Not typically in money, but in gifts, lunches, and attention paid by young, attractive pharmaceutical sales people. For opioids, specifically, there is also the factor that doctors prescribing opioids will have higher customer satisfaction in the short term because opioids are better than almost anything for pain relief. Higher customer satisfaction (not necessarily the same as better patient outcomes) usually means more recommendations and more money. If some of your patients get addicted it just means they'll come in more frequently for more prescriptions. Plus, they can't actually be addicted, since your sales rep with a bachelor's in biology said that Oxycontin is not addictive.
Saying Oxycontin isn't addictive is false but from talking to doctors they tend to not consider it addiction if you are receiving the medication for an actively treated issue.
Gifts from pharma hasn’t been true for a couple decades. They don’t even give pens now. Sure they can get a free lunch, but it’s usually brought to their office and it’s fast food.
Customer satisfaction is relevant, but only because hospitals have put so much emphasis on it.
But regardless, nobody can get these drugs without a doctor writing a script, so there is plenty of blame to go around.
Huh. I'd love to know where you're getting that idea from.
Through a strange series of events (extreme sports hobbies) I became friends with a group of doctors, none of them participating in anything very special or that could be seen as a career height. Most really just starting out after the hell that is med school.
They spoke of pretty regular outreach of gifts from pharma. Mainly in the form of fancy retreats (like to Hawaii - note, we were based in SoCal at the time) with pretty extravagant dinners and fancy boating stuff. These were, according to them, always filled with the brim with others like them to the point it got to be quite frankly boring, annoying, and a nuisance. No matter how hard they tried to ignore the unsolicited outreach, it wouldn't stop coming.
The guidelines also reiterate the group’s 2002 code, which prohibited more expensive goods and services like tickets to professional sports games and junkets to resorts. And it asks companies that finance medical courses, conferences or scholarships to leave the selection of study material and scholarship recipients to outside program coordinators.
Huh. Call me crazy, but it almost seems as if guidelines and codes haven't meant much for a while. Like, real life "air quotes" oh yes, we won't send them to resorts.
Well, if I had to make an educated guess, they really did cross their fingers and nobody seems to be investigating/enforcing otherwise and they're getting away with it - because I'm telling you, first hand... it's happening, quite frequently, at least on the West Coast.
I used to work in the industry when all this changed. Could there be a one-off company doing it? Sure. They are risking being brought up on Federal charges for it. The gov't has gone after drug companies for much less.
