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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2136

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

Caamano F, Figueiras A , Gestal-Otero JJ.
Influence of commercial information on prescription quantity in primary care.
Eur J Public Health 2002 Sep; 12:(3):187-91
http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/12/3/187?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=Caamano%2C+F&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1124411285121_316&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=1&journalcode=eurpub


Abstract:

Background: In the last few years we have witnessed many publicly-financed health services reaching a crisis point. Thus, drug expenditure is nowadays one of the main concerns of health managers, and its containment one of the first goals of health authorities in western countries. The objective of this study is to identify the effect of the perceived quality stated in commercial information, its uses, and how physicians perceive the influence it has on prescription amounts.

Methods: A cross-sectional study of 405 primary care physicians was conducted in Galicia (north–west Spain). The independent variables physician’s education and speciality, physician’s perception of the quality of available drug information sources, type of practice, and number of patients were collected, through a postal questionnaire. Environmental characteristics of the practice were obtained from secondary sources. Multiple regression models were constructed using as dependent variables two indicators of prescription volume.

Results: The response rate was 75.2%. Prescription amounts was found to be associated with perceived credibility of information provided by medical visitors, regulated physician training, and environmental characteristics of the practice (primary care team practice, urban environment).

Conclusions: The study results suggest that in order to decrease prescription amounts it is necessary to limit the role of pharmaceutical companies in physician training, improve physician education and training, and emphasize more objective sources of information.

Keywords:
cross-sectional study; multiple regression; prescription quantity; primary care

 

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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