Pfizer Sales Reps Discuss Having Sex With Doctors
Sales reps at Pfizer are using a CafePharma bulletin board to discuss whether it is common for their colleagues to sleep with the doctors whom they are trying to persuade to write prescriptions.
Surprisingly for CafePharma — which has a reputation for being juvenile, offensive and misogynist — the debate is relatively level-headed and tame. Most commenters seem to agree that sex with doctors is going on more inside people’s heads than in reality. The debate started with this question:
Physician’s wife here. Just how prevalent is it? I hear that it happens but does it happen often? Just wondered.
The most common type of answer:
Lots and lots of talk and wishful thinking, but it happens rarely.
Another noted that while there’s plenty of flirting, there’s not a lot of consumating:
Rep here. Unfortunately we get hit on all the time by men like your husband.
The most famous Pfizer rep to describe a doctor-sex story is Jamie Reidy, formerly the self-proclaimed No. 1 Viagra salesman in the U.S. (Reidy was later fired as a sales trainer from Eli Lilly when his book, “Hard Sell,” was published. The book detailed his unethical sales tactics while at Pfizer and is currently being made into a movie, Love and Other Drugs, starring Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhall.)
In the book, Reidy (pictured) describes a female doctor with whom he has drinks in a bar. He fends off her drunken advances, and she passes out and ends up sleeping on his sofa.
On CafePharma, fending off amorous doctors is something of a theme:
They come to dinner programs with a goal in mind that has nothing to do with medicine. Others simply take any kindness by a pretty girl as a come-on and a signal for sex, when nothing could be further from the truth. Shame but true.
Still, it’s hard to know whether to take this post seriously or not:
I have had sex with six married doctors in my career.
Certainly, this one should not be:
I was at a dinner program the other night and as the lecture ended the rep had sex with 4 of the physicians. I found this very disturbing and disapointing (primarily because I was not one of the four physicians selected).
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Jim Edwards, a former managing editor of Adweek, has covered drug marketing at Brandweek for four years, and is a former Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University's business and journalism schools. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email.
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