A Celebrity Patient Sells His Soul to the Pharma Devil

I've come to expect underhanded promotional tactics from pharmaceutical manufacturers. They are easy to find and call out.

But this story... this one really took me by surprise. Until I realized that it's part of this celebrity patient's schtick and he was happy to let Bristol Myers-Squibb pay a fortune for his services, even though he was lying through his teeth. Not sure who took who for a bigger ride.

Andy Behrman. His name was not familiar to me, but perhaps it should have been. He calls himself Electroboy. He's made a career out of (presumably) advocating for people with bipolar disease, a disease which he claims he has, too. He charges big bucks to people who want his help. For what? I'm not sure. Because it seems he's for sale for anything anyone wants to pay him for, whether he speaks the truth or not.

Specifically this story is about Behrman's arrangement with Bristol Myers Squibb which manufactures a drug called Abilify for people with bipolar disease, also called manic depression. According to the Wall Street Journal, BMS paid him $400,000 to talk about how wonderful the drug is.

The problem is, Behrman was having problems with side effects and stopped taking the drug four days after he started taking it. Yet he continued to speak for two years on behalf of Abilify, and BMS continued to pay him handsomely.

Behrman only stopped promoting the drug because BMS refused to pay his price, which BMS reports to be $7.5 million.

The only question is: which one of them -- Andy Behrman or BMS -- is more unethical? At least Behrman's book comes clean when he talks about his arrests for fraud, hustling, male prostitution and more in the 1990s. BMS continues to pay patients and psychiatrists to talk about a drug which has been shown to have some severe side effects. It doesn't seem to matter whether those speakers are sincere.

Seems like neither zebra has changed its stripes.

What can we patients learn from this? We can learn to be careful about who we trust. We can learn to ask questions about sincerity vs useful information.

It doesn't matter whether it's Andy Behrman, Sally Field, Jenny McCarthy, or even Robert Jarvik who we used to think invented the first artificial heart. (He didn't. His mentor did. He improved it and named it after himself.) Don't rely on a celebrity to give you advice about medical care or drugs. They've been paid to make commercials or speak. They are not trustworthy medical professionals. We need to remember to follow the money.

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