How many sundry and insidious schemes will the pharmaceutical industry employ to push their products on doctors and patients? The following news article from the Washington Post suggests that these companies will do virtually anything—including use intrusive data mining tactics—to pad their profits:

Doctors, Legislators Resist Drugmakers’ Prying Eyes

Seattle pediatrician Rupin Thakkar’s first inkling that the pharmaceutical industry was peering over his shoulder and into his prescription pad came in a letter from a drug representative about the generic drops Thakkar prescribes to treat infectious pinkeye.

In the letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to miss more days of school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories.

“My initial thought was ‘How does she know what I’m prescribing?’ ” Thakkar said. “It feels intrusive. . . . I just feel strongly that medical encounters need to be private.”

He is not alone. Many doctors object to drugmakers’ common practice of contracting with data-mining companies to track exactly which medicines physicians prescribe and in what quantities — information marketers and salespeople use to fine-tune their efforts. The industry defends the practice as a way of better educating physicians about new drugs.

Now the issue is bubbling up in the political arena. Last year, New Hampshire became the first state to try to curtail the practice, but a federal district judge three weeks ago ruled the law unconstitutional.

This year, more than a dozen states have considered similar legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. They include Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Nevada, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont and Washington, although the results so far have been limited. Bills are stalled in some states, and in others, such as Maryland and West Virginia, they did not pass at the committee level.

The concerns are not merely about privacy. Proponents say using such detailed data for drug marketing serves mainly to influence physicians to prescribe more expensive medicines, not necessarily to provide the best treatment.

“We don’t like the practice, and we want it to stop,” said Jean Silver-Isenstadt, executive director of the National Physicians Alliance, a two-year-old group with 10,000 members, most of them young doctors in training. (Thakkar is on the group’s board of directors.) “We think it’s a contaminant to the doctor-patient relationship, and it’s driving up costs.” [full text]