by Julie Fidler, Natural Society:

Doctors at teaching hospitals are more likely to prescribe generic drugs over name-brand ones when pharmaceutical sales representatives are kept at bay, a study published in JAMA shows. [1]

By comparison, doctors working in hospitals that don’t keep pharma sales reps on a short leash – freely accepting meals and gifts, and letting reps have free reign of the hospital – prescribed far more name-brand medications.

In other words, pharma reps know how to sweet-talk docs into choosing significantly more expensive drugs over cheaper generics.

For the teaching hospital study, researchers looked at 19 centers in 5 states that restricted visits by drug reps by:

limiting access

limiting gifts

or punishing reps who broke the rules

The team compared prescriptions by 2,126 doctors at teaching hospitals with 24,593 of their peers with similar characteristics who did not limit reps’ access. The study also examined more than 16 million prescriptions in total, using data from CVS Caremark, a large pharmacy benefit manager.

In an editorial accompanying the study, Charles Ornstein, from ProPublica, writes:

“Understanding the financial relationships between physicians and the drug industry is only 1 window into prescribing habits. It is just as important, if not more so, to understand how prescribing practices of physicians compare with their peers. Most physicians generally are not aware if their drug choices are similar to other physicians in their fields; there has been no definition of what constitutes ‘normal’ prescribing.” [2]

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