The Impact Of Drug Marketing On Medical Care
In my group practice, the Yale Medical Group, drug company-sponsored lunches and similar events have been banned. This is part of a trend, at least within academic medicine, to create some distance between physicians and pharmaceutical companies, or at least their marketing divisions. The justifications for this are several, and are all reasonable. One reason is the appearance of being too cozy, which compromises the role of academic physicians as independent experts.
But the primary reason is the belief that “detailing” by pharmaceutical sales representatives has a negative effect on the prescribing habits of physicians. There is reason to believe this may be the case because of cases of bad behavior on the part of pharmaceutical marketing divisions — ghost writing white papers, for example.
The concern, backed by evidence, is that pharmaceutical companies introduce spin and bias into the information they provide to physicians, whether though CME, detailing, literature, or sponsored lectures. Even when the information itself is not massaged, it is cherry picked, so in the end physicians are not getting a thorough and unbiased assessment of the facts. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
