Ill be frank as well (junior dr here). They buy you lunch weekly, often for the whole establishment (your practice, the hospital, etc.). In the ye olde days they erherm..'sponsored' vacations for doctors to for example, Hawaii. It could be like a 1 week vacation, where they'd require you to spend half a day learning about their drug and going through their marketing spiel with you. In return they'd host your flights, accomodation and food (trust me the food is good).

Doctors are busy. They don't have time to read each and every journal article on the latest and greatest treatments. Sales reps can come in and highlight the key differentiators for their drugs (the FDA also makes them call out the negatives).

Sales reps also help with a lot of the non-sales aspects as well (getting reimbursement for the doc, helping patients who can't afford the drug).

You are correct that if you have the best drug out there by far sales reps don't really drive that much in sales. However, it's tough to convince marketing that they don't need sales reps at all, so even for the best drug they hire them.

In reply to Joe (the reply button appears disabled for me). Yes doctors, as with professionals in other fields are encouraged to keep up to date with the literature.

However they're exquisitely busy people, and no one is paying them to spend the time to keep up to date. Sure, there are programs that encourage it (usually called 'Continuing Medical Education') but they're often very weak, easily ignored and there is a lot of pushback by doctors themselves against them). If you take a look at the volume of information coming out every day, coupled with the fact most of the papers just plain suck, you'll realise how it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat.

The reply button is disabled for a few minutes after a comment is posted to prevent flamewars. You can work around this by clicking on the permalink ("X minutes ago"). You can always reply from there.

Doctors are actually required to keep up on their discipline with annual retraining requirements, right? They are not to be forgiven for being behind in treatments.

Not all marketing is TV ads or sales jobs to doctors.

In this hypothetical case, marketing $$ were spent to discover that existing late state melanoma treatments were lacking in some important respect (efficacy, side effects, cost...), and that there was a sufficient market to continue the expensive process of developing a potential treatment.