More Hippocrates, less Hunan hot sauce.
Free lunches for doctors are under attack yet again.
Free lunch deliveries to medical offices, along with those ubiquitous drug company logo pens, have come to symbolize the extensive financial ties between doctors and the drug industry. And there is evidence they influence which drugs are prescribed.
But pressure is building against the widely reported gifts and other potential conflicts, an effort that took hold last year when a group of influential doctors condemned financial arrangements between doctors and drug companies in JAMA.
The Prescription Project, a new initiative has been announced by Community Catalyst, a health care consumer advocacy group based in Boston, and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, a research group at Columbia University.
With a $6 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the organizations plan a national campaign calling for restrictions on the interactions between doctors and drug companies, and urging doctors to base their prescription writing more on medical evidence than on marketing.
“If you’ve been in the waiting room when these Chinese lunches are taken into the back office, it may raise the question whether the decisions are based on the best scientific evidence about medication or whether or not those Sichuan shrimp have something to do with the prescribing patterns,” said Jim O’Hara, the managing director of policy initiatives at Pew.
More at the NYT
Free lunches for doctors are under attack yet again.
Free lunch deliveries to medical offices, along with those ubiquitous drug company logo pens, have come to symbolize the extensive financial ties between doctors and the drug industry. And there is evidence they influence which drugs are prescribed.
But pressure is building against the widely reported gifts and other potential conflicts, an effort that took hold last year when a group of influential doctors condemned financial arrangements between doctors and drug companies in JAMA.
The Prescription Project, a new initiative has been announced by Community Catalyst, a health care consumer advocacy group based in Boston, and the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, a research group at Columbia University.
With a $6 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the organizations plan a national campaign calling for restrictions on the interactions between doctors and drug companies, and urging doctors to base their prescription writing more on medical evidence than on marketing.
“If you’ve been in the waiting room when these Chinese lunches are taken into the back office, it may raise the question whether the decisions are based on the best scientific evidence about medication or whether or not those Sichuan shrimp have something to do with the prescribing patterns,” said Jim O’Hara, the managing director of policy initiatives at Pew.
More at the NYT
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