a C.B.I.T.C public service announcement

there was a disturbing article in the business section of saturday's new york times by barnaby j. feder about doctors being subjects of federal bribery probes. the article, rife with stories of physicians being paid thousands of dollars in "consulting fees" by companies that manufacture and market medical devices and pharmaceutical products, hit a little close to home.

you see, as i've mentioned here a couple of times previously, in a past life, and god does it seem a lifetime ago, i worked in pharmaceutical and medical sales. i made a decent living by most modern american class standards, and the gigs that i had were actually highly sought after by many. you may be surprised or not to learn that my landing the jobs that i did were not so much due to my scientific background or aptitude, which was very limited, but mostly due to the fact that i was a former college athlete with an engaging personality (this industry loves to staff their sales teams with attractive girls and athletic young men as most of the physicians, especially in the south, are men, who are perceived to being more inclined to give an audience to pretty girls that they could flirt with and/or strapping lads that they could talk sports with.)

the jobs basically consisted of me traveling all over south louisiana calling on doctors, hospital administrators, health plan pharmacy heads, etc., in an effort to convince them to use whatever drugs or medical devices that my company was selling. an integral part of this "sales" process included blowing through a virtually unlimited expense account to take doctors out for elaborate lunches and dinners, to purchase pricey gifts for them and their office staffs, to whisk them away for weekend golfing and fishing trips, along with occasional weekends at biloxi casinos.

i think you get the gist here.

part of this work also included selecting certain doctors, usually the ones that held the greatest capacity to increase sales by writing prescriptions for my products, to lead "programs" or "seminars" that were supposed to educate other medical professionals on the risks and benefits of my products, but mostly wound up turning into parties and social gatherings with little or no significant medical knowledge imparted upon the guests. in exchange for their services, the doctors who led such "programs" were paid assloads of money in "consulting fees."

now, i have many friends whom i respect greatly working in all aspects of this medical industry clusterfuck, but i make no bones about the fact that this was, more often than not, out and out bribery. this fact was not lost on me and often had detrimental affects on my psyche. putting my own professional disenchantment aside, there's no way to sugarcoat the fact that my company was paying people to increase its bottom line, transactions that i facilitated mind you, and these tactics were alarmingly VERY effective.

what's even more alarming were the stories that i'd hear about additional lengths that sales reps would go to in order to secure a physician's script business. there was one that i remember distinctly about a female sales representative fucking a prominent rheumatologist every friday afternoon, while his staff and spouse thought he was out playing golf, in order to get him to write prescriptions for celebrex, her product, over vioxx, celebrex's main market competitor at the time. and guess what? it worked! i remember a friend who was a vioxx rep at the time showing me a pharmacy report stating that dr. fridayfuck was prescribing celebrex 98% of the time to his patients with arthritis, and this was long before it was known that vioxx could kill you.

though my own time in that industry was marked by titanic disillusionment (i probably spent more time in my car daydreaming about moving to new york to become something people from my neck of the woods rarely became while traversing louisiana's backroads than i did actually working), it was not without coming away with many lessons learned.

the most important one of all: choose your doctor carefully!

case in point: something else that i've occasionally referenced here in the past is having had some health problems (a spinal injury) at one point in my life. fortunately for me, at the time i was befallen by crippling injury, i was living in the city where i was working as a rep and had all sorts of crazy insights into the medical profession of that area. more specifically, i knew which doctors were on the take and which ones were on the up and up, more likely to make important patient medical decisions based on what was truly best for the patient and not based on which rep had taken him or her and their staff out for steaks earlier in the week. in fact, the doctor that i ultimately went with, who subsequently took me under the knife and nursed me back to health, was one that i had never before met in the course of doing my job, largely because getting to him as a sales rep was harder than a man named osama getting through the gates of the white house; he refused to allow himself to be swayed by attractive, smooth-talking sales people armed with expense accounts.

i tell you all of this not to slam the industry and the way that it works (it should be noted that many regulations have been put into place since i left this field and that i do believe that most of the people working on both sides of the industry are good human beings), rather, i tell you this as a public service. i almost feel that it's my duty to do so.

a final word of advice: in the event that you, or someone you love, are faced with a personal medical crisis, and at some point all of us will, do yourself a favor and take a seat on a bench near the entrance of an office plaza where practitioners of the medical fields that you plan to seek treatment in house their offices. be sure to politely stop any neatly dressed young man or woman driving a ford taurus and carrying black, wheeled suitcase, for they are likely medical/pharmaceutical sales reps. ask them for a minute or two of their time and explain your condition to them. ask them then to honestly answer this question: "what doctor would you see if you were confronted with the same condition?"

what you'll learn might save your life.


who's that elderly black man bagging your groceries and rotating your tires? it could be a former member of the jackson 5!

there was a huge, and frankly kinda sad, story in the new york post over the weekend about the current state of the jackson family. an excerpt...

Stiffed by their superstar brother Michael and plagued by decades of bad fiscal decisions, the once-mighty Jackson family is barely scraping by, with one brother stocking groceries, another repairing cars and others living at home with mom while hoping for sister Janet's next handout.

wait, michael has money? i thought that he was broke too? the story goes on...

