Celebrities and athletes are no strangers to the world of corporate sponsorship.
From stylish accessories to drinks at the hippest clubs, freebies handed out to the stars can often lead to higher sales for the brand or product that is sharing in the limelight.
But when it comes to doctors handing out prescriptions, does corporate sponsorship have any potency to drive up sales, or at the very least, influence a doctor to choose one brand over another?
A study from the University of California, San Francisco shows doctors who enjoy free meals — sponsored by pharmaceutical companies — are more likely to prescribe certain branded drugs being featured or promoted through the sponsorship.
And this could be dangerous if it leads doctors to the pricey drug options.
Doctors Receive Promotional Items From Drug Companies
The idea of receiving freebies from drug companies is, of course, nothing new. Physicians are sometimes given the chance to attend conferences, seminars and other trade events. Here, they are lavished with luxury items, such as luggage and gadgets (and even all-expenses-paid trips), by sales and marketing representatives from drug companies.
In 2008, hospitals and clinics across the U.S. began a sweep of doctors' offices where promotional items from pharmaceutical companies were found.
This new study, however, focused on the simplest way to a doctor's heart: the offer of a free meal.
Dr. R. Adams Dudley, lead author of the study and a medicine and health policy professor at UCSF, together with colleagues, investigated the "controversial" link between how the pharmaceutical industry "pays" doctors with sponsored meals and how frequently a certain brand of medicine is prescribed.
Industry-sponsored meals make up eight out of 10 industry payments that doctors receive, the researchers reported.
Certain Drug Brands More Likely To Be Prescribed
The team performed a cross-sectional analysis of the industry payment data from 2013, and examined records of prescription made by physicians from Medicare Part D taken from the same year. (Only recently did these two sets of records become public.)
The researchers selected physicians who were handing out Medicare prescriptions for any of these four target classes of drugs:
• Rosuvastatin, marketed as Crestor by AstraZeneca, which lowers cholesterol levels
• Nebivolol, marketed as Bystolic by Forest Laboratories, a blood pressure drug
• Olmesartan medoxomil, marketed as Benicar by Daiichi Sankyo, also a blood pressure drug
• Desvenlafaxine succinate, marketed as Pristiq by Pfizer, an antidepressant
Results showed about 280,000 doctors received more than 63,000 payments related to these four classes. Almost 156,000 wrote more than 20 prescriptions of these selected drugs.
Physicians who received four sponsored meals or more, valued at $20 or less per meal, wrote prescriptions for:
• Crestor twice as frequently as doctors who went without sponsorship;
• Pristiq 3.4 times;
• Benicar more than four times; and
• Bystolic more than five times.
The researchers noted that this relationship is not causal but is an association — and it has its critics.
All this could be just a "false narrative" based on "cherry-picking" prescription data for only a subset of drugs, says the group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
"Manufacturers routinely engage with physicians to share drug safety and efficacy information, new indications for approved medicines and potential side effects of medicines," explains the PhRMA in an email to the Chicago Tribune.
Still, doctors should decline gifts from industry partners if there is an expectation of reciprocity, according to the guidelines set by the American Medical Association.
The study was published online on June 20 in JAMA Internal Medicine .
