Onco-Industrial Complex

Back in the late 1980s a friend coined the term "lunatic fringe of medical oncology" for a small group of oncologists, myself included, who were advocating improved end-of-life care education and practice within the field of medical oncology.   In the mid 1990s I left the world of medical oncology clinical practice; I resigned my membership in ASCO and removed my name from the NIH PDQ oncology database.  But this information has escaped the marketing geniuses of the pharmaceutical industry. Over the past month I decided to save and sort all the oncology junk mail that came to my home--not my office, but my home--in total, about 20 pounds in one month.  The heaviest category was disease-specific throw-away journals and miscellaneous journals for oncology financial practice, oncology leisure activities, and an oncology guide to the internet.  Next came the  "education" materials--books, CDs, pamphlets--from single pharmaceutical companies, many published by a group called Physicians' Education Resource in Dallas, Texas (no website). 

All of the “journals” and “education” materials were subsidized overtly, or through advertising, by the pharmaceutical industry and all the “education materials” dealt solely with new, expensive chemotherapeutic agents or oncology support drugs. I also received a total of $100 in pre-paid checks from different marketing firms wanting me to complete mail-in surveys regarding my chemotherapy practice.  Lets do the math ...there are 20,000 members of Amer Assoc of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), that comes to 400,000 pounds of junk mail each month and $2,000,000 in marketing checks per month!  Oh, I almost forgot, there were half a dozen letters from head hunters looking for oncologists—including one letter guaranteeing a starting salary of …. $511,223.  In case you didn’t know, oncologists make the bulk of their income from chemotherapy sales.   The Onco-Industrial complex is alive and well.