CSHP Industry Night...?

Just came back from a CSHP Golden Gate chapter event, "6th Annual Night Out With Industry." Let me de-mystify this introductory sentence term by term.

CSHP = California Society of Health-System Pharmacists is a pharmacy organization in California, and people (pharmacists, student pharmacists and pharmacy technicians) who work in hospital pharmacies constitute its membership. Supposedly, it is the largest pharmacy organization in California. How many members? Haha...great question! Who am I? Am I a Google engineer? Do I know the answer like that? NO, no clue.

Industry = Pharmaceutical Industry, or Big Pharma.

In summary, it is a night where drug representatives from various companies educate us students and pharmacists about their products. I used "educate" since it paints a more favorable picture, but I suppose you can also use "sell."

My conclusion is if you talk to just one company, you will be easily convinced that they make the BEST medication!! Comparison shop is the key, like dating.

Here are some pictures I took of the variety of medication pamphlets and souvenirs. My guess is you know none of the drugs, but they do have nicely designed packaging! Enjoy, and think about their motivation!

As titled, "6th Annual Night Out With Industry"

Victoza? It's a diabetes medication.

Humira? And how do you pronounce "adalimumab"? Why are there 2 names? The nice-sounding one is usually the BRAND name, and by design can be recalled by people, patients as well as us health care professionals easily. "Adalimumab" below is the weird-sounding GENERIC name. It's a more systematic name so can be more easily classified. We are humans, or Home Sapiens. Same idea here. So Humira is an injection that treats autoimmune diseases, some examples are Crohn's disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Nice cow, specifically an Apis bull, a sacred animal in ancient Egypt. It's an insulin company. Yes, insulin is a drug even though we also make them ourselves. Hmm, interesting! Where do they get the insulin from? From us? Great question! No, originally insulin was first taken from pigs (porcine) and cows (bovine). Currently, all insulin are made from DNA technology, and they look like our own insulin.

Look at how many companies are present! We were having some raffle drawing, and we needed to collect sitckers from different venders. Pfizer is covered by Sponge Bob.

Nice souvenir notebook! It also has all the information about the drug, Emend, which helps nausea side effects of many chemotherapeutic drugs. It also includes a nice bookmark, "I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart -- by Vincent van Gogh."

Toviaz, hmm, sounds European. Fesoterodine fumarate, on the other hand, just sounds non-sense. Toviaz treats Over-Active Bladder (OAB), or urinary incontinence. Doesn't OAB look like some sort of blood type? And look at the freely jumping human figure next to the drug name. Association at work here: happy human figure BECAUSE of Toviaz!

Lancet, the world's leading general medical journal and specialty journals in Oncology, Neurology, and Infectious Diseases according to thelancet.com. I suppose having your drug study published here is a big deal. For example, I have ZERO article published anywhere. Fampridine is another weird-sounding drug for a serious disease, multiple sclerosis.

New England Journal of Medicine should need no more introduction, right? The drug is Xifaxan. Cool sounding drug with a neat neon-green light bulb. It treats a serious neurological complication of liver cirrhosis. On the post-it note, in addition to the neon-green light bulb, and a large Rx font, it kindly reminds doctors to make sure give the patients 11 refills, and with the original script, constitute one-year worth of Xifaxan.

Relistor, methyl-nal-trex-one ("I can read it, I can read it!!!" You're welcome.), relieves constipation caused by taking opioid drugs (Vicodin is an example.) I am guessing Relistor sounds like relief? Ok, very creative!!

Big Pharma is all about creativity, not only in the Research & Development stage, but also in marketing stage.