Re: Doctors and Drug Makers: A Move to End Cozy Ties
From: art fougner, md (evsono@pipeline.com)
Mon Feb 12 13:50:00 2007
Invites often come to those whose prescribing patterns fit the company's
profile.
But I have a bigger quarrel with direct to consumer adverts.
Art
At Mon, 12 Feb 2007, Dean Huffman . wrote:
>
>.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/business/12drug.html?ref=health
>
>NY Times
>
>Doctors and Drug Makers: A Move to End Cozy Ties
>
>By STEPHANIE SAUL
>
>Published: February 12, 2007
>
>More Hippocrates, less Hunan hot sauce. Free lunches for doctors are under
>attack yet again.
>
>Free lunch deliveries to medical offices, along with those ubiquitous drug
>company logo pens, have come to symbolize the extensive financial ties between
>doctors and the drug industry. And there is evidence they influence which drugs
>are prescribed.
>
>But pressure is building against the widely reported gifts and other potential
>conflicts, an effort that took hold last year when a group of influential
>doctors condemned financial arrangements between doctors and drug companies in
>The Journal of the American Medical Association.
>
>Tomorrow, a new push is scheduled to be announced by Community Catalyst, a
>health care consumer advocacy group based in Boston, and the Institute on
>Medicine as a Profession, a research group at Columbia University.
>
>With a $6 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the organizations plan a
>national campaign calling for restrictions on the interactions between doctors
>and drug companies, and urging doctors to base their prescription writing more
>on medical evidence than on marketing.
>
>“If you’ve been in the waiting room when these Chinese lunches are taken into
>the back office, it may raise the question whether the decisions are based on
>the best scientific evidence about medication or whether or not those Sichuan
>shrimp have something to do with the prescribing patterns,” said Jim O’Hara,
>the managing director of policy initiatives at Pew.
>
>The pharmaceutical industry spends $12 billion a year marketing to doctors, and
>much of that money is in the form of free samples delivered to doctors’
>offices, often accompanied by lunch for the entire staff. When the University
>of Michigan health systems banned such lunches in 2005, they calculated that
>the lunches had been worth $2.5 million a year.
>
>The free drugs are samples of the newest and most expensive branded products.
>The drug industry hopes that by starting patients with free samples, they will
>remain on the more expensive medication rather than using a cheaper generic.
>And there is evidence that doctors who have relationships with the
>pharmaceutical industry prescribe more of the expensive drugs.
>
>The new initiative, called the Prescription Project, is an outgrowth of an
>article published in January 2006 in The Journal of the American Medical
>Association in which a coalition of scholars and doctors proposed that academic
>medical centers across the country take the lead in restricting interactions
>between doctors and the health care industry.
>
>Several medical centers, including those at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania
>and Stanford, have announced such restrictions.
>
>The Prescription Project aims to spread those restrictions to other academic
>medical centers, doctors’ organizations and third-party payers.
>
>Some medical school deans are reluctant to impose such restrictions, fearing
>that they will lose research money, according to David J. Rothman, an author of
>last year’s journal paper who is also president of the Institute on Medicine as
>a Profession.
>
>“They say, ‘If we did this, we would lose a third of our faculty. They’ll go to
>places with less stringent requirements; if we did this, we’ll tick off the
>drug companies and there’ll be payback,’ ” said Professor Rothman.
>
>One of the group’s plans is to document the impact of changes at Yale, the
>University of Pennsylvania and Stanford. “Did the drug companies stop giving
>Penn research money?” he said. “I don’t for a minute believe that is going to
>happen.”
>
>The organization’s goal is not to prohibit research grants or consultancies, but
>to limit gifts, travel fees, speakers’ bureaus and ghostwriting while at the
>same time encouraging prescriptions based on a medical evidence.
>
>“Gifts bring with them the felt need to reciprocate,” said Professor Rothman,
>who teaches social medicine at Columbia.
>
>“We’re not saying you’re being bribed,” he added. “We’re saying you’re being
>gifted. Some of it could be raw monetary hustling. But some of it is this
>psychological — ‘Well, they just sent me out to Las Vegas, their drug is as
>good as anybody else’s, why not just say thank you.’ ”
--
art fougner, md
"May The Wings of Liberty Never Lose a Feather." - Jack Burton
