corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10789

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Wall LL, Brown D.
The High Cost of Free Lunch
Obstet Gynecol 2007 Jul 1; 110:(1):169-173
http://www.greenjournal.org/cgi/content/full/110/1/169


Abstract:

Most physicians deny their professional integrity can be “bought” by something as trivial as a cup of coffee or a free lunch. In this paper, we review the social science literature arguing that “gifting” physicians in this way is, in fact, a highly successful method of boosting drug sales. Unlike ordinary consumer goods, the sale of prescription drugs does not take place directly between the producer and the consumer; rather, prescription drug sales are mediated by the physician who writes the script for the medication. Pharmaceutical sales practices are geared toward influencing physician drug recognition so that, when prescriptions are written, their drug is the first one that comes to mind. Even small gifts produce in their recipients a disproportionately powerful willingness to reciprocate in some manner. The simple act of providing food has been shown to make any message more palatable and more likely to be favorably received. We argue that physician prescribing habits should be based upon careful consideration of what medication is really in the patient’s best clinical interests, not on who most recently provided the doctor with a free lunch.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909