Reverse Psychology

Last night I went to a pharm dinner at an awesome restaurant. My boyfriend and I occasionally hit up these dinners bc it's a cool way to get info on random drugs ... plus you get free dinner from a fancy place that we're normally way too broke to ever go to.

Usually, we expect that the presentation will be highly biased and will promote whatever drug as the new best thing since penicillin. So we go in with our secret decoder rings on to filter out all the BS.

And, yes, I'm aware of all the ethical issues surrounding pharm dinners and perks, and frankly I think its BS. As a physician in training I think I'm savvy enough to know that walking into a drug company meeting I'm not going to find a comprehensive, unbiased description of XYZ drug or condition. And I mean really, the pen thing??? Get real. (although I totally understand doing away with gifts and incentives like trips to Europe for writing 400 scripts in a month, etc.)

But last night we discovered that Eli Lilly is up to a new trick. They didn't try to push a drug on us. In fact, they didn't even MENTION a drug. I don't even know WHAT drug they were promoting. Basically a physician speaker came in a presented current research (not from Eli Lilly either) on metabolic disease prevalence among those with mental illness. We actually learned something. Didn't feel pressures. Didn't need our decoder rings. Had a great dinner. For free.

Eli Lilly, if this is an attempt at reverse psychology... nice work.