Posted on behalf of Daniel Cressey

A new survey suggests that despite widespread and often-voiced concerns about conflicts of interest, most doctors still think gifts from the pharmaceutical industry are acceptable.

While regulators, ethicists and politicians have waged an ever more aggressive war on such gifts, the link between doctors and big pharma has proven surprisingly durable. Often missing from discussions about the potential for this link to unduly influence medicine is any real understanding of how most doctors actually feel about their free pharma-company pens, lunches, holidays, and the like.

A team from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York set out to fill this knowledge gap. They surveyed 590 doctors and medical students from the Mount Sinai hospitals regarding their attitudes towards gifts from industry. They found that, so long as the gifts weren’t too large, most doctors were perfectly happy to accept them.

A meal in a clinical setting was deemed appropriate by 72% of respondents while travel expenses to conferences were thought acceptable by 53%. Over 80% would accept text books and 48% said they would accept a gift worth less than $50. Only 25% thought gifts of greater value were acceptable.

“Our finding of overall positive physician attitudes is notable in this time of increasing public concern about potential conflicts of interest, increasing regulation, and a move toward stricter guidelines for physician-industry interactions,” write Deborah Korenstein and her colleagues in Archives of Surgery.

“If physician attitudes become congruent with the attitudes of the public, the medical profession may be viewed as part of the solution instead of part of what the nation at large perceives to be a problem.”

In an invited commentary published with the paper, Jo Buyske, of the American Board of Surgery in Philadelphia, urges doctors to forgo their tickets to the game and their lunchtime sandwiches, lest they jeopardise industry links that do bring benefits, such as those that have speeded the development of new instruments and techniques.

“The baby must not be thrown out with the bathwater,” she writes. “Physician-industry interactions are not all created equal, and it is incumbent on us to be sure that policymakers and patients understand the distinctions.”

Image by Robert S. Donovan via Flickr Creative Commons