Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

No such thing as a free yogurt

You might have noted that the previous entry on this blog was written by Coco Ballantyne, who recently joined the journal as our News intern. I’m confident she will blog about far less frivolous things than the one I’m going to write about today, so please join me in giving her a warm welcome.

Now, check out this entry from The Wall Street Journal‘s Health Blog. In a nutshell, companies are beginning to restrict the freebies they give away at meetings, keeping them from doctors who work in specific parts of this country. For example, Lilly won’t give you a cup of frozen yogurt if you have prescribing authority in Minnesota or if you are a government employee in New York.

This priceless initiative, of course, finds its origins in the criticisms that pharma companies have received for giving doctors expensive gifts, which have been regarded as an attempt to bias the choice of drugs that physicians prescribe. As the pharma industry seems to want to comply with state regulations that limit the gifts that they can give to doctors in some places, it seems that companies are pulling all the stops (no matter how silly) to make sure they remain on the safe side. I’m sure that some pundits who are obsessed with transparency in biomedicine are celebrating this victory of what I call “CFI fundamentalism”.

Anyway, Minnesota docs, don’t worry. Our marketing department just created some very neat Rubik cube-like toys to advertise the different journals that NPG publishes on cancer. They may not be as tasty as that frozen yogurt but, if you come to come by our booth at a future meetings, you’ll be very welcome to take one of them home with you.

Comments

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    Sergio Stagnaro MD said:

    I think that this is a really interesting mews on an original topic: giving frozen yoghurt at physicians meeting or very neat Rubik cube-like toys to advertise the different journals that NPG publishes on cancer. The best gift among all, in my opinion, should be a coloured nice table, informing doctors on the overlooked Oncological Terrain and Inherited Oncological Real Risk (See https://blogs.nature.com/nm/spoonful/), conditio sine qua non of malignancy.As italian people says: Utility and Joy.

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    Alan Dove said:

    I’ve gotten a closeup view of this phenomenon through my wife, who switched from surgery to psychiatry after three years of residency. Surgeons receive almost no direct marketing from drug companies, because they prescribe only a handful of drugs, most of which are off-patent (Old joke: What’s the difference between an orthopedic surgeon and a carpenter? Most carpenters can name more than two antibiotics). Psychiatrists, in contrast, are hit with a barrage of marketing, because they prescribe a large range of highly profitable drugs.

    The diversity of materials these docs receive is mind-boggling – even including such confusing items as a drug-branded bag of microwave popcorn. Then, of course, there are all the meals and free drinks. What’s disturbing to me is not the appearance (or reality) of impropriety in all this, but the fact that drug companies are pouring millions of dollars into these direct marketing campaigns, which don’t do a thing to help patients. That money can only come from higher prescription drug prices, one major part of our current healthcare disaster. The price of some yogurt is indeed high.

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    Chris Muller said:

    This may be completely off-the-wall but what happens if a pharma company employee wants to date a physician (or pharmacist)? What papers do they need to sign to make sure that they REALLY are going out for an ice cream or a frozen yogurt rather than some underhanded ploy to foist that company’s products on the unsuspecting patients of that physician?

    COMMENT FROM JCL:

    Cases in which couples are encouraged to break up while they are dating owing to the interests of their companies are not unprecedented.