WHY PAYMENTS MATTER

AN increasing amount of academic research has found that doctors who take payments from drug companies are more inclined to prescribe drugs manufactured by those firms.

In June the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology heard that physicians who had to choose between multiple drugs for certain cancers were more likely to prescribe drugs from companies they had received funding from to attend international events.

The researchers – from the UNC School of Medicine – found that payments for lodging and meals were linked to higher odds of a doctor prescribing certain drugs, although that wasn’t consistently the case for payments for research.

‘We saw a pretty consistent increase in prescribing of a company’s drug stemming from what we call “general payments”, which don’t go directly for research, but instead are paid to physicians for consulting, meals, travel and lodging for conferences or talks,’ explained Dr Aaron Mitchell, the study’s lead author.

‘This raises the possibility that drug companies are able to influence prescribing practices through gifts to physicians.’

The study is the latest of several that have reached similar conclusions in recent years.

A 2016 study published in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal found that doctors who had received a single meal promoting a certain brand-name drug prescribed those drugs for depression, high cholesterol and heart disease at higher rates.

Another study, also published in the same journal last year, found a link between industry payments and higher rates of prescriptions for brand-name cholesterol drugs.