Doctors who receive gifts and payments, such as meals, from pharmaceutical companies write more prescriptions for promoted medications, including ones that are often less appropriate and more expensive for patients, according to a new Cochrane review published on October 9.
The review analyzed 93 studies, mostly from the United States, and used prescribing data from millions of providers. The authors examined three ways pharmaceutical companies engage with physicians: advertising and education, gifts and payments, and free samples. While the review could not determine that pharmaceutical marketing and promotion changed physicians’ prescribing, it found that doctors who accepted gifts and payments from industry showed the strongest correlations with certain prescribing outcomes.
Overall, the authors said, “the more interactions doctors had with pharmaceutical companies, the less appropriate their prescribing was and the more prescriptions they wrote.” https://t.co/qOx5bLkuHA