{"id":797561,"date":"2026-10-10T00:48:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T00:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/797561\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T00:48:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T00:48:10","slug":"free-meals-and-other-perks-from-big-pharma-really-do-sway-doctors-review-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/797561\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Meals and Other Perks From Big Pharma Really Do Sway Doctors, Review Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hubris threatens<\/a> doctors in the same ways it does many of society\u2019s other technically daunting, well-paid professions: It\u2019s a hard club to get into, and if you\u2019re in there, well, you must be pretty smart. (This latent tendency likely played a role in Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton going from completing an MD<\/a> at Harvard Medical School at age 27 to preaching climate change denial by the end of his life<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Now a stern warning is coming down from a team of medical researchers who have pored over 93 peer-reviewed studies investigating the real-world behavior of millions of healthcare professionals who regularly prescribe medication to their patients. Contrary to what most doctors might tell themselves, free lunches, paid trips, complimentary new drug samples, and other perks from major pharmaceutical companies display a concrete, measurable impact on how frequently a given medical provider then prescribes a drugmaker\u2019s wares.<\/p>\n

The new analysis, published<\/a> Friday in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, documented an almost comical \u201cdose-response\u201d relationship, in fact, between the number of dubious prescriptions written by a doctor for certain drugs and the number of free meals they had received.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoctors often think that this is trivial and doesn\u2019t influence them, that they \u2018can\u2019t be bought for the price of a sandwich,\u2019 but the data shows this is an effective marketing strategy,\u201d the review\u2019s lead author, pharmacy professor Barbara Mintzes, said<\/a> in a statement.<\/p>\n

\"CochraneMedical researchers from institutions across the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the UK looked at the relationship between free meals for doctors and prescription patterns for several drugs, including opioids. Credit: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews Hungry, hungry Hippocrates <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very common for doctors to receive free meals from companies,\u201d according to Mintzes, who works at the University of Sydney in Australia but previously helped lead<\/a> the U.N. World Health Organization\u2019s Health Action International project. \u201cThe more free meals a doctor receives, the more likely they are to prescribe less appropriate or more expensive drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mintzes and her collaborators\u2014half a dozen researchers from medical institutions across the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom\u2014found that this correlation proved to be true for a range of drugs covered in the studies they reviewed. The data showed that a given drug company\u2019s opioid painkillers, its antidepressants, and\/or its medications for high blood pressure and cholesterol were prescribed more times in direct proportion to the number of complimentary meals they gave doctors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is problematic for a number of reasons and it matters because it directly affects patient care,\u201d study coauthor Lisa Bero, a (now recently retired<\/a>) professor of internal medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese less appropriate, more expensive drugs can have fewer benefits or more side-effects than alternatives, or simply be unnecessary in the clinical context.\u201d<\/p>\n

Best medicine <\/p>\n

Bero, Mintzes, and their colleagues acknowledged that their systematic review stopped short of achieving the statistical robustness required<\/a> for what\u2019s known as a \u201cmeta-analysis,\u201d in large part because their (still quite thorough) effort covered such a heterogeneous collection of studies. The 93 peer-reviewed studies they examined explored the influence of \u201cpayments, gifts, or other transfers of value,\u201d advertising and educational events targeting doctors, and free drug samples.<\/p>\n

An overwhelming majority of the studies (88%) focused on doctors within the U.S., largely due to the fact that the Physician Payments Sunshine Act of 2010 has required<\/a> pharmaceutical firms to report all details of their payments to doctors for inclusion in a publicly searchable database<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But among these disparate studies, several that tackled the impact of medical institutions\u2019 conflict\u2010of\u2010interest policies did offer some cause for optimism. Two studies that examined 3,065 prescribers found that these policies improved the \u201cappropriateness\u201d of the healthcare provider\u2019s drug prescriptions, although the jury appears to still be out on whether these policies help bring down costs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s encouraging to see that robust conflict-of-interest policies in place tended to be effective,\u201d Mintzes noted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hubris threatens doctors in the same ways it does many of society\u2019s other technically daunting, well-paid professions: It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":797562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[101943,8809,102,2960,262270,6591,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-797561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-big-pharma","tag-ethics","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-medical-billing","tag-medication","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/797562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}