Free, Cheap Meal From Pharma Rep Can Influence Doctor's Prescriptions
A free meal worth as little as just $20 can influence the way a doctor decided to write a prescription. These are the findings of a new study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
According to reports, name-brand pharmaceutical representatives do not need to spend a lot to make physical prescribe the drugs that they are attempting to sell. The new study analyzed the connection between the money that pharma representatives spend on doctors and how that money influences the way doctors write prescriptions.
The authors of the study used Medicare's Open Payments data to track the money that the drug industry spends in the favor of physicians, including the spending on gifts, meals, travel and similar things. The authors specifically looked at drugs from four broad categories - antidepressants, statins and two types of anti-hypertension drug.
During the study, the researchers took a note of 279,669 physicians who received 63,524 payments linked to these four categories of drugs. Surprisingly, nearly 95 percent of those payments came in the form of free meals that were rather cheap, as the average cost associated with each free meal was calculated to be around just $20.
The researchers found that physicians who were treated with a meal in an attempt to make them sell their drug ended up prescribing that drug over its equivalent. Specifically, doctors were 70 percent more like to prescribe Bystolic from Forest Laboratories over other beta blockers, Crestor from AstraZeneca over other statins, Pristiq from Pfizer over other antidepressants and Benical from Daiichi Sankyo over other ACE inhibitors used for the treatment of blood pressure.
The team further discovered that offering more free meals or meals worth more than $20 increased the chances of drugs being prescribed by doctors even more. However, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) believes that the study cherry-picks physician prescribing data for a subset of medicines to advance a false narrative."
