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Frame from Marketing to Doctors: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Marketing to Doctors: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

68 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this commentary1 month2015–2017 score 1.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN uses it as a reference in threads about pharma payments, medical corruption, and declining trust in healthcare.

A Last Week Tonight segment on how pharmaceutical companies spend billions marketing drugs to doctors. It uses comedy to lay out the industry's questionable practices.

“I highly recommend watching it” (HN, 2015)

1 strong recommendations · 3 citations · 1 critical · Commentary · partly dated

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@DigitalSea Feb 2015 Strongly recommends
on HN thread The FDA buries evidence of fraud in medical trials. My students and I dug it up
Both honestly and sadly, I think nobody is actually legitimately surprised by this. The pharmaceutical industry is a profit machine that will do anything to ensure that it remains profitable. If anyone hasn't seen John Oliver's latest video, it's on the whole marketing to doctors thing and touches upon the pharmaceutical industry and I highly recommend watching it: [this video] - he sums it up perfectly.
Oliver segment on pharma marketing to doctors.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@RaleyField Mar 2015 Cites it
on HN thread Java Runtime updater now installs ask.com toolbar on Macs
> Anti-vaccine movement comes from declining levels of trust in authorities. I'll just leave this relevant episode of [Last Week Tonight]( [this video] ). While anti-vaxxers are clearly wrong let's acknowledge that health care, at least in the US, has been partially corrupted. The thought that medical workers might be offering unsound advice in this one area when it's known they behaved unethically in that other area suddenly does not appear so unreasonable.
Episode on healthcare corruption cited for declining trust.
@brightball Nov 2015 Cites it
on HN thread Doctors want ban on prescription drug, device advertisements
There's a part of me that wants to agree completely...and there is another part that has concerns about the messenger. The end result of that would be that the gatekeeper to knowing about these drugs or devices are the doctor's themselves meaning those companies just have to work harder to advertise to the doctors to recommend their drug/device. From Last Week Tonight w/ John Oliver: [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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