Pharma-cology 101: Educating future prescribers on drug reps, dead drugs, and the hidden scripts of pharmaceutical industry relationships.

This paper introduces the concept and practice of "pharma-cology" which argues that future prescribers as well as established clinicians need to understand pharma sales tactics at a deeper level. The case of a drug rep from the late 1990s is highlighted as he successfully introduced and sold Trovan by manipulating and leveraging social relationships within a teaching hospital - a drug eventually removed from the US market by the FDA due to safey concerns. These specific sales tactics are pulled through to the contemporary scene, showing similarities with the promotion of opioids, which caused great harm to patients, and the GLP-1s, such as Ozempic (semaglutide), which are the most recent class of blockbuster pharmaceuticals to benefit from intensive marketing campaigns and the activies of drug reps.