Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2370

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

Goodman B.
Do drug company promotions influence physician behavior?
West J Med 2001 Apr; 174:(4):232-3

Abstract:

Calcium channel blockers are less effective than thiazides, more expensive, and more heavily prescribed, despite guidelines to the contrary. One factor is pharmaceutical samples, which influence physicians to use drugs they would not otherwise prescribe. Drug companies provided more than $7 billion worth of samples in 1999, mainly newer drugs, and spent almost $14 billion promoting drugs in the US. Calcium channel blockers are heavily promoted. This may explain why they are so heavily prescribed. Although many physicians deny being influenced, research consistently shows that gifts, from pens to vacations, do affect physicians’ beliefs and behaviour. Medical culture views pharmaceutical industry largesse as an entitlement. This culture needs to change. No Free Lunch (www.nofreelunch.org) was started in 1999 to challenge this culture. It encourages physicians to practice medicine on the basis of unbiased evidence, rather than biased pharmaceutical promotion, and to ‘just say no’ to industry largesse.

Keywords:
MeSH Terms: Advertising/methods Advertising/standards* Antihypertensive Agents/therapeutic use* Attitude of Health Personnel Drug Industry Drug Utilization/standards* Drug Utilization/trends Female Humans Hypertension/drug therapy Male Pharmaceutical Services/standards Pharmaceutical Services/trends Physician's Practice Patterns/standards* Prescriptions, Drug/standards* United States Substances: Antihypertensive Agents *analysis/United States/pharmaceutical industry promotion/samples/prescribing behavior/gifts/culture of entitlement/No Free Lunch/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: GIFT GIVING/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: PAYMENT FOR MEALS, ACCOMMODATION, TRAVEL, ENTERTAINMENT/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: SAMPLES/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: SAMPLES

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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