Marlon Jackson, 51, an original Jackson Five member who stocks shelves at a Vons supermarket in San Diego, had to temporarily move into an extended-stay hotel.

Randy, 46, does odd jobs, including fixing cars in a Los Angeles garage owned by a family friend. He recently claimed Michael was going to give him $1.7 million - "a pipe dream," said another brother last week.

Jackie, 56, the oldest and most debonair of the brothers, is struggling to manage his son Siggy's aspiring rap career after an Internet clothing business startup and attempts to produce music failed.

Jermaine, 54, shuttles back and forth from his girlfriend's home in Ventura County, Calif., to his parents' mansion in Encino, where Jackie and Randy still bunk.

Tito, 55, is the only brother still making music, but it's a meager living. The guitarist fronts a blues and jazz band that plays small venues and nets him $500 and $1,500 per occasional gig - a far cry from the days when the Jacksons could pull in 50,000 people at $30 a ticket.

Family patriarch Joseph Jackson, 79, spends most of his waking hours conjuring up schemes he hopes will replenish a bank account that once had more money than the FDIC cared to insure. Peddling musical girl groups in Las Vegas and a book about his family in Germany, Joseph, despite evidence to the contrary, is not convinced that time and the music industry have passed him by.

apparently, the only members of the family who have NOT squandered their fortunes, are the members of the family that have vaginas.

Janet is said to be worth upward of $150 million, while controversial sister La Toya, 52, is a millionaire. Rebbie, 57, the oldest, has been married for more than 35 years to a successful businessman she met in Gary, and the two live in an exclusive Las Vegas enclave.

read the modern day american tragedy in its entirety here...

jacko clan in deep funk


historian/author david mccullough on charlie rose

on friday night at 11, reeling from an orgy of college basketball that i'd drowned myself in, i switched over to the charlie rose show on PBS to see who the guest was for that night. turns out, it was david mccullough, author of john adams, 1776, and truman, among others. i started watching sort of passively, i mean i like mccullough and his works, but i perceived him to be a rather dull interview.

boy was i was wrong.

what followed over the course of the next hour was one of the more engrossing author interviews i've ever seen. mccullough spoke with wit and passion on becoming a writer, earning a living as a writer, our nation's history, the founding fathers as they really were and not how talking heads try to make us believe they were, art, acting, and many other things. if you have an hour to kill, i highly suggest you invest it in watching the interview...




the death and life of the american newspaper

eric alterman has a GREAT piece in the new issue of the new yorker. an excerpt...

...trends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter. Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have.

the piece also touches on how blogs like the huffington post have revolutionized the way news is delivered to the masses...

First envisaged as a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post started out by aggregating political news and gossip; it also organized a group blog, with writers drawn largely from Huffington’s alarmingly vast array of friends and connections. Huffington had accumulated that network during years as a writer on topics from Greek philosophy to the life of Picasso, as the spouse of a wealthy Republican congressman in California, and now, after a divorce and an ideological conversion, as a Los Angeles-based liberal commentator and failed gubernatorial candidate.

Almost by accident, however, the owners of the Huffington Post had discovered a formula that capitalized on the problems confronting newspapers in the Internet era, and they are convinced that they are ready to reinvent the American newspaper. “Early on, we saw that the key to this enterprise was not aping Drudge,” Lerer recalls. “It was taking advantage of our community. And the key was to think of what we were doing through the community’s eyes.”

On the Huffington Post, Peretti explains, news is not something handed down from above but “a shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer.” Echoing Murdoch, he says that the Internet offers editors “immediate information” about which stories interest readers, provoke comments, are shared with friends, and generate the greatest number of Web searches. An Internet-based news site, Peretti contends, is therefore “alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink.”

interesting stuff. read the entire piece here...

out of print


a bright shining star in the banking/mortgage crisis storm?

the following are quotes pulled from a sunday styles article in the ny times on the potential upside of a recession for new york city's creative underclass.

“If there is greater good for everyone, is it worth a few people losing their jobs?” Mr. Anderson asked. “I think so. I hate to see people lose their jobs, but prices in the city have become ridiculous.”

“The environment right now is definitely more favorable to people who don’t make those Wall Street bonuses,” Mr. Cox said.

“I am willing to risk a recession if it means tons of ibankers will be gone,” wrote one anonymous poster on Curbed.com, a Web site about real estate.

“It’s one thing if people are adding value to society,” Professor Frank said. “But there is skepticism that this is all a shell game and these guys are not adding value, at least to the extent that justifies their salaries.”

“The city has been so damaged by this wealth, and the middle class has been forced out,” Ms. Lyon said. “You’re holding on by your fingernails to stay in the city.”

“I love New York,” she added, “But there’s always the risk of the city being swallowed up by wealth.”

i've heard many people echoing these sentiments over the past couple of weeks. maybe putting an end to $15 french toast and $2500 per month studio apartments would make a recession a good thing? read the entire article here...

you say recession, i say "reservations!"


i posted a few more things here...
http://cajunboy.tumblr.com