What a great leap forward for a drug company to get doctors to put a disposable sheet on their examining room table blazing with the Viagra logo as a billboard for their product.
By Harvey Friedman, Attorney at Law, Washington, DC
I deal with lots of doctors in my disability law practice but only a few for myself.
I recently paid a visit to my friendly local urologist. He’s an employee of a massive, factory-like medical practice with scads of staff popping in and out of doorways and hanging out behind the reception desk and scads of patients reading old magazines while waiting endlessly in the waiting room to see scads of doctors, who mostly seem to be in hiding.
It's a long way from Dr. Milliken, the doctor who delivered me and who after a $5.00 house call, couldn't get enough of my mom's coffee and danish. It’s a long way too from the little pads and ballpoint pens with drug company logos, which over the years, I’ve finally gotten used to.
What a great leap forward for a drug company to get doctors to put a disposable sheet on their examining room table blazing with the Viagra logo as a billboard for their product.
Now I have nothing against Viagra and in fact it can be a fun drug. And like you, I watch the ads for Viagra and Cialis and Livitra on TV. Perhaps unlike you, and I don’t know, when I watch those ads, I wait with great delight for the ending, when the announcer runs lickety-split down a list of yucky possible side effects and finally arrives at the most yucky of all, the more-than 4-hour erection for which you better lickity-slit get to the emergency room.
You can blame the drug company, which obviously produced and gave this stuff to the doctors, but you can’t escape the conclusion that it was the bosses who own this doctor-factory who accepted it and used it in just the way the drug company wanted. You can only speculate on whether this has anything to do with the sub-rosa meals and Caribbean trips which rumor has it, that these same generous drug companies give to these same compliant doctors.
But now back to me.
As ordered, by the assistant who pointed me towards the little room and then disappeared, I obediently took off my pants, hung them on the back of the door, sat in the only chair in the room (don’t worry, there was a swiveling stool for the doctor) and began my wait.
The chair was facing the examining table and given the size and configuration of the room there was no escaping the Viagra billboard, unless you turned the chair around and were willing to face a blank wall or a set pf draws, with God knows what in them. Given the choice, I chose the Viagra.
Confronted with that inescapable glaring ad for Viagra, I knew that this was a new turn in the road and that someone had very much upped the ante for the medical profession.
At first, I was somewhat amused but it didn't take long for my amusement to turn to disbelief and then to anger. It's one thing for doctors to foist drug company advertising on their patients through pens and paper but it's another to foist it at this shameless scale. I started ruminating at how far doctors had gone in allowing themselves to be paid off by drug companies; and it would take a an awful lot of evidence for me to believe that this was anything but a payoff.
But then I am a lawyer specializing in medical disability issues, a lawyer who works with doctors every day and who finds a whole lot of them unwilling to go to bat for their patients, so perhaps what I’m saying here is just the product of my prejudice.
I was convinced that no one would believe me if I described what I was seeing and if some did, they would never understand the impact this was having on me and which it might have on them.
I had to prove this, like when I do my legal thing and I have to corroborate evidence which I claim exists but which I have to prove does in fact exist.
My first thought was to rip off some of the Viagra paper from the table to show the disbelievers. I was going to do that, but the door was ajar and anyone could suddenly walk by and hear the rippppppppppping noise. As my need to corroborate grew stronger, I had a sudden epiphany.
I remembered the cell phone in my pants pocket hanging behind the door and that the cell phone had a camera. I've used that cell phone camera just once before and I was determined to use it now for the second time.
I geared up into my best stealth mode, slunk up from the chair, kind of crept over to the door, peeked out both ways down the hall and with no one there, quietly closed it. I fished my phone out from my pant's pocket. I peeked out the door again and with no one in the hall, closed it again, and prepared myself for my great photo op. I quickly kneeled down on the floor to get just the right angle and flash this photo.
I stealthily put the phone back into my pant's pocket, quickly sat back down in the chair and assumed my most innocent pose. There is only so long that you can hold a pose and I let it go after a few minutes. Good thing too, since I would have had to have held it for 10 more minutes until the doctor made it into the room.
Sitting there, gave me time to think, not of what I had done and I suppose it is somewhat unusual for a patient in an examining room, to do what I did. Rather, it gave me time to think about how what I was seeing so demolishes our fantasy of what doctors are all about.
I'm publishing this photo here, to corroborate what I saw and to allow you to determine whether a paper sheet on a urologist’s examining table with the Viagra logo screaming out from it says to you what it says to me.
I cannot believe that this doctor, who I had never met before and turned out to be a pretty nice guy, would have to so demean himself and his patient, if he controlled the action and was not forced by the owners of his factory practice to examine patients in such a setting. I will not believe that this doctor who finally came in to examine me, thought up this idea or had control over its execution, despite that he indirectly profited from it.
Instead, I believe, that unlike Dr. Milliken who could schmooze with my family over coffee and danish, this doctor is a cog in the factory wheel. He is as fearful as any other employee of plummeting performance evaluations or worse, should he dare challenge his bosses’ decisions. But I also believe that this doctor might not even have had a clue that I had overall been kept waiting for 45 minutes before I got to see him and if he did, then he certainly did not have the foggiest idea at how offensive it was for him not to offer the slightest hint of an apology.
Just as you might have wondered about how I got the photo, you might also wonder about what happened when the doctor finally made it into the room.
He had me slid up onto the Viagra sheet, did his number on me and pronounced me fine. That was obviously the highlight of the visit.
As he was about to walk away, I pointed at the Viagra emblazoned sheet and said, "the Cialis people must be kind of jealous.” He shot back, “oh no, we have Cialis sheets in another room.”
I’m still trying to figure out if he was kidding.
