Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1762

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

Brubaker B.
Drug Industry Adopts Guidelines on Giveaways to Doctors
Washington Post 2002 Apr 20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18058-2002Apr19.html

Full text:

Free steak and lobster dinners are out. But pizza is okay.

Sports tickets are forbidden. So are tickets to Broadway plays.

After increasing criticism from health-care watchdog groups, pharmaceutical industry executives yesterday announced new voluntary ethical guidelines to govern the relationship between drug sales representatives and physicians.

Beginning July 1, drug companies said, their sales reps no longer will woo doctors — the men and women who prescribe the firms’ medications to patients — with expensive meals and other perks.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America will leave it to the drug companies to enforce the guidelines.

“We didn’t like some of the things that some companies and sales representatives did in the past,” said Hank McKinnell, chairman and chief executive of Pfizer Inc. “Doctors were being entertained [by sales reps] when there was no educational element involved.”

The new guidelines will still allow drug companies to hire doctors as “consultants.” Some doctors have said consultancy contracts provide a loophole that has enabled them to take all-expenses-paid trips to resorts, where some scientific conferences are held.

Scott Willoughby, a lawyer for the drug-industry trade group, said the new guidelines “clarify” existing policies and ban gifts such as “floral arrangements . . . music CDs or tickets to a sporting event” that are now acceptable.

“Previously a physician could attend a baseball game with a sales representative,” Willoughby said. “That was something that was [under the guidelines] ‘less than substantial value.’ And the sales rep was to provide [educational] information to them [at the game]. We feel that is not the type of venue where it’s . . . even believable that you’re providing good information.

“A round of golf with a physician may only cost $50. But under the new code that’s not acceptable,” Willoughby said.

Under the new guidelines, a sales rep can still buy a doctor a “modest” meal at a function that has a scientific or educational component. What’s “modest” is left to each drug company to decide.

“In downtown D.C., I’d consider $50 a modest meal,” Willoughby said.

McKinnell said “modest” to him is a pizza — not dinner at the Palm in midtown Manhattan.

The American Medical Association called the pharmaceutical trade group’s plan “a positive step” that addresses “inappropriate . . . marketing practices aimed at physicians.”

Last summer, the AMA launched a campaign to increase awareness of its own gift guidelines, which were established in 1990. Some doctors say the AMA guidelines are vague and have been ignored.

The new drug-industry guidelines were criticized yesterday by a consumer group. “This is a thinly disguised public relations campaign,” said Sidney M. Wolfe, a physician who heads the health research group at Washington-based Public Citizen. “I don’t trust the pharmaceutical industry or the AMA to practice what they preach because they have articulated similar guidelines for 11 1/2 years. And in the last couple of years alone we have found large numbers of violations of these.”