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Two former pharmaceutical sales reps have blown the whistle on unethical tactics used by Big Pharma to curry favor with physicians, raising health care costs and doing no real good for patients.

Two former Big Pharma sales reps who regularly visited doctors to promote their company’s prescription products have gone public with claims of everything from free gifts, dinners, trips to strip clubs and even ‘sexual tension’ to manipulate America’s doctors into prescribing more of their products, saying reps were chosen for their attractiveness, not their product knowledge or scientific training.

Shahram Ahari, a former Eli Lilly sales rep, told medical students at Tufts, Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital recently about how the future doctors can resist the slanted sales pitches. Ahari also discussed the unethical nature of drug sales with Jim Braude of New England Cable News (NECN) in a video recently, and his claims are downright shocking.

Ahari, now at the University of California-San Francisco School of Pharmacy, who has testified before Congress on the situation, told NECN that reps were chosen for their looks and charm, and if doctors appeared to be attracted to the rep, that rep should ‘exploit’ the situation. He said he has no info on how far such exploitation might have gone, but he knew that doctors were routinely treated to expensive dinners, all-expense-paid trips, and even visits to strip clubs.

Ahari tells more of his disturbing story about selling the controversial drug Zyprexa in a video on the YouTube website. And another former Big Pharma rep, Gwen Olsen, has also uploaded a series of confessions about her unethical sales tactics to YouTube. Similar to Ahari’s revelations, she reveals a shocking lack of ethics and a willingness to exploit and manipulate physicians with little or no regard for patient safety by Big Pharma’s sales reps.

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, introduced by Senators Chuck Grassley and Herb Kohl, will require drug and medical device makers to report gifts, honoraria, cash and free services made to doctors. The bill was proposed because of worries that Big Pharma’s marketing practices add to already skyrocketing health care costs and are not in patients’ best interests.

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