Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20015

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

Newton-Syms FA, Dawson PH, Cooke J, Feely M, Booth TG, Jerwood D, Calvert RT.
The influence of an academic representative on prescribing by general practitioners.
Br J Clin Pharmacol 1992; 33:(1):69-73
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1381201/?tool=pubmed

Abstract:

1. The effect of providing information about medicines by a short ‘sales’ interview between individual general practitioners and an ‘academic representative’ on prescribing was investigated. 2. The promotional campaign was designed to encourage a rational approach to prescribing of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents in an intervention group of 101 general practitioners selected at random from the Leeds Family Practitioner Committee (FPC). The remaining general practitioners in the Leeds FPC acted as a reference group. 3. The prescribing data for each group for 5 months immediately prior to and 5 months following intervention were compared. 4. Intervention produced a significant increase (P less than 0.005) in the prescribing cost of ibuprofen, the non-steroidal promoted as first choice agent, which was sustained for at least 5 months. 5. Prescribing of the second choice agent, piroxicam, decreased in the reference group but not in the intervention group. 6. There was a decrease in the average prescribing cost of pounds 6.60 per doctor per month in the intervention group compared with the reference group.

Keywords:
Costs and Cost Analysis Drug Information Services* Drug Prescriptions*/economics Drug Prescriptions*/statistics & numerical data Family Practice* Humans

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
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.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

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