The pharmaceutical industry is starting the new year with a resolution: No more swag.
MICAH MERTES / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Thursday, January 1, 2009 12:00 am
The pharmaceutical industry is starting the new year with a resolution: No more swag.
Starting today, the New York Times reported, most pharmaceutical companies will no longer give branded pens, mugs, staplers, T-shirts, notepads, flash drives, paperweights, calculators and other freebies to doctors’ offices.
The ban on the goodies is voluntary, with new industry guidelines mapped out by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group in Washington. About 40 drug makers, including Eli Lilly & Co., Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer have signed on, the Times reported.
The moratorium addresses a long-voiced criticism that pharmaceutical companies try to influence doctors into prescribing their meds by giving them gifts.
“We joked about how we have to start buying pens, now,” said Derrick Anderson, president of the Lancaster County Medical Society and a practitioner with Southwest Family Health in Lincoln.
But seriously, he said, “that marketing doesn’t make a difference in what prescriptions I write or how I treat my patients.”
The misconception, he said, is that whoever gives you the best gift is going to get their meds doled out. But most doctors prescribed based on what studies say and what works on patients, Anderson said.
He certainly appreciates the educational material pharmaceutical companies provide him, but he doesn’t have much use for, say, Now and Laters candies promoting a drug for erectile dysfunction.
“They bring a lot of good stuff,” he said, “but I could definitely do without the fluff.”
Skeptics are claiming the ban on swag is a superficial nod to a deeper problem of pharmaceutical companies influencing doctors, the Times reported. The guidelines still allow drug companies to buy doctors dinner, so long as it comes with an educational presentation.
Dr. Les Spry, president of the Nebraska Medical Association and a kidney specialist in Lincoln, said he’s been concerned about drug makers’ attempted wooing of doctors for some time. Not because it necessarily has an influence on what doctors prescribe, he said, but because the cost of the marketing and wining and dining could translate to higher drug costs for patients.
The death of swag probably won’t change much itself, said Spry, who has been in the profession for nearly 30 years.
“They use these little props to get their elbow in the door,” he said. “But we as physicians make hundreds of decisions every day. That has very little do with marketing.”
Still, the goodies, which he said he has encountered on a daily basis, can be pretty entertaining.
“The companies are quite inventive,” he said. “Their ability to think outside of the box in marketing has always been impressive to me.”
He recalled once receiving a bawdy little pen for the erectile dysfunction drug Levitra that, um, moved in an interesting way.
With the new ban he likely won’t see another one of those for a while.
Reach Micah Mertes at 473-7395 or mmertes@journalstar.com.