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Marketing to Doctors: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

LastWeekTonight · 13.3M views · 2015-02-09 · 17:13

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Overview

A Last Week Tonight segment on how pharmaceutical companies spend billions marketing drugs to doctors. It uses comedy to lay out the industry's questionable practices.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as a reference in threads about pharma payments, medical corruption, and declining trust in healthcare.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2015–2017

Topics

Medicine & infectious diseaseMedia, journalism & propagandaProduct, marketing & sales
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pharmadoctorshealthcarejohn oliveropioids

What people said

DigitalSea · 2015-02 · Strong recommendation

Both honestly and sadly, I think nobody is actually legitimately surprised by this. The pharmaceutical industry is a profit machine that will do anything to ensure that it remains profitable. If anyone hasn't seen John Oliver's latest video, it's on the whole marketing to doctors thing and touches upon the pharmaceutical industry and I highly recommend watching it: [VIDEO] - he sums it up perfectly.

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ddebernardy · 2017-08 · Reference

Is this really news? John Oliver ran a piece on the topic and the industry's many other dubious practices over 2 years ago, and I'm quite sure he wasn't the first to try to raise awareness. [VIDEO]

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brightball · 2015-11 · Reference

There's a part of me that wants to agree completely...and there is another part that has concerns about the messenger. The end result of that would be that the gatekeeper to knowing about these drugs or devices are the doctor's themselves meaning those companies just have to work harder to advertise to the doctors to recommend their drug/device. From Last Week Tonight w/ John Oliver: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by LastWeekTonight, played through YouTube.

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