Payments from pharmaceutical companies affect prescriptions
April 19, 2014
The BBC ran an excellent article outlining some of the complexities involved with pharmaceutical companies giving gifts to doctors. The train of thought can start out innocently enough ("Doctors could go to a restaurant, learn something, get a nice dinner - what was wrong with that? Is education better in a monastery than in a restaurant?"), but the article cites a study that "found that a doctor receiving payments from a pharmaceutical firm was more than twice as likely to prescribe its drugs, compared to doctors receiving no payments." My guess is that more research into this subject would be positive, and that in the meantime, disclosure of these gifts would be helpful in allowing the patient decide whether there might be a conflict of interest. Fortunately, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act mandates that manufacturers disclose "transfers of value" to physicians.
The industry group's response to the mandate disclosures? "PhRMA is concerned that the Sunshine Act may have a 'chilling effect' on the exchange of information, saying some doctors are refusing medical article reprints from drug reps because these can be seen as 'transfers of value'." Somehow, I think there's a lot more at stake than article reprints.