oldani is a former sales rep for Pfizer who left the business in the late 1990s to get a degree in medical anthropology from Princeton University.
He said the market was exploding then with new name-brand drugs like Vioxx and Zoloft and reps had "carte blanche" to aggressively promote and market those products.
"For the most part, as long as we were selling product, we could get away with just about anything," said Oldani, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
"The goal of repping was to show how you differentiated from competitors. You got doctors to be loyal to you."
One path to loyalty and access, Oldani said, was by awarding "unrestricted educational grants" to physician practices and clinics that would be used for training "retreats" at a resort.
He bought medical equipment for doctors and pharmacists and funded clinical trials for specific drugs he was marketing.
Clinics that banned sales reps were called "no-see" clinics, Oldani said, but that only increased the challenge. "The whole goal is to sell product. You figured out how to get in the back door," he said.
Ah, Happy Days!
More at The Star Tribune
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