See this week's issue of Business Week for an interesting article on efforts to educate medical school students on the effects of drug company perks. While many believe that they won't be swayed by pitches from pharmaceutical reps, the statistics would seem to indicate otherwise.
The article quotes Dr. Adrian Fugh-Berman who says that a doctor who spends one minute with a pharma sales rep prescribes 16% more of the product than he or she was previously prescribing. A four-minute interaction is associated with a 52% increase. I am a little skeptical of the causality here (we might expect that doctors who are interested in a certain drug are more willing to meet with a sales rep; their interest in the drug causes both the meeting and the increase in prescriptions), but it's something to think about. Fugh-Berman's web site features some interesting videos from drug reps describing their marketing tactics. In this one, a rep compares free samples to crack.
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