Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11910

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: news

Parnell K.
Confession: I use drug rep pens
6minutes 2007 Nov 2
http://www.6minutes.com.au/kerri_blog/blogposts.asp?postid=555

Full text:

I can see it now:

“What are you in for?”, a prisoner asks his cellmate.
“Eating duck a l’orange”, replies his fellow inmate, a medical man whose just been nabbed for accepting the largesse of a pharmaceutical company.

Sounds crazy to me, but apparently not to pharma critic, Ray Moynihan, who is calling for doctors to be “charged” if they accept dinners and other “bribes” from drug companies.

According to yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald, Moynihantold
a congress of the world’s consumer groups in Sydney that while the ACCC had made a good start by forcing companies to disclose their events, more needed to be done.

“What we don’t know is the names of the doctors attending these events, and that’s one of the next steps”, he said. “There’s no reason that patients shouldn’t get access to all that information about their doctors.”

The next step is to criminalise these “bribes”, Moynihan reportedly said.

On the issue of transparency, I wouldn’t argue with him, and have no objection to any pharmaceutical company going public with a list of the prolific gifts they regularly shower me with as long as there’s no paperwork involved at my end.

In fact I’ll go on the record right now and admit that as I write I’m eating a Micardis mint I recently got at a conference along with several pads and pens, a stress ball and a tiny torch I gave my son.

Seriously though, while I wonder if Moynihan’s gone a bit far, the man’s got a point.

There’s plenty of evidence that doctors are influenced by pharma gifts, whether they realise it or not, and whether or not actual harm occurs as a result.
So by all means, go public with my menu choices and pens.

But please don’t lock me up.

NEJM 2007; 357; 1796 – 7.