Doctors Still Chummy With Drug Sales Reps
By: Patricia Barry; June 2007 Source: AARP Bulletin Date Posted:
"There's a big bucket of money sitting in every office ... Every time you go in, you reach your hand in the bucket and grab a handful."
That's how a sales manager at AstraZeneca described to colleagues the rewards of pitching the company's products to doctors. His unguarded remarks showed up on the Internet—and got him fired, as the company confirmed—just as a new storm is brewing over tactics drugmakers use to influence doctors' prescribing habits.
A two-year Senate Finance Committee investigation, for example, has concluded that the companies, by funding continuing medical education programs for doctors, have been able to "increase their market for new products" and to illegally promote off-label uses for their drugs. The committee is concerned that persuading doctors to prescribe the newest, costliest drugs hikes government spending for Medicare and raises safety issues.
The drug industry in 2002 issued its own code of conduct declaring that interactions between sales reps and doctors should benefit patients and that meals—but not entertainment—are allowable if modest and connected to educational presentations. Today, 94 percent of doctors report a relationship with drug reps, according to a survey led by Harvard Medical School and published in the April 26 New England Journal of Medicine. The interactions range from receiving drug samples (78 percent) to getting free meals (83 percent) and expenses for attending industry-sponsored meetings (35 percent).
The authors of a second study wrote in the Public Library of Science's April medical journal that "reps scour a doctor's office for objects—a tennis racquet, Russian novels, '70s rock music"—to establish personal ties, and some give doctors food and gifts.
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