Hubris threatens doctors in the same ways it does many of society’s other technically daunting, well-paid professions: It’s a hard club to get into, and if you’re in there, well, you must be pretty smart. (This latent tendency likely played a role in Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton going from completing an MD at Harvard Medical School at age 27 to preaching climate change denial by the end of his life.)

Now a stern warning is coming down from a team of medical researchers who have pored over 93 peer-reviewed studies investigating the real-world behavior of millions of healthcare professionals who regularly prescribe medication to their patients. Contrary to what most doctors might tell themselves, free lunches, paid trips, complimentary new drug samples, and other perks from major pharmaceutical companies display a concrete, measurable impact on how frequently a given medical provider then prescribes a drugmaker’s wares.

The new analysis, published Friday in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, documented an almost comical “dose-response” relationship, in fact, between the number of dubious prescriptions written by a doctor for certain drugs and the number of free meals they had received.

“Doctors often think that this is trivial and doesn’t influence them, that they ‘can’t be bought for the price of a sandwich,’ but the data shows this is an effective marketing strategy,” the review’s lead author, pharmacy professor Barbara Mintzes, said in a statement.

N. World Health Organization’s Health Action International project.

Source link