Going to a free lunch sponsored by a pharmaceutical company can significantly affect a doctor’s prescription choices, a new study shows.
The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that 95 percent of the 63,524 payments from pharmaceutical companies reported by doctors in 2013 were for lunches totaling less than $18.
But the pittances spent by the drug companies were more than repaid by the doctors, who were much more likely to prescribe name-brand drugs than those who hadn’t attended pharma-provided lunches.
Specifically, lunch recipients were 18 percent more likely to prescribe Crestor, the cholesterol medication, than its generic equivalent. They were 70 percent more likely to prescribe Bystolic, a blood pressure medication and 100 percent more likely to prescribe Pristiq, an antidepressant, over generic alternatives.
The study suggested that the results demonstrated an association between lunches and prescriptions, rather than a clear cause-and-effect.
The problem, said the study authors, was that attending conferences and luncheons sponsored by pharma companies is often the way that doctors educate themselves on new trends in medicine.
“Why is this our system of education for doctors?” Dr. R. Adams Dudley, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said to The New York Times. “The cost of an alternative system of drug education would be paltry.”
Sponsoring lunches may be the way that pharma gets around the increasing number of regulations that prevent them from communication with physicians directly. More and more hospitals are prohibiting staff from engaging with or accepting gifts from pharma reps.
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