Docs on a $290m diet

Pharmaceutical firms spend up on meals

DOCTORS are getting fancy meals funded by drug companies who spent $290 million in four years trying to build a cosy relationship with medicos so they could influence prescribing habits.

A University of Sydney study has found doctors might never have to pay for a meal with drug companies hosting 116,000 “educational” events for them in the four years between 2011 and 2015.

On average, each week over the four years between 2011 and 2015 there were 608 drug company-funded events that ranged from breakfasts, to journal club morning teas and lunches.

Nearly two-thirds of the events (74,998) were held in a clinical setting, such as hospitals, clinics or doctors’ offices.

A recent US study found these meetings are enough to influence a doctor’s prescribing habits and generate an increase in prescriptions for expensive brand-name drugs even when they include a lunch that costs just $12.

Medicines Australia, the peak group representing major pharmaceutical companies, published information on these meetings every six months but it was difficult to use the information.

A group of researchers from Australian universities turned the information into a searchable data base.

The study published in BMJ online found that 42 pharmaceutical companies spent $286,117,928 on events attended by over 3.4 million individual health professionals over the four years.

On average, companies spent $2449 per event and the median cost per person was $14.

The pharmaceutical companies that held the highest number of these events were Astra-Zeneca, Novartis, Merck Sharp & Dohme, Roche and Pfizer.

Boehringer Ingelheim had the highest cost per event, with a median cost of $2007, while Eli Lilly spent the least with a median cost per function of $145.

Trainee health professionals were the main participants at the events.

“Targeting medical trainees can lead to a process of normalisation and enculturation while trainees develop their professional identity,” said the researchers in a statement.

“This has been described as an effective strategy ‘to influence physicians from the bottom up’.”

Medicines Australia no longer publishes this data on entertaining doctors.

Instead, pharmaceutical companies are for the first time revealing how much they pay individual doctors to travel to overseas medical conferences and speak at events.